New Books in African Studies
651 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 36 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books
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Episodes
Mai Hassan, "Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
August 11, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesWhen trying to understand how to help countries escape poverty, economists initially focused on macro topics like inflation, government deficits, trade balances, and capital inflows. Later there was a shift in focus to institutions, looking at whether and how competitive elections, strong legal systems, and other features facilitated investment and growth. More recently micro policy has become a new focus, with experimentalists conducting randomized trials to figure out whether or how much sp...
Shelby Grossman, "The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: How the State Shapes Private Governance" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
August 04, 2021 08:00 - 48 minutesProperty rights are important for economic exchange, but many governments don't protect them. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort group members. Under what circumstances, then, will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Based on market case studies and a representative survey of traders in Lagos, Nigeria, this book argues that threats fr...
Christopher J. Lee, "Kwame Anthony Appiah" (Routledge, 2021)
July 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourKwame Anthony Appiah is among the most respected philosophers and thinkers of his generation. In Kwame Anthony Appiah (Routledge, 2021), Christopher Lee introduces the reader not only to the contributions that Appiah has made to some central debates of our time, but also to the complex personal and intellectual history that shaped his ideas. Born in Ghana to an African father and a British mother, Appiah has spent his life straddling multiple worlds. He was educated as a philosopher at Cambri...
Cynthia J. Becker, "Blackness in Morocco: Gnawa Identity Through Music and Visual Culture" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
July 16, 2021 08:00 - 51 minutesFor more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual repr...
Rahul Rao, "Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 06, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesBetween 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford UP, 2020) seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopo...
Monica Popescu, "At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War" (Duke UP, 2020)
July 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War (Duke UP, 2020), Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century to address the intertwined effects of the Cold War and decolonization on literary history. Popescu draws on archival materials from the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers Association and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom alongside considerations of canonical literary works by Ayi Kwe...
Megan Carney, "Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean" ( U of California Press, 2021)
June 15, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesWith thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (University of California ...
Alice Elliot, "The Outside: Migration As Life in Morocco" (Indiana UP, 2021)
June 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Outside: Migration as Life in Morocco (Indiana UP, 2021) traces how migration has come to occupy a striking place in the lives of many Moroccans. A full 10 percent of the population now lives outside the country, affecting individual and collective life in countless unanticipated ways. In this intimate ethnography of rural Morocco, Alice Elliot considers the experience of migration from the point of view of the families and people, mostly women, who have not (yet) left. Elliot shows how t...
Jonas Kreienbaum, "A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
June 09, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesHolocaust and Genocide historians have spent much time and effort recently considering the connections between the experiences and ideas of colonialism and subsequent mass atrocity violence. Jonas Kreienbaum's recent book A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908 (Berghahn Books, 2019) is an important contribution to this new direction in the field. Kreienbaum is interested in the way in which concentration camps became a widely used tactic in anti-insurgency ca...
Hannah Hoechner, "Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty" (U Cambridge Press, 2018)
May 28, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesIn a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalization and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialized in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, ...
Naminata Diabate, "Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020)
May 24, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourBala Saho (Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Naminata Diabate (Associate Professor, Cornell University) about her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, published by Duke University Press, in 2020. What provocations are posed by a naked woman’s body? What does it mean to those who see her? And what does it signify for the woman herself, in the moment and in memory? In this book, Naminata Diabate recovers the deep historical roots for women’s embo...
João José Reis, "Ganhadores: A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia" (Companhia das Letras, 2019)
May 12, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourUm retrato original da Bahia no século XIX, num livro cheio de movimento e vozes, sobretudo da gente negra. Em Ganhadores: A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia (Companhia das Letras, 2019), o historiador João José Reis reconstitui a história dos negros de ganho, ou ganhadores, protagonistas de uma insólita greve que paralisou o transporte na capital baiana durante vários dias em 1857. Esses trabalhadores escravizados, libertos ou livres, todos africanos ou seus descendentes, se organizavam em grupo...
