New Books in African Studies
651 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 36 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books
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Episodes
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourHow can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton UP, 2023), historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory ...
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, "The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South" (Northwestern UP, 2019)
February 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhere there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But "dictator novels" do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing ...
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesImperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine indust...
Lehasa Moloi, "Developing Africa?: New Horizons with Afrocentricity" (Anthem Press, 2024)
February 12, 2024 09:00 - 41 minutesDeveloping Africa? New Horizons with Afrocentricity (Anthem Press, 2024) is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policy-makers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the th...
Ana Lucia Araujo, "The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 11, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesThe Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African commercial agent in the port of Cabinda (Kingdom of Ngoyo), in twenty-first century Angola. Slave tra...
Kerstin Bree Carlson, "The Justice Laboratory: International Law in Africa" (Brookings Institution Press, 2022)
February 09, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesEver since World War II, the United Nations and other international actors have created laws, treaties, and institutions to punish perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These efforts have established universally recognized norms and have resulted in several high-profile convictions in egregious cases. But international criminal justice now seems to be a declining force—its energy sapped by long delays in prosecutions, lagging public attention, and a globally risin...
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesDuring the “global land grab” of the early twenty-first century, legions of investors rushed to Africa to acquire land to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. In Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell UP, 2024), Youjin Chung examines the messy, indeterminate trajectory of a high-profile land deal signed by the Tanzanian government and a foreign investor: a 99-year lease to over 20,000 hectares of land in coastal Tanzani...
Paul Stoller, "Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times" (Cornell UP, 2023)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWisdom From the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times (Cornell University Press, 2023) describes what anthropologists can do to contribute to the social and cultural changes that shape a social future of wellbeing and viability. Paul Stoller shows how anthropologists can develop sensuously described ethnographic narratives to communicate powerfully their insights to a wide range of audiences. These insights are filled with wisdom about how respect for nature is central to the future of...
The Conflict in Sudan
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourNisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan. Books, Links, & Articles: “Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots.” Analysis by Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly Darfur Diaspora Association Keep Eyes On Sudan Dabanga ...
Democracy in Malawai
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesIn this episode of Ufahamu Africa, cohost Kim Yi Dionne presents on the state of democracy in Malawi as part of a panel at the 2023 African Studies Association. The panel focused on democratic backsliding and sites and actors that have worked for democratic endurance, strengthening, and democratic governance. Before Kim’s presentation, you’ll hear from cohost Rachel Beatty Riedl who provided an introduction to the topic. Books, Links, & Articles: Dr. Boniface Dulani “Was the COP28 climate m...
Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDuring the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into an Atlantic-wide system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children were enslaved every year. In Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2023), Nicholas Radburn explains how thousands of slaving merchants in Africa, Britain, and the British ...
Kathryn Mathers, "White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation" (Routledge, 2022)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation (Routledge, 2022), Kathryn Mathers interrogates the white savior industrial complex by exploring how America continues to present an imagined Africa as a space for its salvation in the 21st century. Through close readings of multiple mediated sites where Americans imagine Africa, White Saviorism and Popular Culture examines how an era of new media technologies is reshaping encounters between Africans and...
Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 12, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJudith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and ex...
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThis original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929-1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020) links the Libyan genocide through cross-cultural and comparative readings to the colonial roots of the Holocaust and genocide studies. Between 1929 and 1934, thousands of Libyans lost their lives, ...
Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesRita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social repair. Of particular interest in Kesselring’s theorizing of the relationship between the body and the law as a mechanism to critique South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dr. Kesselring’s book is an innovati...
Paul F. Diehl et al., "When Peacekeeping Missions Collide: Balancing Multiple Roles in Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe contemporary world is beset with a wide variety of conflicts, all of which have features without historical precedent. While most accounts of peacekeeping focus on attempts to limit violent conflict, this traditional view hardly captures the variety of challenges that today's peacekeepers face. Peacekeepers are now thrust into the unconventional roles of monitoring elections, facilitating transitions to the rule of law, distributing humanitarian aid, and resolving conflicts in civil socie...
