New Books in African Studies
680 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 days ago - ★★★★ - 39 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books
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Episodes
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...
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020)
December 31, 2020 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, ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Lia Paradis, "Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire" (I. B. Tauris, 2020)
December 07, 2020 09:00 - 32 minutesIn The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the East, including the palace at Khartoum where General Charles Gordon was killed. ‘It was a sorry sight, a ruin. His blood still upon the staircase’. The Sudan, or more properly, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of the Sudan lasted from 1898 to 1956, and was one of many glimpses of the exotic that appeare...
Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourPauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates the social life of Black Power politics across the African diaspora from the 1950s through the 1980s. Told through Bermudian activist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego’s life, Swan takes readers on a journey through Black radical diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, western, eastern, and south...
Oluwakemi M. Balogun, "Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesEven as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests ...
Anne K. Bang, "Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform" (Brill, 2014)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices, and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar, and Cape Town. ...
Ned Bertz, "Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Space in Tanzania" (U Hawaii Press, 2015)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe vibrant Swahili coast port city of Dar es Salaam—literally, the “Haven of Peace”—hosts a population reflecting a legacy of long relations with the Arabian Peninsula and a diaspora emanating in waves from the Indian subcontinent. By the 1960s, after decades of European imperial intrusions, Tanzanian nationalist forces had peacefully dismantled the last British colonial structures of racial segregation and put in place an official philosophy of nonracial nationalism. Yet today, more than fi...
Christopher J. Lee, "Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives" (Ohio UP, 2019)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world or...
S. F. C. Daly, "A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. I...
Pedro Machado, "Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (Ohio UP, 2020)
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourPearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2020), co-edited by Pedro Machado, Joseph Christensen, Steve Mullins) is the first book to examine the trade, distribution, production, and consumption of pearls and mother-of-pearl in the global Indian Ocean over more than five centuries. While scholars have long recognized the importance of pearling to the social, cultural, and economic practices of both coastal and inland areas, the overwhelming majority ha...
Ian Foster, "Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas" (UP of Mississippi, 2019)
November 05, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (UP of Mississippi, 2019) author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent questions regarding crises of global immigration by redefining migration in terms of conscription and by studying contemporary literature. Reporting on immigration, whether liberal or conservative, popular or scholarly, leaves out the history in which the Global North helped create outward migration ...
Zakkiyah Imam Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World" (NYU Press, 2020)
November 03, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesIn a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Imam Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the racial logics of the so-called “Enlightenment,” past and present. Rewriting the pernicious, enduri...
Sarah Longair, "Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897-1964" (Routledge, 2015)
November 02, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesAs one of the most monumental and recognisable landmarks from Zanzibar’s years as a British Protectorate, the distinctive domed building of the Zanzibar Museum (also known as the Beit al-Amani or Peace Memorial Museum) is widely known and familiar to Zanzibaris and visitors alike. Yet the complicated and compelling history behind its construction and collection has been overlooked by historians until now. Drawing on a rich and wide range of hitherto unexplored archival, photographic, architec...
Chima J. Korieh, "Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 02, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourReading the petitions that resident of colonial Nigeria submitted to the government during World War II, Marquette University historian, Prof. Chima J. Korieh found a unique source for African political voices as they renegotiated their status as something more than colonial subjects. What emerged was a wider social history of Nigeria during World War II. The colonial state intensified its attention to economic extraction, and many Nigerians responded positively because they believed in the B...
Precariously Positioned: How Africa Must Balance Development with a Climate-Friendly Outlook
October 26, 2020 08:00 - 28 minutesIn addition to battling poverty, malnutrition, and disease, African countries today find themselves also having to fend off the numerous perils of climate change. The African problem is unique— socioeconomic development is crucial, but that also shouldn’t come at the cost of environmental destruction. In this episode, Dr Robin Attfield, Professor Emeritus at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, talks about how Africa finds itself vulnerable to not only dr...
S. Wynne-Jones and A. LaViolette, "The Swahili World" (Routledge, 2017)
October 26, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesThe Swahili World (Routledge, 2017) presents the fascinating story of a major world civilization, exploring the archaeology, history, linguistics, and anthropology of the eastern coast of Africa. It covers a 1,500-year sweep of history, from the first settlement of the coast to the complex urban and rural spaces found there today. This is the first volume to explore the Swahili coast in chronological perspective. Each chapter offers a unique wealth of detail on an aspect of the region’s past,...
Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019)
October 21, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesIn Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement with and literary depictions of imperial Ethiopia. Widely celebrated as one of two African nations to resist European colonization in the age of modern imperialism, Ethiopia captured the attention of a host of African American journalists, artists, writers, adventurers, and even financiers. Drawing on ...
Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
October 20, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourExporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.” In tracing minstrel globalization across the Anglo-colonial and British imperial worlds beginning in the 1800s, Thelwell explores the ways that blackface minstrelsy helped to construct and maintain notions of exclusionary citizenship ...
Alexis Wick, "The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space" (U California Press, 2016)
October 12, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesThe Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In ca...
Elleni Centime Zeleke, "Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016" (Haymarket Books, 2020)
October 12, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesBetween the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Brill, 2019 and Haymarket Books, 2020 paperback) examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian p...
Matthew S. Hopper, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” (Yale UP, 2015)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn this wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slaver...
Prita Meier, "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere" (Indiana UP, 2016)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. In Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press), Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing. Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal ...
François-Xavier Fauvelle, "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2018)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. How do we reconstruct these centuries of the African past in the face of a daunting lack of sources? In thirty-four thoughtful vignettes, Fauvelle takes us along for the ride as he wrestles with this question. From Aksum to the Swahili coast, and Sijilmâsa to South Africa, the distances covered by The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African ...
Stephanie Newell, "Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos" (Duke UP, 2019)
September 24, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesStephanie Newell, Professor of English at Yale University, came to this project, which explores the concept of “dirt” and how this idea is used and applied to people and spaces, in a rather indirect way, having read the memoirs and journals of merchant traders – particularly the white British traders who were writing about their visits to many of the African colonies. In observing the ways in which these traders discussed the people they encountered in West Africa, Newell notes that the trade...
Anais Angelo, "Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAnais Angelo, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Vienna has written an exceptional book entitled Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years (Cambridge University Press) in CUP's prestigious African Studies Series. Angelo’s book analyses the little-studied institution of the Office of the President by studying its first postcolonial office-holder in Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. Angelo’s book is also a study of postcolonial statebuilding, ...
Learning from Rwanda: How 100 Days of Mass Killing Finally Led to International Reform (Part 2)
September 23, 2020 08:00 - 22 minutesRwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 people, including Tutsis and moderate Hutus, dead. And while, shockingly, the event was not given enough attention by the international community at the time, Rwanda’s genocide later led to reform and innovation in order to prevent and respond to such crises and to help the recovery of societies post conflicts. In this episode, Dr. Philip Drew, Asso...