S. Garnett Russell, "Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
May 12, 2021 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen (Rutgers UP, 2020), S. Garnett Russell argues that although the Rwandan government makes use of global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the curricular intentions of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and an undermining of sustainable peace. She is assistant professor of international and comparative e...
Catherine E. McKinley, "The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Womanhood" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 29, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesWhat does it mean to tie your cloth to that of another person, as in the Ghanaian tradition, or to be in full dress? How is fashion photography in a colonial and decolonial context more than just a "look" but in fact a looking and a looking at? Join author Catherine McKinley (she/her) and host Lee M. Pierce (they) for a discussion of these provocative questions in the context of fashion photography by and about pan-African women from the 1870s to the 1970s. Most of us grew up with images of A...
Adom Getachew, "Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination" (Princeton UP, 2020)
April 26, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesAdom Getachew, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019). The work has received immense praise from academics and non-specialists alike, winning a plethora of awards, including the Frantz Fanon Prize, the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award, and the J. David Greenstone Book Prize. Getachew renarrates the twentieth-century hi...
Christian A. Williams, "National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO's Exile Camps" (Cambridge UP, 2015)
April 19, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Christian Williams tells the stories of the many exiles that lived in camps established by the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) during Namibia’s three-decade liberation struggle. Through extensive use of oral testimonies as well as photographic and documentary materials, Williams describes the wide range of experiences that exiles encounter...
Michela Wrong, "Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad" (PublicAffairs, 2021)
April 16, 2021 08:00 - 46 minutesMichela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad (PublicAffairs, 2021) is a glorious piece of journalism. It tells the story of Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence turned government critic, Patrick Karegeya, and his falling out with the Rwandan leadership, including current President Paul Kagame. For Wrong, the murder of Patrick Karegeya provides a passage-way into broader conversations about how Rwanda has been ruled since the 1994 geno...
Yuichiro Onishi and Fumiko Sakashita, "Transpacific Correspondence: Dispatches from Japan's Black Studies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
April 09, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesTranspacific Correspondences: Dispatches from Japan’s Black Studies, an essay collection edited by Dr. Yuichiro Onishi and Dr Fumiko Sakashita, introduces a little-known, but critical history of Black Studies in Japan. Taking the Black Studies Association (Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai) as its focus, the collection charts the history of members of the Black Studies Association, and the ways in which Japanese scholars and writers studied, translated and disseminated the works of black radical thinkers...
New Ethnographies of the Global South: In Conversation with Victoria Reyes and Marco Garrido
April 08, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourHow can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside) are the editors of a recent special issue of Contexts magazine, New Ethnographies of the Global South, that brings together scholars doing fieldwork outside of the US and Europe. Marco and Victor...
Emily Callaci, "Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania" (Duke UP, 2017)
April 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEmily Callaci's book Street Archives and City Life. Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania (Duke University Press, 2017) tells the histories of the young migrants who shaped the city of Dar es Salaam between 1967 and 1985. During this period, the ruling party, TANU, pursued the policy of Ujamaa or African socialism which sought the future of African independence in traditional villages and rural areas rather than cities. Despite the increasingly anti-urban policies of the Tanzanian st...
Duane Jethro, "Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
April 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDuane Jethro’s Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a terrific book. In it, Jethro develops a novel analytical framework to understand the relationship between the senses (taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch) and heritage formation. Heritage formation and the senses are intimately linked as foundational processes, important for untangling how heritage is actually nation-building and nation-building is better understood ...
Smriti Srinivas et al., "Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds" (Routledge, 2020)
April 02, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourReimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020), coedited by Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng'weno, and Neelima Jeychandran, breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches to examine contemporary Indian Ocean worlds. It reconfigures the Indian Ocean as a space for conceptual and theoretical relationality based on social science and humanities scholarship, thus moving away from an area-based and geographical approach to Indian Ocean studies. Contributors from a variety of dis...
Zach Sell, "Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital" (UNC Press, 2021)
March 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, e...
Dan Hicks, "The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution" (Pluto Books, 2020)
March 26, 2021 04:00 - 48 minutesDan Hicks, Curator and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University has written a terrific book. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Books, 2020) is a call to arms, for Western museums to return everything it procured, or more correctly stole, from African locations. The claim for cultural restitution is made through the Benin Bronzes, artworks pillaged by the British in a 1897 naval attack, loot that was t...
