Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is Associate Professor in the Department of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in Literature from Duke University. His research sits at the intersection of global studies, racial capitalism, political geography, political theory, political economy, urban geography, and African and Africana Studies. He is a member of the editorial collective for the journal Antipode, and Associate Editor of the book series Contemporary African Political Economy, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
His first book, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City (2024) asks what global political lessons can be drawn from the novel forms of political theorizing by shack dwellers struggling to desegregate South Africa’s persistent apartheid urban geographies. Grounded in the local realities of the fight for land, housing, and dignity, the book makes broader interventions in national, continental, and global debates about urban geography, African studies, social movements, and racial capitalism. It argues that the shack settlement is emblematic of a democratic South Africa still profoundly shaped by the afterlife of apartheid.
Together with Geo Maher and Damien Sojoyner, he is the co-editor of Reading Black Reconstruction Today (2026). This transdisciplinary collection explores what W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking 1935 work, Black Reconstruction in America, tells us about repression and resistance across the world, asking: What do abolition and reconstruction mean today? How can we make sense of our political moment, from the resurgence of Black consciousness across the Americas, to the rise of neofascism in Europe and beyond, to the fight against land dispossession in Africa? Reading “Black Reconstruction” Today draws together a group of leading scholars and activists to examine the lasting and global relevance of Du Bois’s political masterwork.
As the 2026 Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, he will be working on a book project exploring the intellectual history and geography of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
