New Books in African Studies Podcast

On Bengt Sundkler's "Bantu Prophets in South Africa" from 2022-08-18T08:00

Bengt Sundkler wrote his 1940 book Bantu Prophets in South Africa for a white, European audience. He had no idea that his ethnographic study would play a critical role in keeping African independen...

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Pedro Machado, “Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and...

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Nicholas Duncan, “Tales from a Muzungu” (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tales from a Muzungu (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) relates a Peace Corps Volunteer’s experiences living and working inUganda. Mixing keen observation, sensitivity, and insight with a mordant wit and ...

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Ellen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their fam...

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Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and p...

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Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and develop...

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Erskine Clarke, “By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jane Bayard Wilson and John Leighton Wilson were unlikely African missionaries, coming as they did from privileged slaveholding families in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively. Yet in 1834 the...

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Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a land...

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Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Patrice Lumumba” (Ohio University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a meteo...

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Elizabeth Schmidt, “Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Schmidt‘sForeign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013)depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during...

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Randy J. Sparks, “Where the Negroes Are Masters” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade ...

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Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” ar...

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Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of Internation...

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Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd wri...

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Lisa L. Gezon, “Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective” (Left Coast Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Khat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumption is an...

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Olufemi Taiwo, “Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto” (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Olufemi Taiwo‘s unremittingly honest and daring book, Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto (Indiana University Press, 2014), confronts the reluctance, if not outright hostility, of many Africans to e...

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Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement” (Syracuse University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and ri...

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Ernest Harsch, “Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during a military coup that brought down his gov...

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Todd Cleveland, “Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds” (Ohio University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Diamonds are forever” or “Blood diamonds”–the one a pithy marketing slogan showing how diamonds encapsulate enduring love and commitment and the other a call to conscience about the violence and s...

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Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 1830s, the French school teacher EugÃ©nie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only wer...

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Deborah Mayersen, “On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined” (Berghahn Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US. We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report. Earthquakes are something that...

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What Do We Now Know About the Rwandan Genocide Twenty Years On? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life. The real life part suffered most of all. But every once i...

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Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the B...

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Samuel Totten, “Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan” (Transaction Publishers, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is di...

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Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania” (NIP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at ...

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James Copnall, “A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce” (Hurst, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

July 2011 saw that rarest of events – an attempt to resolve a conflict in Africa by the redrawing of borders. It saw the birth of South Sudan as a fully fledged country after decades of conflict go...

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Susan Thomson, “Whispering Truth to Power” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This spring, I taught a class loosely called “The Holocaust through Primary Sources” to a small group of selected students. I started one class by asking them the deceptively simple question “When ...

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Pedro Machado, "Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (Ohio UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pearls, 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, dis...

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Ian Foster, "Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (UP of Mississippi, 2019) author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent q...

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Sean D. Murphy et al., “Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopi...

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Zakkiyah Imam Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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...

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Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in...

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Sarah Longair, "Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897-1964" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As 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 P...

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Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under ...

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Chima J. Korieh, "Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reading 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 poli...

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Jennie Burnet, “Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a respon...

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S. Wynne-Jones and A. LaViolette, "The Swahili World" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 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. I...

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Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and c...

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Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement wit...

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Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht tra...

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Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Exporting 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 minstrel...

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Lidwien Kapteijns, “Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lidwien Kapteijns is author of Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is the Kendall/Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College. W...

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Elleni Centime Zeleke, "Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016" (Haymarket Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 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 socia...

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Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly ...

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Alexis Wick, "The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 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 ...

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John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820” (Cambridge UP, 2012). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the ...

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Matthew S. Hopper, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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, glob...

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Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann (editors), “Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space” (University of Michigan Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic l...

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Prita Meier, "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On 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...

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Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colon...

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François-Xavier Fauvelle, "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What 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 Af...

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Lee Ann Fujii, “Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The question Lee Ann Fujii asks in her new book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) is a traditional one in genocide studies. Her research builds on earli...

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Stephanie Newell, "Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephanie 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 indirec...

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Catherine Higgs, “Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled b...

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Anais Angelo, "Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anais 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 ...

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Martin Plaut and Paul Holden, “Who Rules South Africa?” (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anybody who has been following the news in recent months knows that bloodshed has returned to South Africa. The recent violence and deaths among strikers in the country’s platinum mining industry r...

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Omar H. Ali, "Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Omar H. Ali’s Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford University Press, 2016), provides insight into the life of slave soldier Malik Ambar. It offers a rare look at an indivi...

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Jason Brownlee, “Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Jason Brownlee explains the two countries relationship over the past several decades. From t...

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Pernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge UP, 2020), Dr. Pernille Røge charts the confluence and reciprocal impacts of i...

