Martin A. Klein Prize Recipients
First awarded at the 2011 annual meeting, the Martin A. Klein Prize recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous year. Focusing primarily on continental Africa (including those islands usually treated as countries of Africa), books on any period of African history and from any disciplinary field that incorporates a historical perspective are eligible. The prize committee pays particular attention to methodological innovation, conceptual originality, literary excellence, and reinterpretation of old themes or development of new theoretical perspectives.
2015 Klein Prize
Frederick Cooper, New York Univ.
Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton Univ. Press)
Citizenship between Empire and Nation presents a radical new view of decolonization in French Africa. As Frederick Cooper reveals, independent nation-states resulted from a contingent process in which African and European actors sought to transform, but not dismantle, the connection between France and Africa. Through extensive archival research and masterful prose, Cooper captures the political imagination of African activists, the dynamism of ensuing policy debates, and the poignancy of outcomes that no one, at the start, actually wanted.