Hisham Aidi

Focus areas: Critical international relations, post-colonial theory, Black Studies and the political economy of development. 

Hisham Aidi is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of International and Public Affairs.  His research interests include critical international relations, post-colonial theory, Black Studies and the political economy of development. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University, and has taught at the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. Aidi is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave, 2008) a comparative study of political parties and labor movements in Latin America, and Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon, 2014), a study of American cultural diplomacy, and winner of the American Book Award of 2015. He is co-editor with Manning Marable of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009), and co-editor of Race-Making: A Trans-Regional Approach – from Africa to Southwest Asia (forthcoming Cornell University Press 2026).

From 2007 to 2012, Aidi was a contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society. His work has appeared in Africa Is A Country, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and The New Yorker.

Aidi is academic advisor to the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, and a founding editor of the Souffles, a journal interested in cultural decolonization. He is also a co-founder of the Program for African Social Research (PASR).

Education

• PhD in Political Science, Columbia University

Affiliations

• Institute of African Studies
• Institute for Research in African-American Studies 

Honors and Awards

• The Malcolm X/Shabazz Vanguard Award (2025)
• Soros Equality Fellowship (2020)
• American Book Award (2015)
• Hip Hop Scholar Award (2015)
• Carnegie Scholar Award (2008)

Book Chapters & Essays

• “The Geo-Politics of Malcolm X: Du Bois, Ghana, and Cairo Jazz,” in Olivia U. Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam eds., The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics (Routledge 2018)
• “Slavery and State-Formation: Black Morocco Revisited,” Islamophobia Studies Journal (Fall 2023)
• “So Why I Did I Defend Paul Bowles? Orientalism and Authoritarianism,” The New York Review of Books (December 2019)
• “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual” (MERIP, Spring 2017)
• “The Failure of Racial Democracy in Brazil,” Journal of African National Affairs (December 2002)

• A Thousand and One Berber Nights (2023)
• Sister Aisha: Queen Mother of Harlem (2023)
• Malcolm X and the Sudanese (2020)