This collection gathers papers from the Workshops of Thought held at Dakar and Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, where the invited scholars first argued among themselves and then met a wider public in open sessions. The stated aim was to start from Africa as a place rather than treat it as a case, and to build frameworks of analysis equal to what is actually in motion across the continent.

The contributions take up decoloniality, the construction of social utopias, the standing of the African question in a global frame, how the universal and the singular are joined, the rebuilding of collective self-regard, and what it takes to think together. Their authors come from a wide spread of disciplines. Mamadou Diouf opens by putting European universalism to the test of indigenous histories, setting the tone for a volume more interested in producing new terms of intelligibility than in arriving at a single position.