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Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb, “Religion and AIDS in Africa” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect – bluntly speaking Africa’s high levels of religiosity have contributed substantially t...

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Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora" (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sana Aiyer investigates how Indian diasporic actors influenced the course of Kenya’s political history, from partneri...

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Sandra Chait, “Seeking Salaam: Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the Pacific Northwest, immigrants from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia coexist, making a life for themselves and their family in a new country. In the book Seeking Salaam : Ethiopians, Eritreans a...

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Jacob Mundy, "Libya" (Polity Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is ...

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Bruce Whitehouse, “Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging” (Indiana UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every so often a book lands on my desk about something so obviously interesting that I have never really considered it before. Bruce Whitehouse‘s Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, D...

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Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgr...

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Steve Kemper, “Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa” (Norton, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Three years ago I travelled overland with my wife from Victoria Falls through Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. It felt like we were on a real adventure. Having just read Steve Kemper‘s exce...

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Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the Mediterranean" (Little Brown, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published A Brief History of the Mediterranean (Little Brown, 2020), to offer readers an overview of this sphere from pre-h...

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Nwando Achebe, “The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe” (Indiana University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I saw Nwando Achebe‘s book The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe (Indiana University Press, 2011), I thought: “Really? A female king? Cool!” It turns out Ahebi Ugbabe was not only ...

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Jessica Marie Johnson, "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivo...

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Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, “Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Imagine this: a young African girl, barefoot but wearing a dress and head wrap, clenches her fists and looks you in the eye. Behind her a semi-circle of men, some in suits and some in kente cloth, ...

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Hideaki Suzuki, "Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the 19th Century" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hideaki Suzuki’s book Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) provides an insightful perspective to the g...

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Mary Harper, “Getting Somalia Wrong: Faith, War, and Hope in a Shattered State” (Zed Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Several months ago I interviewed Steve Bloomfield, the author of a book on African football, for New Books in African studies. As usual, I ended the interview with a simple enough sounding question...

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Oumar Ba, "States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020) theorizes the ways in which states that are presumed to be weaker in the international system ...

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Helen Tilley, “Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950” (University of Chicago, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen Tilley‘s new book Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) uncovers the surprising relationsh...

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Zachary Valentine Wright, "Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the 18th-Century Muslim World" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (The University of North Carolina Press 2020) by Zachary Valentine Wright (Associate Professor in Residence in...

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Raymond Jonas, “The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Raymond Jonas‘ The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2011) places Menelik alongside Napoleon and other greatest strategists. The Ethiopian emperor carried out a bril...

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Ravi Palat, "The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650" (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric notions of long-term historical change by drawing upon ...

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Orla Ryan, “Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa” (Zed Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When was the last time you ate some chocolate? If you live in the developed world there’s a strong chance that you’ve been munching on some fairly recently. At the basic level chocolate is an every...

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Benjamin Talton, "In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics" (Pennsylvania UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history that explores the influence of African America...

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Richard Bourne, “Catastrophe: What Went Wrong in Zimbabwe?” (Zed Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of the literature on modern Africa makes the unhappy comparison between hopes, especially upon independence, and reality. In Zimbabwe that link resonates even more than is normal. Zimbabwe on...

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Erik Gellman, "Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles Through the Lens of Art Shay" (Chicago UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James West speaks with Erik Gellman, an associate professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about his new book Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles Through the Le...

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Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra: A Life” (Back Bay Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aside from being aesthetically equated to Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra has not fared well in history. In her riveting biography Cleopatra: A Life (Back Bay Books, 2011), which is now out in paperbac...

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Nwando Achebe, "Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa" (Ohio UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this unapologetically African-centered monograph, Nwando Achebe considers the diverse forms and systems of female leadership in both the physical and spiritual worlds, as well as the complexitie...

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Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history o...

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Charles Piot, "The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles"?(Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the West African nation of Togo, applying for the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery is a national obsession, with hundreds of thousands of Togolese entering each year. From the street frenzy of the lo...

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Richard Hamilton, “The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco” (I. B. Taurus, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers, charlatans, showmen and chancers, all shroude...

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Kathleen Klaus, "Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen Klaus, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco has written a terrific book, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making published in 2020 by C...

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Steve Bloomfield, “Africa United: How Football Explains Africa” (Canongate Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A couple of days ago I had an unusual experience. I was staying in a hotel in Kampala, with a stunning view of the southern reaches of the Ugandan capital and the northern edge of Lake Victoria. It...

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N. Achebe and C. Robertson, "Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“The most interesting women in the world!” That’s how Claire Robertson describes African women, and it’s hard to disagree with her after reading Holding the World Together: African Women in Changin...

