New Books in African Studies
651 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 36 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 07, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesToday I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist p...
Christopher Silver, "Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourRecording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of twentieth-century North Africa, one that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what...
Claire L. Wendland, "Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
June 29, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesA close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge. By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Wa...
Mark Fathi Massoud, "Shari'a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWestern analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people have embraced shari'a, commonly translated as Islamic law, in the struggle for national identity and human rights. Lawyers, community leaders, and activists throughout the Horn of Africa have invoked God to oppose colonialism, resist dictators, expel warlords, and to fight for gender equality - all crit...
Moses E. Ochonu, "Emirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity" (Indiana UP, 2022)
June 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEmirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity (Indiana UP, 2022) recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience to the Northern Nigerian people. Moses E. Ochonu shows how rather than simply serving as puppets and mouthpieces of the British Empire, these aristocrats leveraged their travel to the heart of the empire to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to tran...
Simidele Dosekun, "Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWomen in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's detailed interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these elite women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist ide...
Alison F. Richard, "Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
June 14, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMadagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of animals, from giant flightless birds and giant tortoises on the ground to agile lemurs leaping through the treetops. Some species live on; many have vanished in the distant or recent past. Over vast stretches of time, Madagascar's forests have expanded and contracted in response to shifting climates, and the hand of people is clear in changes during ...
Martin Williams, "When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be" (Princeton UP, 2021)
June 10, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch, turtles, crocodiles, and hippos, and attracted prehistoric hunters and herders. What transformed this land of lakes into a sea of sands? When the Sahara Was Green describes the remarkable history of Earth's greatest desert--including why its cli...
Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 08, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesPeer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact...
Evan Lieberman, "Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid" (Princeton UP, 2022)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesAt a time when many democracies are under strain around the world, Until We Have Won Our Liberty: South Africa After Apartheid (Princeton UP, 2022) shines new light on the signal achievements of one of the contemporary era’s most closely watched transitions away from minority rule. South Africa’s democratic development has been messy, fiercely contested, and sometimes violent. But as Evan Lieberman argues, it has also offered a voice to the voiceless, unprecedented levels of government accoun...
Ariela Marcus-Sells, "Sorcery or Science?: Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)
May 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Sorcery or Science? Contesting Knowledge and Practice in West African Sufi Texts (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022) Ariela Marcus-Sells examines two Sufi Muslim theologians, known as Kunta scholars, who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century. Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Through textual analysis of their de...
Shoko Yamada, "Dignity of Labour for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School" (Langaa RPCIG, 2018)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Prince of Wales College, Achimota School, opened in 1927 north of Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Achimota was to be a ‘model’ school—but a model of what, exactly? And for whom? Shoko Yamada’s book 'Dignity of Labour' for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School (Langaa RPCIG, 2018) delves into the multiple discourses and contested politics that resulted in Achimota. Her careful analysis pulls apart the different strands of Ame...
Adam Day, "States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance: Complexity Theory Applied to UN Statebuilding in the DRC and South Sudan" (Oxford UP, 2022)
May 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday's vision of world order is founded upon the concept of strong, well-functioning states, in contrast to the destabilizing potential of failed or fragile states. This worldview has dominated international interventions over the past 30 years as enormous resources have been devoted to developing and extending the governance capacity of weak or failing states, hoping to transform them into reliable nodes in the global order. But with very few exceptions, this project has not delivered on it...
Jacob Doherty, "Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability" (U California Press, 2021)
May 18, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesUganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability (U California Press, 2021) tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, pla...
Sally Hayden, "My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route" (Melville House, 2022)
May 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourLate one night, journalist Sally Hayden received an urgent message on Facebook: “Sally, we need your help.” It was from a group of Eritrean refugees who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months. Now, Tripoli was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and the refugees remained stuck, defenseless, with only one hope: contacting her. With that begins Hayden’s staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa: from brutal, vindictive Libyan guards to unexpected...
Paddy Docherty, "Blood and Bronze: The British Empire and the Sack of Benin" (Hurst, 2022)
May 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Benin Bronzes are among the British Museum’s most prized possessions. Celebrated for their great beauty, they embody the history, myth and artistry of the ancient Kingdom of Benin, once West Africa’s most powerful, and today part of Nigeria. But despite the Bronzes’ renown, little has been written about the brutal imperial violence with which they were plundered. Paddy Docherty’s searing new history tells that story: the 1897 British invasion of Benin. Armed with shocking details discover...
Sarah G. Phillips, "When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland" (Cornell UP, 2020)
May 16, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesFor all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah Phillips's When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland (Cornell UP, 2020) offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland's experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. ...
Isabel Hofmeyr, "Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House" (Duke UP, 2022)
May 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Duke University Press, 2022), Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods in...
Karen Samantha Barton, "Africa’s Joola Shipwreck: Causes and Consequences of a Humanitarian Disaster" (Lexington Books, 2020)
May 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2002, a government-owned Senegalese ferry named the Joola capsized in a storm off the coast of The Gambia in a tragedy that killed 1,863 people and left 64 survivors, only one of them female. The Joola caused more human suffering than the Titanic yet no scholarly research to date has explored the political and environmental conditions in which this African crisis occurred. Africa’s Joola Shipwreck: Causes and Consequences of a Humanitarian Disaster (Lexington Books, 2020) investigates the...
Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022)
May 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disa...
Raymond Kwun-Sun Lau, "Responding to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Protection First and Justice Later" (Routledge, 2021)
May 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAround the world, audiences in the mid-1990s watched the mass atrocities unfolding in Rwanda and Srebrenica in horror and disbelief. Emerging from these disasters came an international commitment to safeguard and protect vulnerable communities, as laid out in the R2P principle, and an international responsibility to punish perpetrators, with the establishment of the ICC. Raymond Kwun-Sun Lau's book Responding to Mass Atrocities in Africa: Protection First and Justice Later (Routledge, 2021) p...
Anna von Rath, "Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin" (Peter Lang, 2022)
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesAfropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin (Peter Lang, 2022), the first book in the new series “Imagining Black Europe,” explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneous and malleable, which constitutes its strengths and, at the same time, creates tensions. Anna vo...
Paul Darby et al., "African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories" (Manchester UP, 2022)
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe global success of football icons like Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following - literally and figuratively - in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories (Manchester University Press, 2022) captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing thi...
Sarah Brouillette, "Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
April 29, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Underdevelopment and African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Sarah Brouillette tackles the print culture and literature in English in South and East Africa. Starting from the period of the 1970s to the contemporary times. She analyses literary texts as well as textbooks and books written for the learners of the English language. She puts forth how piracy, short-fictions app, apps and so on form an intricate part of this diverse field. Sarah Brouillette is a professor at Carl...
Shobana Shankar, "An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Ghanaian protests over Gandhi statues to American Vice President Kamala Harris’s story, this relationship—notwithstanding moments of common struggle—seethes with conflicts that reveal how race reverberates throughout the modern world. Shobana Shankar’s groundbreaking intellectual history tackles the controversial question of how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. In An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India a...
Christopher Tounsel, "Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan" (Duke UP, 2021)
April 28, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesOn July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion that the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which the South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from the Arab and Muslim Sudanese to the north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines within S...
Amadou Hampâté Bâ, "Amkoullel: The Fula Boy" (Duke UP, 2021)
April 26, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutes“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.” We’ve all heard this phrase, or some version of it, but not all of us know who uttered it. It was the singular Amadou Hampâté Bâ. By the end of his long life, Bâ, the ethnographer, author, interpreter, religious teacher, poet, philosopher and ambassador had himself become one of Africa’s most famous “elders”, and, to borrow his phrase, one of the continent’s most expansive “libraries”. Amkoullel, the Fula Boy (Duke University Press, 2021) is t...
Harry Verhoeven and Anatol Lieven, "Beyond Liberal Order: States, Societies and Markets in the Global Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 21, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesWe often neglect the Indian Ocean when we talk about our macro-level models of geopolitics, global economics or grand strategy—often in favor of the Atlantic or the Pacific. Yet the Indian Ocean—along whose coasts live a third of humanity—may be a better vehicle to understand how our world is changing. Globalization first began in the Indian Ocean with traders sailing between the Gulf, South Asia and Southeast Asia, spreading goods, cultures and ideas. And now, with no hegemon and an array of...
Delinda Collier, "Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020)
April 20, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 fi...
Hilton Judin, "Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital" (Routledge, 2021)
April 19, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesHilton Judin's book Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital (Routledge, 2021) is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpa...
Simon Peter Newman, "Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London" (U London Press, 2022)
April 19, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesFreedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (University of London Press, 2022) by Professor Simon P. Newman reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital. In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this b...
The Future of the Far Right in the U.S.: A Discussion with Timothy Snyder
April 19, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesThe events of January 6th 2021 are contested in the US. For some supporters of Donald Trump it was, and remains, a case of a legitimate protest against a rigged election. For opponents of Mr. Trump, it was an attempt to bully Congress through physical intimidation into refusing to validate the correct election result. That so many Americans believe the election was rigged raises questions about the nature of right wing politics in the US. This podcast covers these issues with Professor Timoth...
Jason K. Stearns, "The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo" (Princeton UP, 2022)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 2 hoursWell into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a "forever war"--a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (Princeton UP, 2022) investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003--accompanied by the largest United Nati...
Jared Staller, "Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670" (Ohio UP, 2019)
April 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670 (Ohio UP, 2019), Jared Staller tells the history of how the myth of cannibalism in West Central Africa developed between 1509 and 1670 in the context of mis-understandings between European and Africans. Many of these misunderstandings were in fact intentional, given that the myth of cannibalism proved very useful to Portuguese slavers seeking to bypass the restrictions imposed by the Papacy as to who could be justifi...
Jochen Lingelbach, "On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War" (Berghahn Books, 2020)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAs the horrors of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine unfold before our eyes, we have witnessed a massive wave of refugees absorbed by a range of Eastern European countries – with the most refugees so far remaining in Poland. This is a remarkably apt moment to talk about the lessons of an important new study by historian Jochen Lingelbach. In On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War (Berghahn, 2020), Lingelbach tells the story o...
Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, "African Peacekeeping" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 04, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesIn African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Fisher and Dr. Nina Wilén explore the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping. This concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeeping by Africans. The book argues that “African peacekeeping should be understood not as simply an adjunct, technical activity but as a complex set of...
Marie Muschalek, "Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa" (Cornell UP, 2019)
March 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSlaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2019) uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was built in an improvised fashion by low-level state representatives. Marie A. Muschalek's fascinating p...
Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii, "Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford UP, 2020), Elisabeth King and Cyrus Samii examine the reasons that governments choose to recognize ethnic identities and the consequences of such choices for peace. The authors introduce a theory on the merits and risks of recognizing ethnic groups in state institutions, pointing to the crucial role of ethnic demographics. Through a global quantitative analysis and in-depth case studies of Burundi,...
Jeremy Friedman, "Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World" (Harvard UP, 2022)
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. In Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (Harvard UP, 2022), Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the pro...
Serena Owusua Dankwa, "Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
March 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourKnowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity....
Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi, "Outbreak Culture: The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, With a New Preface and Epilogue" (Harvard UP, 2021)
March 18, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesAs we saw with the Ebola outbreak--and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic--a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled. One of America's top biomedical researchers, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborator, Lara Salahi, argue that these pr...
Brian J. Peterson, "Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa" (Indiana UP, 2021)
March 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021) by Brian J. Peterson is a thoroughly researched biography of Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. Peterson sketches Sankara’s rise to power in the early 1980s and focuses specifically on how his military experiences, educational background, and community of mentors, family, and friends shaped his radicalism. Peterson frames Sankara within a second-generation of anti-colonial radicals who b...
The Future of Africa: A Discussion with James A. Robinson
March 15, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesAfrica is often portrayed in terms of dictators, starvation, corruption, tribalism, war, disease, poverty and crime. In this podcast Professor James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago who is co-author (with Daron Acemoglu of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Currency, 2013) explains why those stereotypes are often wrong and why he believes Africa has a brighter future than many think. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC co...
Vicki L. Brennan, "Singing Yoruba Christianity: Music, Media, and Morality" (Indiana UP, 2018)
March 08, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourSinging the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by singing together, church members create one spiritual mind and become unified around a shared set of values. She follows parishioners as they attend choir rehearsals, use musical media—hymn books and cassette tapes—and perform the music and rituals that connect them through religious experience. Brennan asserts that chur...
Carol Berger, "The Child Soldiers of Africa's Red Army: The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan's Military" (Routledge, 2022)
March 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Child Soldiers of Africa's Red Army: The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan's Military (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Carol Berger examines the role of social process and routinised violence in the use of underaged soldiers in the country now known as South Sudan during the twenty-one-year civil war between Sudan’s northern and southern regions. Drawing on accounts of South Sudanese who as children and teenagers were part of the Red Army—the youth wing of the Sudan P...
Candace M. Keller, "Imaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa" (Indiana UP, 2021)
February 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourImaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021) is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the present. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy, its analysis focuses on the studio and documentary work of professional urban photographers, particularly in the capital city of Bamako and in smaller cities such as Mopti ...
Michelle Gordon, "Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
February 25, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesAnalysing three cases of British colonial violence that occurred in the latter half of the 19th century, this book argues that all three share commonalities, including the role of racial prejudices in justifying the perpetration of extreme colonial violence. Exploring the connections and comparisons between the Perak War (1875–76), the 'Hut Tax' Revolt in Sierra Leone (1898–99) and the Anglo-Egyptian War of Reconquest in the Sudan (1896–99), Gordon highlights the significance of decision-maki...
Eghosa Imasuen, "Fine Boys: A Novel" (Ohio UP, 2021)
February 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Fine Boys: A Novel (Ohio University Press, 2021), Ewaen is a Nigerian teenager, bored at home in Warri and eager to flee from his parents’ unhappy marriage and incessant quarreling. When Ewaen is admitted to the University of Benin, he makes new friends who, like him, are excited about their newfound independence. They hang out in parking lots, trading gibes in pidgin and English and discovering the pleasures that freedom affords them. But when university strikes begin and ruthlessly viole...
Marissa Mika, "Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda" (Ohio UP, 2021)
February 18, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesThousands of stories are given voice by Marissa Mika in Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda (Ohio UP, 2021), a fearless, warm, and humane history of the Uganda Cancer Institute’s first half century. Mika treads carefully but surely through the fields of colonial and post-colonial medical research and politics while never losing sight of the individuals who worked, planned, improvised, suffered, survived and died at the UCI. The book is a fascinating contrast to the...
3.2 Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut with Andrew van der Vlies
February 17, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesGuest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South African literature and global modernisms at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Andrew and Damon tunnel down into the structures of Damon’s newest novel, The Promise to locate the ways in which a generational family story reflects broadly on South Africa’s present moment. The two discuss how lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic invoke for some the lim...