Stratégies d’affirmation de l’identité et minority businesses : une comparaison des trajectoires coopératives afro-américaines et africaines

How have Black communities in America and Africa transformed the margins into a space for identity reconstruction? Rooted in the history of slavery and colonization, which are two historical forms of material and symbolic dispossession, cooperatives have emerged in both contexts as minor forms of active emancipation. In the United States, they are part of a long-standing tradition of resistance to racial exclusion and capitalist exploitation. In Africa, they have their origins in colonial dynamics, before being reappropriated as instruments of community sovereignty. Based on these contrasting trajectories, this article offers a comparative study of the logics of identity revalorization carried by these structures in each region, where the economy becomes both a language of resistance, and a site of social and cultural invention.