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Stephen Ellis, “Season of Rains: Africa in the world” (Hurst, 2011 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Globalisation has not passed Africa by. The recent boom in commodity prices has had a direct impact on African markets, as has the inescapable presence of new global powers like China on the contin...

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Mari K. Webel, "The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of ...

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Erin Haney, “Exposures: Photography and Africa” (Reaktion Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise pr...

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Gaurav Desai, "Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination" (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Rea...

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Chuck Korr, “More Than Just a Game–Soccer vs. Apartheid: The Greatest Soccer Story Ever Told” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apar...

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Laura S. Grillo, "An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if the moral guardians of West African societies are postmenopausal women? This is the argument that Laura S. Grillo makes in her 2018 book, An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual ...

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James Brabazon, “My Friend the Mercenary: A Memoir” (Canongate, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In February 2002, British journalist James Brabazon set out to travel with guerrilla forces into Liberia to show the world what was happening in that war-torn country. To protect him, he hired Nick...

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Edward Alpers, "The Indian Ocean in World History" (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied o...

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Patrick Manning, “The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Africans were the first migrants because they were the first people. Some 60,000 years ago they left their homeland and in a relatively short period of time (by geological and evolutionary standard...

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R. S. Dieng and A. O'Reilly, "Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond" (Demeter Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How have the everyday practices of parenting been shaped by patriarchy and coloniality? What are the transformative potentials of feminist parenting? In Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa...

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Jack Greene and Philip Morgan, “Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal” (Oxford UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This is the first in a series of podcasts that New Books in History is offering in conjunction with the National History Center. The NHC and Oxford University Press have initiated a book series cal...

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Assan Sarr, "Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin" (Rochester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An original, rigorously researched volume that questions long-accepted paradigms concerning land ownership and its use in Africa. Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin (Rochester U...

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Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this i...

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Will Rollason, "Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets" (Lexington Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Will Rollason is senior lecturer of anthropology at Brunel University London. He’s written a fascinating book titled Motorbike People: Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets (Lexington Books, 2020)....

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Joyce Tyldesley, “Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt” (Basic Books, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Swords and Sandals” movies always amaze me. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Spartacus,” “Ben-Hur,” “Gladiator,” and the rest. These movies are so rich in detail–both narrative and physical–t...

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Oludamini Ogunnaike, "Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Arabic Madih Poetry and its Precedents" (Islamic Texts Society, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Around the world Muslims praise the Prophet Muhammad through the recitation of lyrical poetry. In West Africa, Arabic praise poetry has a rich history informed by local literary, spiritual, and rit...

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James Zug, “The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper” (Michigan State UP, 2007) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren’t at all what they appear to have been in hindsight. James Zug‘s wonderfully written The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extra...

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Luke Messac, "No More to Spend: Neglect and the Construction of Scarcity in Malawi's History of Health Care" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dismal spending on government health services is often considered a necessary consequence of a low per-capita GDP, but are poor patients in poor countries really fated to be denied the fruits of mo...

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J-B. Tchouta Mougoué, "Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019) illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist moveme...

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Kara Moskowitz, "Seeing Like A Citizen" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kara Moskowitz, Assistant Professor of African History as the University of Missouri-St. Louis. has written a terrific book, Seeing Like A Citizen: Decolonization, Development and the Making of Ken...

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Alanna O’Malley, "The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964" (Manchester UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 1960, the Republic of the Congo won its independence from Belgium. Only one week later, however, Belgium had already dispatched paratroopers into the country and the Congolese gove...

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Steven J. L. Taylor, "Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

African Americans have a long history of emigration. In Exiles, Entrepreneurs, and Educators: African Americans in Ghana, Steven J. L. Taylor explores the second wave of African American exiles or ...

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Ken O. Opalo, "Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) examines the development of African legislatures from their colonial origins through indepen...

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Lynn M. Thomas, "Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Tho...

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Mauro Nobili, "Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 19th century, on the floodplain of the Niger river’s inland delta in West Africa (present-day Mali), the Caliphate of ?amdall?hi emerged. The new State, locally known as the Maasina Di...

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Neil Roberts on How Ideas Become Books in Africana and AfroAm Studies from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can...

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Joyce E. Leader, "From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide" (Potomac Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to reflect on the state of research about the genocide...

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Kathryn M. De Luna, "Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa" (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Kathryn M. De Luna documents the evolving meanings borne in the collection of wild fo...

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Frank Wilderson III, "Afropessimism" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate ...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Nemata Blyden, "African Americans and Africa: a New History" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What is Africa to me?”, African-American writer Countee Cullen asked in Color, his 1925 collection of poems. African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019) lays out the ...

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Monique A. Bedasse, "Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization" (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (UNC Press, 2017), examines Rastafarian repatriation to Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, Monique A....