China’s Environmental Footprint in Ghana: Non-State Responses
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesMusicians and community activists in Ghana have raised their voices to increase awareness of the environmental impact of Chinese activities in the country. The chart-topping song “Greedy men” by Stonebwoy directly criticizes Chinese illegal gold mining in the region. On a separate occasion, a community movement compelled the Ghanaian Minister of Environment to cancel a Chinese coal plant project. In this episode, Dr Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi, lecturer at the Lagos State University in Nigeria, j...
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale of scholarship for social change, An-Naim proposes advancing the universality of human rights through internal discourse within Islamic and African societies and cross-cultural dialogue among human cultures. This book proposes a transformation from human rights organized around a state determined ...
Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesThere's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cann...
Kathleen Klaus, "Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesKathleen Klaus, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco has written a terrific book, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. Kathleen’s book is richly researched and beautifully written. She draws on 15 months of survey and interview methods to center the politics of elites in crafting land narratives that lead—or not—to electoral violence. Kathleen’s book is a great example of mixed methods as ...
Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesMost scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage. In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines ho...
Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)
December 27, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesHistories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African...
George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
December 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourGeorge MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union’s castoff Kalashniko...
Adrienne E. Strong, "Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania" (U California Press, 2020)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDocumenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania (University of California Press, 2020) is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development supp...
Jenny Trinitapoli, "An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesA decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known. An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (U Chicago Press, 2023) advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as...
Tom Buitelaar, "Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAlthough the International Criminal Court (ICC) - as the only permanent international court that addresses crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes - has important potential to end impunity and find justice for victims of atrocities, it is dependent on others for almost all aspects of its functioning. The Court has frequently relied on the peacekeeping operations that the UN deploys in the field and, over the past two decades, UN peacekeepers have provided logistical assistance and s...
Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 17, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial ac...
Troels Burchall Henningsen, "Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms" (Routledge, 2021)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWestern Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms (Routledge, 2021) by Dr. Troels Burchall Henningsen examines the political and military dynamic between threatened local regimes and Western powers, and argues that the power of informal politics forces local regimes to simulate statebuilding. Reforms enabling local states to take care of their own terrorist and insurgency threats are a blueprint for most Western interventions to provide a way out of protra...
Louis-Alexandre Berg, "Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSecurity assistance has become the largest component of international peacebuilding and stabilisation efforts, and a primary tool for responding to civil war and insurgency. Donors and peacekeepers not only train and equip military and police forces, they also seek to overhaul their structure, management, and oversight. Yet, we know little about why these efforts succeed or fail. Efforts to restructure security forces in Iraq, Libya, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, and the Democratic Republic of Co...
Have We Entered a New Era of African Politics and International Relations?
December 13, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesIs the recent resurgence of military coups reshaping politics in sub-Saharan Africa? Is faith in multiparty elections waning among citizens? And how do emerging military juntas impact regional stability and democracy? Listen to Nic Cheeseman, Mwita Chacha and Obert Hodzi talk about the recent spate of coups in sub-Saharan Africa, the domestic and international trends that explain them, and the impact these coup will have on Africa in the years to come. Mwita Chacha is an Associate Professor i...
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesThe Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts and the transnational interplay of ideas and policies all at once. By integrating food crises in Algeria, West and Equatorial Africa, and Vietnam into a broader story of imperial and transnational care, Dr. Slobodkin reveals how the ...
Xavier Luffin, "Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives" (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020)
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnother Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited by Xavier Luffin, unlocks an unprecedented journey through the tapestry of Congo's past in Central Africa and the Indian Ocean world. This meticulously compiled collection unveils a trove of Arabic and Swahili archival documents nestled within Belgian archives, presenting an unparalleled lens into a transformative era. Spanning the eve of Belgian col...
Sara Byala, "Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTravel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became ubiquitous across the continent, and what this reveals about the realities of globalisation, development and capitalism. Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sara Byala is the first assessment of the social, commercial and environmental impact of one of the planet's biggest brands and largest corporation...