Carolyn Holmes, "The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-building in Democratic South Africa" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
March 25, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourCarolyn Holmes’ new book, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-building in Democratic South Africa (U Michigan Press, 2020),takes its title from a cartoon that captured the complicated nature of democratization and nation-building in South Africa in the period that followed the end of apartheid. As Holmes explains in her deeply researched book, the promise of a diverse “rainbow coalition” that was to characterize the “new” South Africa has been caught within the...
Jeremy Best, "Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
March 19, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMotivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany's colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heave...
Joshua Cole, "Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2019)
March 17, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourJoshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery. Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political v...
Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 15, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesWhat does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be...
John M. Janzen, "Health in a Fragile State. Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo" (Wisconsin UP, 2019)
March 08, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourJohn M. Janzen's Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo (Wisconsin University Press, 2019) offers a granular and insightful view of the state of healthcare services in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo), and examines the extent to which said services are able to improve the health of the communities that inhabit this region. The collapse of the Congolese state during the 1980s and 1990s resulted in the deterioration and v...
Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, "Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
February 18, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourYomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism…” (1). By centering the relationality ...
Nicholas Jepson, "In China's Wake: How the Commodity Boom Transformed Development Strategies in the Global South" (Columbia UP, 2019)
February 17, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourFrom 2002 to 2013, China’s rapid economic growth caused a boom in the prices of commodities—particularly of metals, fuel, and soybeans. According to political economist Dr. Nick Jepson, the commodity boom offered resource exporters in the Global South the financial resources and thus the opportunity to break away from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and set their own policy agendas. But not all resource-exporting countries that benefited from the comm...
Jelmer Vos, "Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860–1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order" (U Wisconsin Press, 2017)
February 16, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourKongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (U Wisconsin Press, 2017) traces the history that led to a violent insurrection that erupted in the town of São Salvador, then capital of the Kongo Kingdom in 1913. The rebels were chiefs who sought to depose the King on account of his inability to prevent the violent means by which their followers were being recruited to work in Portuguese plantations. Jelmer Vos explains how the origins of the insurrection date back to th...
Juliane Okot Bitek, "100 Days" (U Alberta Press, 2016)
February 12, 2021 09:00 - 31 minutesJuliane Okot Bitek, of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, has written a terrific book of poetry on the 1994 Genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Published in 2016 by the University of Alberta, and simply titled, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), Okot Bitek’s poetry is a form of witnessing violence that records the senseless loss of life in a way that reminds us violence is human and universal. Susan Thomson is an Associate Pro...
Łukasz Stanek, "Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 11, 2021 09:00 - 44 minutesIn the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton UP, 2020) shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Łukas...
Tiffany N. Florvil, "Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
February 03, 2021 09:00 - 55 minutesIn the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. In Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University ...
Steven Press, "Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe's Scramble for Africa" (Harvard UP, 2017)
February 02, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourSteven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundr...
Matthew Gavin Frank, "Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa" (Liveright, 2021)
January 28, 2021 09:00 - 57 minutesFor nearly eighty years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed “overmined” and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling?particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their fee...
Becky L. Schulthies, "Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality" (Fordham UP, 2020)
January 20, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesWhat does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objec...
C. Decker and E. McMahon, "The Idea of Development in Africa: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
January 13, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourThe Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020) challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by tracing the history of ideas, practices, and 'problems' of development used in Africa. In doing so, it offers an innovative approach to examining the history and culture of development through the lens of the development episteme, which has been foundational to the 'idea of Africa' in western discourses since the early 1800s. The study weaves tog...
Steven Serels, "The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945" (Palgrave, 2018)
January 11, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesThe African Red Sea Littoral, currently divided between Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, is one of the poorest regions in the world. But the pastoralist communities indigenous to this region were not always poor—historically, they had access to a variety of resources that allowed them to prosper in the harsh, arid environment. This access was mediated by a robust moral economy of pastoralism that acted as a social safety net. In The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640...