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M’hamed Oualdi, "A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial vi...

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Kwasi Konadu, "In Our Own Way In this Part of the World" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book In Our Own Way In this Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture and Nation (Duke University Press, 2019), Kwasi Konadu tells the story Kofi Donko (1913-1995) an...

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Anne Heffernan, "Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa" (James Currey, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Heffernan's new book Limpopo’s Legacy, Student Politics and Democracy in South Africa (James Currey, 2019) is a thoroughly researched account of the Black Consciousness Movement, student activ...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Jatin Dua, "Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019) is a pirate story of a different kind. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork in Somalia, the UK ...

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

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Nicholas R. Jones, "Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain" (Penn State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black Afri...

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Christopher J. Lee, "Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa" (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Duke University Press, 2014), Christopher J. Lee recovers the forgotten experiences of mu...

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David Morton, "Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who built Africa’s cities? Going beyond the colonial archive and the planner’s gaze, David Morton’s Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique (Ohio Universit...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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Peter Cole, "Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is a fascinating, densely researched account of dockworkers and their organized res...

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Eddie Michel, "The White House and White Africa" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence was one of the last crises of formal imperialism. British settlers in present-day Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, refused to accept demands fr...

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Rupert Lewis, "Marcus Garvey" (UP of West Indies, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rupert Lewis has written a biography of Marcus Garvey published by the University Press of the West Indies in 2018. His book Marcus Garvey documents the forging of Garvey’s remarkable vision of pan...

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Julie MacArthur, "Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion" (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader De...

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Roberto Strongman, "Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Duke University Press, 2019), Roberto Strongman reveals the many non-heteronormative texts, practices and ...

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Sean Jacobs, "Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. Jacobs is also the founder and editor of the acclaimed Africa is A Country website, a leader His new bo...

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

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Catherine Besteman, "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Catherine L. Besteman's book Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press, 2016) is an important contribution to our understanding of the process of remaking one’...

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Matthew Gavin Frank, "Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa" (Liveright, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For 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 set...

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Jessica Lynne Pearson, "The Colonial Politics of Global Health: France and the United Nations in Postwar Africa" (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

International organizations throw up several obstacles—their immense scale, their dry bureaucratic language—to the historian trying to piece together their past. In her book, The Colonial Politics ...

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Becky L. Schulthies, "Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality" (Fordham UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What 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 re...

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Judi Rever, "In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front" (Random House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Judi Rever’s In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Random House, 2018) is investigative journalism at its finest. Through great personal risk to so many of those involved, ...

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C. Decker and E. McMahon, "The Idea of Development in Africa: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 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 'pr...

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Stephanie Malia Hom, "Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom's new book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes ...

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Steven Serels, "The Impoverishment of the African Red Sea Littoral, 1640–1945" (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 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...

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Gillian Glaes, "African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gillian Glaes’s African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare (Routledge, 2018) examines the experiences and agency of African immigrants in France from 1...

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Tara McIndoe-Calder, "Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe: Background, Impact, and Policy" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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...

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Alex Lichtenstein, "Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Pres...

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Narrating Africa in South Asia from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Narrating 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...

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Benjamin Breen, "The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreation...

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Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This 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 surviv...

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Great Books: Manthia Diawara on Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's 1958 Things Fall Apart transformed the world by vividly imagining the story of an African community in English, the language of the colonizers, and yet on its ...

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K. B. Berzock, "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, pub...

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Miriam Driessen, "Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia" (Hong Kong UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong...

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Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vita...

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

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Caroline Wanjiku Kihato, "Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato's Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) is a book about home and not-home, eloquently told about the hopes and dreams...

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Adeline M. Masquelier, "Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (University of Chicago Press 2019) is a study of the kinds of experimentation and creative engagements that young men in the urban public spaces of Niger undert...

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David Wheat, "Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Wheat’s fantastic book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) argues that the extensive participation of Luso-Africans, Latinized Afri...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

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Naleli Morojele, "Women Political Leaders in Rwanda and South Africa: Narratives of Triumph and Loss" (Barbara Budrich 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rwanda and South Africa have some of the highest rates of women’s political representation in the world, with significant growth particularly in the last 20 years. Through interviews with eleven wo...

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Henning Melber, "Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Decolonisation of Africa" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold di...

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Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effect...

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Jennifer L. Derr, "The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In October 1902, the reservoir of the first Aswan Dam filled, and Egypt's relationship with the Nile River forever changed. Flooding villages of historical northern Nubia and filling the irrigation...

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Jennifer Jensen Wallach, "What We Need Ourselves: How Food has Shaped African American Life" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Jennifer Jensen Wallach about the her book Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food has Shaped African American Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019...

