Introduction

This opening chapter provides a critical overview of research trends and interdisciplinary scholarship on place-names studies in general, with special attention to street names in Africa’s historiographic contexts. It highlights the contribution of the book to the mainstreaming of Africa in recent critical toponymic studies and elaborates on the book’s aims, rationale and conceptual apparatus. The main argument in this chapter is that the mainstreaming and the ‘wordling’ of Africa in critical place-names scholarship is not just a matter of how many studies are published about this or that part of the world. It rather concerns, more fundamentally, improving the quality of research approaches to African toponymic landscapes and broadening the conceptual horizons and methodologies of critical toponymy. Thus, the deepest challenge of this volume is to foster an understanding of African toponymic realities, which would show what they can bring to more global knowledge systems. The contribution of the book is further illuminated by expanding on some prominent aspects, such as the unconventional experimentalism in the geographic-cum-thematic conjuncture of African and Israeli cities, (post-)colonial legacies, the importance of understanding bottom-up processes such as naming reception and unofficial toponymies and the materiality of street signage.