This edited volume joins a growing list of books that examine contemporary human rights struggles and discourses in Africa from multidisciplinary perspectives. The book furthermore explores links between human rights issues in Africa and the African diaspora. The editors’ stated goal is to interrogate the dynamics of human rights within a global context by addressing diverse issues such as state repression in Africa, women's rights, the right to education, and questions of minority rights and racial injustices in Black America. The book includes contributions from scholars in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The thirteen chapters of the book focus on a wide range of human rights-related topics that converge around themes of race, state building, diasporic identities, and literary culture.

Bessie House-Soremekun's chapter provides a conceptual framework for the book by laying out a distinction between human rights and civil rights. It traces the development of the modern universal human rights regime within its political context, as well as with human rights movements in Africa. The chapter also attempts to connect those processes with the rights struggles of people of African descent in the United States. Other chapters in the book follow with similar comparative discussions of human rights movements in Africa and the African diaspora. Martha Alibah's chapter, for example, offers a comparative analysis of repression in colonial Ghana and the United States.

The social exclusion and economic marginalization of people of African descent in the black Atlantic is a dominant theme of the book. This theme is evident in Sarah Iriogbe-Efionayi's chapter, which examines the inequities in the United States education system and their impact on African Americans. Focusing on access to education, she demonstrates the continued failure by the state to uphold the fundamental rights of African-Americans. Similarly, Cynthia Gadsden examines the social and historical constructions of racial identities among African Americans, while Rebecca Dixon draws on fiction writing to capture the representation of black oppression in popular culture and its relationship to the struggle for civil rights in Black America. Going beyond the United States, Bernard Ifekwe examines the links between Rastafarianism in Jamaican reggae music and human rights. Ifekwe frames reggae as an instrument of black resistance developed by Rastafarians in response to human rights violations. He also explores how the music has addressed issues of human rights such as slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation.

The other chapters center on human rights issues on the continent. Abolade Adeniji's chapter explores the role of the Nigerian press in dismantling the apartheid system in South Africa. That discussion focuses specifically on press coverage of the Soweto massacre. Writing from a linguistic perspective, Ngozi Emeka-Nwobia and Chinwe Obianika address representations of women's rights and gender inequality in language in Nigeria. They emphasize that language serves as an instrument of power that suppresses and marginalizes women. Chapters by Leslie Stubbs and Biale Zua discuss human rights, state repression, and the challenges of good governance in Nigeria. Felix Okokhere addresses similar questions but takes a broader approach in his examination of the undemocratic characteristics and repressive tendencies of state regimes in Africa.

The main appeal of this book lies in its effort to link human rights struggles in Africa with contemporaneous rights movements in the African diaspora. However, as with most edited collections, the chapters are of varying quality in terms of writing, analytical rigor, and cogency. While some chapters, such as Stubbs's chapter on internally displaced persons and good governance in Nigeria, are thorough and meticulous in their analysis, several chapters in the book lack depth, coherence, or evidence of detailed research. Another major limitation of this book is that it is inadequately grounded in human rights scholarship. Although most of the chapters deal with issues of inclusion and social justice, few explicitly link these issues to current human rights debates, or frame them as human rights questions; the connections with human rights are implied, rather than clearly articulated. For example, none of the chapters dealing with human rights in African states engage with the rich academic and policy debates on cultural relativism and cultural legitimacy, which are central to discourses on and discussions of human rights on the continent. For a book centered on human rights, the volume could have been better anchored on key conceptual and theoretical debates in the field of human rights.

Nonetheless, this book is a welcome addition to the literature. The subject of human rights is a broad one, and no single book can comprehensively cover its many dimensions and permutations. By drawing attention to the links between human rights struggles in Africa and its diaspora, this volume contributes to the growing scholarship on human rights in Africa.