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Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages ...

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Kevin Dawson, "Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways...

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Lindsey Green-Simms, "Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of...

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Tsega Etefa, "The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are ethnic conflicts in Africa the product of age-old ancient hatreds? Tsega Etefa’s new book, The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta ...

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David Stenner, "Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has rece...

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Elizabeth R. Baer, "The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich" (Wayne State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Elizabeth R. Baer, professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College exami...

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Reinhart Kössler, "Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past" (U Namibia Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s Namibia was once the German colony of South West Africa, for a 30-year period spanning of 1884 to 1915. From 1904-1908, German colonial troops committed the first genocide of the 20th centu...

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Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, "Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories" (Peter Lang, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and m...

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Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between s...

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Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into t...

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Joseph Hill, "Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal" (U Toronto Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph Hill's new book Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal (University of Toronto Press, 2018), is an ethnographic study of women Sufi leaders in the Taal...

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Jeannette Eileen Jones, "Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936" (U Georgia Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a...

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Dannel Jones, "An African in Imperial London: The Indomitable Life of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor" (Hurst, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty. He had arrived over a decade before in the imperial capital bearing different name, seeking education, fame and for...

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Jane Hooper, "Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800" (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Madagascar lies so close to the African coast--and so near the predictable wind system of the Indian Ocean--that it’s easy to overlook the island, the fourth largest in the world, when talking abou...

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Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happened in 2013 in when the virus, already well-known...

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Daniel Hershenzon, "The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were...

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Ryan Hanley, "Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c. 1770 -1830" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To our eyes, eighteenth-century Britain can look like a world of opposites. On one hand everything was new: political parties and a ‘prime’ minister emerged in parliament; their sometime unruly deb...

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Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (...

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Andrew Wallis, "Stepp’d in Blood: Akazu and the Architects of the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsis" (Zero Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last month Rwanda commemorated the 25th anniversary of the genocide. Unlike the recent outpouring of books marking hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, there was only a short f...

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Kristin D. Phillips, "An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Families in parts of rural Tanzania regularly face periods when they cut back on their meals because their own food stocks are running short and they cannot afford to buy food. Kristin D. Phillips'...

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Caitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Bar...

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Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British em...

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James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million people every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa. In The Long Struggle against Malaria in ...

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Elizabeth Schmidt, "Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror" (Ohio UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Of all the blank spots in the mental maps of many Americans, Africa is one of the largest. Informed by a number of misconceptions and popular myths, knowledge of the continent’s complexity is poorl...

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Hennie van Vuuren, "Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit(Hurst, 2019), Hennie van Vuuren examines the final decades of the apartheid regime in South Africa. He weaves together archival material,...

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Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunni...

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Kathleen Keller, "Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons,...

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Emma Hunter, "Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Histories of African nationalism and decolonization have often assumed that political ideas such as freedom and democracy were imported into African colonies and helped motivate Africans to seek th...

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Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

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Chet Van Duzer, "Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chet Van Duzer, an accomplished historian of cartography, trains his sight in this book on one uniquely important map produced in early modern Europe. The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has l...

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Susan Thomson, "Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? Susan Thomson's new book Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (Yale University Press, 2018) examines the postwar history of Rwanda to consider...

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Brannon D. Ingram, "Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its tr...

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Calvin Schermerhorn, "Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At this point, it is hard to fathom the shear volume of studies of American slavery that scholars have produced. And new works on American slavery are being published at a remarkable clip. As a res...

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Anne Garland Mahler, "From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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 gl...

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Jesse A. Zink, "Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism" (Baylor UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The most recent addition to Baylor University Press’s Studies in World Christianity is Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor U...

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Constance Smith, "Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging" (James Currey, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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?...

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Patrick Eisenlohr, "Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World(University of California Press, 2018) by Patrick Eisenlohr is an exciting ethnographic study of Mauritian Muslims’ sound...

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Beatrice Nicolini, "Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean" (Educatt, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Land 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 res...

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McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

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Ana Beatriz Ribeiro, "Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What 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 t...

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Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nov...

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Brandon Mills, "The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brandon 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 exp...

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Jonathon Earle, “Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse in...

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Steven Fabian, "Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Situated 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 diver...

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Joanna Davidson, “Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a book about change. The Jola, a people living in Guinea-Bissau, have l...

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Marissa J. Moorman, "Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marissa 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 i...

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Edward J. Watts, “Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny” (Basic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite enduring for nearly five centuries, the Roman Republic ended in a series of crises and wars that discredited the idea of republics in the West for centuries. In Mortal Republic: How Rome Fe...

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Antoinette Burton, "Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation" (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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 eme...

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Miranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Story” (Oneworld, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage ...

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Lia Paradis, "Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire" (I. B. Tauris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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 Ea...

