New Books In African Studies

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936 (American Philosophical Society, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices. Aaron Spencer Fogleman is professor of history at Northern Illinois University. Robert Hanserd teaches African, Afro-Atlantic, and African-American history at Columbia College Chicago. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium memb

Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, Gediminas Lesutis' book The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering (Routledge, 2021) explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy. Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique, in the book Lesutis theorises how precarity unfolds as a spatially constituted condition of everyday life given over to the violence of capital. Going beyond labour relations, or governance of life in liberal democracies, that are typically explored in the literature on precarity, the book shows how dispossessed people are subjected to structural, symbolic, and direct modalities of violence; this simultaneously constitutes their suffering and ceaseless desire, however implausible, to be included into abstract space of ex

Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border policies are underpinned by unending wars. At this critical juncture, how can journalists, especially those engaged in foreign correspondence, tell these stories? How can they make connections across time and space, and across politics, economics, environments, and crucially, people? Given its colonial history, are these connections possible for the profession of foreign correspondence? In Borderland: Decolonising the Words of War (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. Chrisanthi Giotis argues that decolonization is possible and necessary for the development of a truly global, public sphere. New global narratives need to meaningfully include the voices, and k

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Yuval Katz discusses the book The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020) by Herman Wasserman. You’ll hear about: The ethical and methodological challenges of studying media in Africa; Why democratization is not a linear process; What tools journalists have at their disposal to support processes of democratization; Reflections on the professional conduct of journalists and what they can do to be more attentive to the needs of ordinary people; Why conflicts are not necessarily detrimental to democracy; Some tips and advice for early career scholars studying the Global South. About the book The book discusses the relationship between media, conflict, and democratization in Africa from the perspective of media ethics. Despite the commonly held view that conflict is a destructive political force that can destabilize democracies, the argument in this book is that while m

Authentic, harrowing, and inspirational, Survivors Uncensored contains more than 100 recollections of events narrated by those who lived through the tragic events when Rwanda turned to darkness. The diversity of experiences sets this book apart from what has already been written about the genocide and massacres in Rwanda and the great lakes region of Africa. These stories bring to light the experiences of both Rwandans and non-Rwandans before, during, and after the genocide of 1994 and contribute to truth-telling, restoring justice, emancipating participants and fostering lasting peace, all while inspiring the readers.  This collection of memories paves the way for a traumatized region to find a healing process and work toward a society where all the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity are known and held accountable for their actions. One of the lead authors Claude Gatebuke speaks abotu the collection, the process of creating it, and its meaning for surviviors. Christopher P. Davey is Visiting Assis

Some two thousand years ago, a group of Jews settled in Ethiopia and was for millennia cut off from the rest of world Jewry, preserving its heritage with great self-sacrifice. When this community, the Beta Israel, ultimately made its way to Israel to rejoin its brethren in the late twentieth century, a host of complex dilemmas emerged. Should the Beta Israel shed its venerated customs, based on ancient, pre-rabbinic Jewish law, and adopt the rabbinic halakhah of modern-day Jewry? Or is there a place for the unique legacy of the Ethiopian Jews within the umbrella of the wider Jewish community? Rabbi Shalom's startlingly original Shulhan ha-Orit delves into the history, customs, and law of the Beta Israel, codifying the ancient cultural heritage of Ethiopian Jewry for the first time and contrasting it with Orthodox rabbinic law. He offers suggestions for honoring Beta Israel tradition while fully participating in the greater Jewish community.  From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Eth

Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda explores how risks of gender-based violence against women, in particular, but also against men, persist despite and partly due to their settlement in the camp and the system established there. It reflects on modes and shortcomings of humanitarian protection, changes in gender relations, as well as strategies that the women and men use to cope with insecurities, everyday struggles, and structural problems occurring across different levels and temporalities. Ulrike Krause is Junior Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studie

"The world's future will depend on Africa having a good future." This week on International Horizons, Jack Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discusses the role of age and demographics of social movements in the twenty-first century. Goldstone speculates about the possibilities of regime change in China associated with the role of the youth and their discontent with governments that are losing performance legitimacy, and the possibilities for a slight rise in authoritarianism in India as the growth of the working-age population slows. Goldstone also suggests why Africa will be the great resource of youth for the entire world for the next 20 years, despite the fact that the talent of young Africans is being held back by government corruption and ineffectiveness. International Horizons is a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly exp

Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—forged in the crucible of imperialism—played as the "new nations" asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War. As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage's floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya’s Christian communities. Exploring the movements’ religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya (Baylor UP, 2020) highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically cha

In To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide (Cornell UP, 2023), Jennie E. Burnet considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, Burnet highlights the ways that complex decisions and behaviors emerge in the social, political, and economic processes that constitute a genocide. To Save Heaven and Earth explores external factors, such as geography, local power dynamics, and genocide timelines, as well as the internal states of mind and motivations of those who effected rescues. Framed within the interdisciplinary scholarship of genocide studies and rooted in cultural anthropology methodologies, this book presents stories of heroism and of the good done amid the evil of a genoci

In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2008) is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the “floating dungeons” at the forefront of the birth of African American culture. Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” with playwright Naomi Wallace. He is currently writing a b

How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit, and wallet. Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America and inspires anti-establishment leaders from Trump to Bolsonaro. It throws itself into culture wars and social media, offering meaning and community to the rootless and marginalised in a fragmenting world. Reporting this revolution from twelve countries and six US states, Elle Hardy weaves a timeless tale of miracles, money, and power, set in our volatile age of extremes. Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (Hurst, 2022) exposes the Pentecostal agenda: not just saving souls but also transforming societies and controlling politics. These modern prophets, embedded in our institutions, have the

How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana UP, 2022) provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories—religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist—and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution. They also reveal how intrafaith variation in political attitudes is not due simply to doctrinal differences but is also a product of the social aspects of religious association operating within political contexts. Sabri Ciftci is a profe

Stephanie Wolfe and Matthew Kane's In the Shadow of Genocide: Justice and Memory Within Rwanda (Routledge, 2023) brings together scholars and practitioners for a unique inter-disciplinary exploration of justice and memory within Rwanda. It explores the various strategies the state, civil society, and individuals have employed to come to terms with their past and shape their future. The main objective and focus is to explore broad and varied approaches to post-atrocity memory and justice through the work of those with direct experience with the genocide and its aftermath. This includes many Rwandan authors as well as scholars who have conducted fieldwork in Rwanda. By exploring the concepts of how justice and memory are understood the editors have compiled a book that combines disciplines, voices, and unique insights that are not generally found elsewhere. Including academics and practitioners of law, photographers, poets, members of Rwandan civil society, and Rwandan youth this book will appeal to scholars an

Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history and the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to ground interpretations of the better-known, European-authored archive in local epistemologies and understandings of the past. Gooding shows that Lake Tanganyika's shape, location, and distinctive lacustrine environment contributed to phenomena traditionally associated with the history of the wider Indian Ocean World being negotiated, contested, and re-imagined in particularly robust ways. He adds novel contributions to African and Indian Ocean histories of urbanism, the environment, spirituality, kinship, commerce, consumption, material culture, bondage, slavery, Islam, and capitalism. African peoples and environments ar

Laura Ann Twagira, an associate professor of history, head of African Studies, and an affiliate with science in society program and feminist gender sexuality studies program at Wesleyan University, talks about her book, Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Embodied Engineering examines how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule. Twagira charts how women in Mali resisted some technological changes in agriculture and kitchens while embracing others, often in the name of pursuing their own notions of how food should taste. Twagira and Vinsel also talk about the need to redefine concepts, such as engineering and technology, in different contexts, and how doing so challenges reigning paradigms, such as that the goal of technology adoption should be increasing productivity and replacing labor - two values that women in Mali rej

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, historians Gyan Prakash, Jeremy Adelman, and their collaborators argue that the multiple and overlapping projects of the Third World offer an alternative globalism to neoliberal globalization. Characterized, fundamentally, by the search for freedom from imperial domination, a focus on the Third World helps reframe our understanding of the second half of the twentieth century. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Cont

Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Spencer Segalla argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. E