Tara McIndoe-Calder, "Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe: Background, Impact, and Policy" (Palgrave, 2019)
January 04, 2021 09:00 - 48 minutesIn the wake of the 2008-09 financial crisis, Adam Fergusson's When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation became an unlikely publishing hit more than three decades after its release. Yet, even though few people knew the details of the 1923 crisis, stories and images from interbellum Germany are things of legend. The same cannot be said of the many other hyperinflationary episodes in the past century and especially the two most severe: the first in postwar Hungary and the secon...
Narrating Africa in South Asia
December 31, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNarrating Africa in South Asia (Special Journal Issue: South Asian History and Culture, Volume 11, Issue 4, 2020) explores the multifaceted and longue durée history of the African diaspora in South Asia. The themes of the articles cover many grounds, such as race, religion, social and intellectual history, space and place, social networks and globality, memory studies, and identity politics, among others. Narrating Africa in South Asia situates the African diaspora in the South Asian subconti...
Constance Smith, "Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging" (James Currey, 2019)
December 22, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn a colonial-era housing estate in Nairobi, urban life unfolds in the shadow of a billboard promising a bright hypermodern global future. How do ordinary residents inhabit this temporal condition? What are the everyday practices of city-making that bring life to urban plans and their material ruins? In Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time & Urban Belonging (James Curry, 2019) anthropologist Constance Smith argues that “as people make places, they also make themselves, and in the process...
Anne Garland Mahler, "From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity" (Duke UP, 2018)
December 22, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesIn From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke UP, 2018), Anne Garland Mahler traces the history and intellectual legacy of the understudied global justice movement called the Tricontinental—an alliance of liberation struggles from eighty-two countries, founded in Havana in 1966. Focusing on racial violence and inequality, the Tricontinental's critique of global capitalist exploitation has influenced historical radical thought, contemporar...
Beatrice Nicolini, "Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean" (Educatt, 2017)
December 21, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesLand and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean (Educatt, 2017) reconceptualizes the history of the Indian Ocean through the themes of mobility, encounters, empires, and slavery. The book aims to reshape the historical understanding of Africa and Asia. It approaches Afro-Asiatic connections from different methodological perspectives. Nicolini and de Silva Jayasuriya have reread the Indian Ocean history's role away from traditional politics and international relations. They stated in the introdu...
Ana Beatriz Ribeiro, "Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse" (Brill, 2020)
December 15, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesWhat history and motivations make up the discourses we are taught to hold, and spread, as common sense? As a member of Brazil's upper middle class, Ana Beatriz Ribeiro grew up with the image that to be developed was to be as European as possible. However, as a researcher in Europe during her country's Workers' Party era, she kept reading that Africans should be repaid for developing Brazilian society – via Brazil's "bestowal" of development upon Africa as an "emerging power." In Modernizatio...
Steven Fabian, "Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
December 14, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSituated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. In Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge UP, 2019), Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwor...
Brandon Mills, "The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
December 14, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesBrandon Mills is the author of The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020. The World Colonization Made explores the beginnings and ends of the colonization movement from the late-18th century to the coming of the Civil War. Mills uses African colonization to explore how ideas of American empire developed during the country’s formative years. From politics to racial ideology, Mills is able to chart a cle...
Antoinette Burton, "Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation" (Duke UP, 2016)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutesIn Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Duke UP, 2016), Antoinette Burton reframes our understanding of the postcolonial Afro-Asian solidarity that emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference. Afro-Asian solidarity is best understood, Burton contends, by using friction as a lens to expose the racial, class, gender, sexuality, caste, and political tensions throughout the postcolonial global South. Focusing on India's imagined relationship with Africa,...
Marissa J. Moorman, "Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002" (Ohio UP, 2019)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMarissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates Angolan history with the radio at its center. From its 1930s beginnings, radio has been used by actors as disparate as Portuguese settlers, guerrilla liberation movements, African nationalists and the postcolonial state to project and contest power across Angola’s sparsely populated territory. Moorman’s account pays special attention to the immateria...