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Ching Kwan Lee, “The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investmen...

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Oluwakemi M. Balogun, "Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even 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, a...

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Jill Kelly, “To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996” (Michigan State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Jill Kelly about her new book To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996 published by Michigan State University Press in 2018. Her book i...

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Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates th...

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Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition” (Fordham UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Ass...

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Anne K. Bang, "Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform" (Brill, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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 leader...

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Paul Bjerk, “Julius Nyerere” (Ohio University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful...

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Ned Bertz, "Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Space in Tanzania" (U Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 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 ...

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Laila Amine, “Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all st...

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Christopher J. Lee, "Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 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 wo...

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Nicholas Grant, “Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism an...

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Jeremy Martens, “Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907” (UWA Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018), Jeremy Martens, a senior lecturer in...

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Duane W. Roller, “Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and polit...

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Naomi André, “Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement” (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Naomi André’s innovative new book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is an example of a concept she calls “engaged musicology.” Positioning herself within...

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Pablo Gomez, “The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic” (UNC Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pablo Gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) examines the strategies by which health and spiritua...

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Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a ma...

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Jeff Koelher, “Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup” (Bloomsbury, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koe...

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Darcie Fontaine, “Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge Universit...

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Alden Young, “Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Telling the story of a former colony post-independence is tricky, no matter if it’s a colony in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia. Where does the idea of the ’nation’ slot in? Does it exi...

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Jeffrey Ahlman, “Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana” (Ohio University Press, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1957 Ghana achieved its independence from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. In Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017)...

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Kate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project...

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Nancy Mitchell, “Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Nancy Mitchell about her book Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War, published by Stanford University Press in 2016 as part of the Cold War International History Projec...

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John Nathaniel Clarke, “British Media and the Rwandan Genocide” (Routledge Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go be...

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Omina El Shakry, “The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Often, when writing the intellectual history of the Middle East, we make assumptions about the influence of ideas from other places on the Middle East itself. We assume what ideas are being adapted...

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Marie E. Berry, “War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Viol...

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Lisa A. Lindsay, “Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), invokes enduring family ties, as well as the con...

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Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global ...

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Katelyn Knox, “Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First-Century France” (Liverpool UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering ho...

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Sharla Fett, “Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Amistad Rebellion is usually remembered as the only instance in which a US court sent re-captured slaves back to Africa. Yet as Sharla Fett shows in her new book Recaptured Africans: Surviving ...

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Amy Bass, “One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together” (Hachette Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Amy Bass, author of the book One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together (Hachette Books, 2018). This is the fourth book for Bass, who is dir...

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Fahad Bishara, “A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Fahad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Bishara is Assistant Professor of ...

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George Paul Meiu, “Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money and Belonging in Kenya” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Professor George Paul Meiu‘s debut anthropological book, Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), dives into the commodification of cult...

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Sandra E. Greene, “Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition” (Indiana UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s podcast we talked to Dr. Sandra Greene about her book Slave Owners of West Africa. Decision Making in the Age of Abolition published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. In this book Dr....

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Nic Cheeseman, “Institutions and Democracy in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack ...

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Bonny Ibhawoh, “Human Rights in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Bonny Ibhawoh examines the discourse of human rights in Africa. He challenges some of the dominant narratives that focus ...

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John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activiti...

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Jennifer Hart, “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our guest today was Dr. Jennifer Hart who talked to us about her recently published book Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016). In th...

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Christopher J. Lee, “Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition” (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kimberly speaks with Dr. Christopher J. Lee about his newest book A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition (Lexington Books, 2017). A Soviet Journey was a travel memoir written by South Afric...

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Seth Markle, “A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974” (Michigan State UP, 2017). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked to Seth Markle about his book, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism 1964-1974, published by Michigan State University Press in...

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Kim Yi Dionne, “Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made i...

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Alexander Thurston, “Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Boko Haram is one of the most well known global terrorist organizations. They have killed thousands of people and displaced millions of West Africans. While widespread journalistic reporting on the...

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Claire Eldridge, “From Empire to Exile” (Manchester UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vi...

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Samuel Totten, “Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re...

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Herman Salton, “Dangerous Diplomacy: Bureaucracy, Power Politics and the Role of the UN Secretariat in Rwanda” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was in graduate school during Bosnia and Rwanda. Like everyone else, I watched the video footage and journalistic accounts that came from these two zones of atrocity. Like everyone else, I wonder...

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Randy M. Browne, “Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randy M. Browne in Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses the overlooked archives of the fiscal, a legal legacy from Dutch colonialism, and protect...

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Jessica Marglin, “Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press, 2016), Jessica Marglin skillfully narrates how Jews and Muslims navigated the complex and dynamic legal system of p...