Sayan Dey, "Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean" (Anthem Press, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesUsually, discourses on the planetary evolution and the movements of slaves remain restricted within the narratives and scholarships of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and hardly engage with the evolution, movements, and shifts about the Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. But multiple published, unpublished, authored, and non-authored historical documents like the historical records of Greco-Egyptian monk Cosmos Indicopleustes (sixth century BC), the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (firstcentu...
Nader Kadhem, "Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
November 25, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesAnti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker from Bahrain, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world. Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, i...
Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesOn the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, jo...
B Camminga, "Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesTransgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national h...
David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to ...
Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesToday I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and mus...
Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury, "Transnational French Studies" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOn the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study lan...
Onyeka Nubia, "England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe. Onyeka Nubia's o...
Lucy Fulford, "The Exiled: Empire, Immigration and the Ugandan Asian Exodus" (Coronet, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesUganda, August 1972. President Idi Amin makes a shocking pronouncement – the country’s South Asian population is being expelled. They have ninety days to leave. After packing scant possessions and countless memories, 50,000 Ugandan Asians vied for limited space in countries including Canada, India and the United Kingdom. More than 28,000 expellees from Britain’s former colony arrived in the UK and began building new lives – but their incredible stories have, until now, remained largely hidden...
Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, "Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 11, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesUpon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for...
Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, "The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice" (U Notre Dame Press, 2023)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesOluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein's book The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice (U Notre Dame Press, 2023) explores African theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye’s constructive initiative to include African women’s experiences and voices within Christian theological discourse. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a renowned Ghanaian Methodist theologian, has worked for decades to address issues of poverty, women’s rights, and global unrest. She is one of the founders of the Circle ...
Thula Simpson, "History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSouth Africa was born in war, has been cursed by crises and ruptures, and today stands on a precipice once again. Thula Simpson's History of South Africa: From 1902 to the Present (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the country's tumultuous journey from the Second Anglo-Boer War to 2021. Drawing on diaries, letters, oral testimony and diplomatic reports, Thula Simpson follows the South African people through the battles, elections, repression, resistance, strikes, insurrections, massacres, crashes and...
Shezan Muhammedi, "Gifts from Amin: Ugandan Asian Refugees in Canada" (U of Manitoba Press, 2022)
September 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn August 1972, military leader and despot Idi Amin expelled Asian Ugandans from the country, professing to return control of the economy to "Ugandan citizens." Within ninety days, 50,000 Ugandans of South Asian descent were forced to leave and seek asylum elsewhere; nearly 8,000 resettled in Canada. This major migration event marked the first time Canada accepted a large group of predominantly Muslim, non-European, non-white refugees. Shezan Muhammedi's Gifts from Amin: Ugandan Asian Refugee...
Seema Alavi, "Sovereigns of the Sea: Omani Ambition in the Age of Empire" (India Allen Lane, 2023)
September 28, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesIt’s one of the strange artifacts of history that Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania, was once controlled by the Sultanate of Oman. In 1832, then Sultan Sayyid Saïd bin Sultan al-Busaidi made the island his capital, with the empire split in two upon his death: one based in Muscat, one based in Zanzibar. As Seema Alavi notes in her history, Sovereigns of the Sea: Omani Ambition in the Age of Empire (India Allen Lane, 2023), the Omanis extended their reach across the Indian Ocean, preserving t...
Nigel Biggar, "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (William Collins, 2023)
September 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the 'decolonisation' movement corrodes the West's self-confidence by re...
Ian Patel, "We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire" (Verso, 2021)
September 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? In We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021), Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today. In a series of post-war immigration laws from 1948 to 1971, arrivals from the Caribbean, Asia and Africa to Britain went from being citizens to being renamed immigrants. In the late 1960s, British officials drew upon an ...
Coups and the Threat of “Feel Good” Militarism in Africa
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesWhy are we seeing a rise in coups in Africa and growing debate about the possible benefits of military rule? What are the roots of “feel good” militarism and how much of a threat does this pose to civilian governments? Whose interests are served by giving the military a role in development, and how well do the armed forces actually perform in reality? Join Nic Cheeseman and Rita Abrahamsen in this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast to learn more about these questions and what they...