Zachary Mondesire

Zachary Mondesire’s research addresses the intersection of race, gender, and religion in Africa as well as the institutional legacy of Pan-Africanism. His teaching addresses global ideas about social, economic, and political justice. Professor Mondesire is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on how transnational geopolitics become elements of everyday life. His regional interests span Africa and the Middle East where he has both lived and conducted extensive fieldwork – in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, and Tanzania.

His current research program includes a book manuscript that thinks critical about the task of liberation once the revolutionary warfare has ceased. The Last Black Nation addresses the post-revolutionary moment wherein the citizens of the newest country in the world, South Sudan are making sense of how decolonization has ceased to be an abstract horizon and has instead become a set of practices and policies to be held accountable in the service of a newly self-determined nation. Mondesire follows the East African transnational movements of the public intellectuals, artists, poets, academics, and young professionals who, as the sons and daughters of South Sudan’s struggle for cultural, economic and political self-determination, are now tasked with navigating and shaping what it will mean to be South Sudanese after independence. Paying close attention to their feelings of betrayal, and how they navigate their experiences of state violence and repression at the hands of a government of individuals who once fought for their liberation. Mondesire explores the counter-linearity of liberation, and what it looks and feels like when decolonization is, in fact and in practice, no longer a metaphor. 

Professor Mondesire’s areas of expertise include critical geopolitics, social movements in Africa and the Middle East, Black studies, Pan-Africanism, racial regimes, and comparative secessionist movements. His work has also appeared in the digital magazine, Africa’s a Country.