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Michel Leiris, “Phantom Africa” (Seagull Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti empl...

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Hilary Matfess, “Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses” (Zed Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we talked with Hilary Matfess about her new book Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses, just recently published by Zed Books in 2017. Drawn from her extensive research an...

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Sowande Mustakeem, “Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage” (U. Illinois Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most scholars and members of the public believe the process of enslavement was confined to the Western Hemispheric plantation or other locations of enslavement. Sowande Mustakeem’s award-winning Sl...

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Marie Grace Brown, “Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much mor...

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Padraic Scanlan, “Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolutions” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revo...

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Stephane Robolin, “Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African Writing” (U. Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zo...

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Sara E. Brown, “Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks to Scott Straus, Leanne Fujii and others, we know quite a bit about how men behaved during the genocide in Rwanda. But we know surprisingly little about women’s actions during that crisis. ...

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Gregory Mann, “From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality” (Cambridge UP, 2014). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the e...

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Keren Weitzberg, “We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya” (Ohio UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and alien presence, w...

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Regine Jean-Charles, “Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary” (OSU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating ...

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Anne C. Bailey, “The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw and highly contested in public discourse...

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Joanna Dee Das, “Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford U...

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Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the d...

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Michael Barnett, “Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast marks the beginning of a new occasional series of podcasts about the genocide in Rwanda. In the next few months we’ll hear from Timothy Longman, Sara Brown, Erin Jessee and others. We...

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Adriana Helbig, “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration” (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musician...

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Ira Dworkin, “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, i...

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Patrick N. Hunt, “Hannibal” (Simon and Schuster, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the ba...

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Sarah Ladipo Manyika, “Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” (Cassava Republic Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press, 2016), is an excellent addition to the larger, and ever-expanding, genre of Nigerian literatu...

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Sarah Eltantawi, “Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution” (U. California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment. In her riveting ...

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Anita Hannig, “Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilit...

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Linda Heywood, “Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen” (Harvard University Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills as a diplomat, w...

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Grace Davie, “Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855-2005” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Poverty Knowledge in So...

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Bert Ingelaere, “Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seeking Justice After Genocide” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rwanda’s homegrown gacaca law has been widely hailed as a successful indigenous solution to the unprecedented problem of the country’s 1994 genocide. In his book Inside Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts: Seek...

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Brandon Kendhammer, “Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brandon Kendhammer takes a fresh approach to the juxtaposition of Islam and democracy in his latest book, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria (University ...

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Anuradha Chakravarty, “Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes,” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In my time doing this podcast, I’ve covered a number of books about transitional justice. All have been insightful and interesting. But few of them focused carefully on the trials themselves. Anur...

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Daniel Magaziner, “The Art of Life in South Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Africa. Rich in color...

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Telesphore Ngarambe, “Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law” (OSSREA, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming fr...

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Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken, “Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There were black Germans?” My students are always surprised to learn that there were and are a community of African immigrants and Afro-Germans that dates back to the nineteenth century (and some...

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Nathan Hofer, “The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, 1173-1325” (Edinburgh UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medieval Egypt had a rapid influx of Sufis, which has previously been explained through reactionary models of analysis. It was argued that the widespread popularity of Sufism was marked by a public...

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Toni Pressley-Sanon, “Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen” (McFarland, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zombifying a Nation: Race, Gender and the Haitian Loas on Screen (McFarland, 2016) dwells on the intersections of memory, history, and cultural production in both Africa and the African diaspora. T...

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Sylvester Johnson, “African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When and where do African American religions begin? Sylvester Johnson, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Northwestern University, disrupts the traditional tem...

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Noah Salomon, “For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In popular discourse today, few concepts are more sensationalized and maliciously caricatured than that of the Islamic State. In his fascinating new book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of ...

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Jean-Germain Gros, “Healthcare Policy in Africa” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rat...

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Susan Verde, “The Water Princess” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Supermodel Georgie Badiel grew up in a small village in Burkina Faso where the closest source of water was many miles from home. After launching her successful modeling career, she began to speak o...

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Carina E. Ray, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana” (Ohio UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and e...

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Ethan Katz, “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. ...

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Steve Kemper, “A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham” (W. W. Norton, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, wandering life of the man who later inspired th...

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Michael F. Robinson, “The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael F. Robinson‘s new book is such a pleasure to read, I cant even. It’s not just because you get to say Gambaragara over and over again if you read it aloud. (I recommend doing this, even if j...

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Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new b...

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Birgit Meyer, “Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video fi...

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Allison Drew, “We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria” (Manchester UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Allison Drew‘s We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester University Press, 2014) traces the long, complex history of communism in Algeria throughout the colonial period...

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Krista A. Thompson, “Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) is a gorgeous book. It’s about light and the practices of self representation in diasporic a...

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Elizabeth M. Williams, “The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa” (I. B. Tauris, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1951 a West-Indian seaman was killed in Cape Town by two white policemen. His murder had initiated protests and demonstrations in the Caribbean and in London. This, tells us Dr. Elizabeth M. Wil...

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Paul Bjerk, “Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Let’s begin with what Paul Bjerk’s new book isn’t: “a biography or evaluation of Julius Nyerere.” Instead, according to a letter that Bjerk sent me in advance of our interview, Building a Peaceful ...

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Alice J. Kang, “Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic ...

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspe...

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Marjorie Feld, “Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the parti...

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Kelly M. Duke Bryant, “Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914” (U of Wisconsin Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) questions and complicates the two dominant narratives of African colonial...

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Chike Jeffers, “Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Oursel...

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Gregory O’Malley, “Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807” (UNC Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1...

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Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. ...

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Zachariah Mampilly and Adam Branch, “Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change” (Zed Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zachariah Mampilly is the author along with Adam Branch of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Zed Press, 2015). Mampilly is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director...

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Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritu...

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Scott Straus, “Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa” (Cornell University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?” Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s n...

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James Zug, “The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper” (Michigan State UP, 2007) from 2008-06-27T01:57:01

Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren’t at all what they appear to have been in hindsight. James Zug‘s wonderfully written The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extra...

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James Zug, “The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper” (Michigan State UP, 2007) from 2008-06-27T01:57:01

Every so often I read a book that reminds me that things weren’t at all what they appear to have been in hindsight. James Zug‘s wonderfully written The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extra...

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Podcasts by New Books in African Studies

All episodes

On Bengt Sundkler's "Bantu Prophets in South Africa" from 2022-08-18T08:00

Pedro Machado, “Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Duncan, “Tales from a Muzungu” (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erskine Clarke, “By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Patrice Lumumba” (Ohio University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Schmidt, “Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Randy J. Sparks, “Where the Negroes Are Masters” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa L. Gezon, “Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective” (Left Coast Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Olufemi Taiwo, “Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto” (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement” (Syracuse University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ernest Harsch, “Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary” (Ohio UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Todd Cleveland, “Stones of Contention: A History of Africa’s Diamonds” (Ohio University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story” (Stanford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Deborah Mayersen, “On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined” (Berghahn Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What Do We Now Know About the Rwandan Genocide Twenty Years On? from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Samuel Totten, “Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan” (Transaction Publishers, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania” (NIP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Copnall, “A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts: Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce” (Hurst, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Thomson, “Whispering Truth to Power” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Machado, "Pearls, People, and Power: Pearling and Indian Ocean Worlds" (Ohio UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ian Foster, "Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas" (UP of Mississippi, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sean D. Murphy et al., “Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zakkiyah Imam Jackson, "Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (University of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Longair, "Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897-1964" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chima J. Korieh, "Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennie Burnet, “Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

S. Wynne-Jones and A. LaViolette, "The Swahili World" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria” (Cornell UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nadia Nurhussein, "Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chinua Thelwell, "Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lidwien Kapteijns, “Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elleni Centime Zeleke, "Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016" (Haymarket Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexis Wick, "The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John K. Thornton, “A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820” (Cambridge UP, 2012). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matthew S. Hopper, "Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann (editors), “Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space” (University of Michigan Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prita Meier, "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elizabeth Foster, “Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940” (Stanford University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

François-Xavier Fauvelle, "The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee Ann Fujii, “Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda” (Cornell UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephanie Newell, "Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Catherine Higgs, “Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa” (Ohio University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anais Angelo, "Power and the Presidency in Kenya: The Jomo Kenyatta Years" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Martin Plaut and Paul Holden, “Who Rules South Africa?” (Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Omar H. Ali, "Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jason Brownlee, “Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pernille Røge, "Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa c. 1750-1802" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb, “Religion and AIDS in Africa” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora" (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sandra Chait, “Seeking Salaam: Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jacob Mundy, "Libya" (Polity Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bruce Whitehouse, “Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, Belonging” (Indiana UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Steve Kemper, “Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa” (Norton, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the Mediterranean" (Little Brown, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nwando Achebe, “The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe” (Indiana University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Marie Johnson, "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, “Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hideaki Suzuki, "Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the 19th Century" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Harper, “Getting Somalia Wrong: Faith, War, and Hope in a Shattered State” (Zed Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oumar Ba, "States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Helen Tilley, “Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950” (University of Chicago, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zachary Valentine Wright, "Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the 18th-Century Muslim World" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Raymond Jonas, “The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ravi Palat, "The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650" (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Orla Ryan, “Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa” (Zed Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393