New Books In African Studies

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla negotiations of social demands, their expansion of ethnicity as an intersectional identity, and the experiences of Douglas within the diaspora outside the Caribbean. Through an examination of how Douglas experience their claim to multiracialism and how ethnic identity may be enforced or interrupted, the authors firmly situate this analysis in ongoing debates about multiracial identity. Based on interviews with over one hundred Douglas, Barratt and Ranjitsingh explore the multiple subjectivities Douglas express, confirm, chal

After the turn of the twentieth century, schools played a pivotal role in the construction of French West Africa. But as this dynamic, deeply researched study reveals, the expanding school system also became the site of escalating conflicts. As French authorities worked to develop truncated schools for colonial "subjects," many African students and young elites framed educational projects of their own. Weaving together a complex narrative and rich variety of voices, Harry Gamble explores the high stakes of colonial education. With the disruptions of World War II, contests soon took on new configurations. Seeking to forestall postwar challenges to colonial rule, French authorities showed a new willingness to envision broad reforms, in education as in other areas. Exploiting the new context of the Fourth Republic and the extension of citizenship, African politicians demanded an end to separate and inferior schools.  Harry Gamble's book Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order,

Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation (Ohio State UP, 2022), Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up "bad" women.  Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions--theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest--enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repai

Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. It illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. As the book shows, through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty. Dr. Miguel Valerio is assistant professor of Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a scholar of the African diaspora in the Iberian world and teaches courses in Afro-colonial culture and contemporary Afro-Latin American literature and culture. His research has focused on black Catholic brotherhoods or confraternities and Afro-creole festive practices in colo

In the middle of the twentieth century, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela organized a group of revolutionary freedom fighters to openly denounce the racist apartheid regime. Mandela and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) embarked on a dangerous, but revolutionary campaign of sabotage that fueled the burgeoning global anti-apartheid struggle.  In Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) Paul Landau explores the pivotal years that led up to the Rivonia trial in which Mandela was given a life sentence in prison while many of his comrades were either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Landau does this by exploring Mandela’s leadership role in MK as well as by highlighting the motives and actions of the people around him. Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know. Robrecus Toles is a Ph.D. student in the Departmen

Since the beginnings of independence, a number of African nations have been plagued by repeated coup d'états. Within the African Union (AU), there has been a concerted effort to break this cycle through the official adoption of an 'anti-coup norm', by which the AU is mandated to suspend a member state and restore constitutional order following a coup. Supporters of this stance see it as strengthening democracy in Africa, while critics argue that it has served to prop up existing regimes. But there has been little analysis of what the AU's attempts to 'restore constitutional order' have meant for individual African states. In Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar (Zed Books, 2020), Dr. Antonia Witt looks at the legacy of the AU's intervention in Madagascar following the 2009 'Malagasy crisis', one of the increasingly relevant yet under-researched cases of non-Western intervention in Africa. Dr. Witt looks at the ways in which international intervention reconfigured the polit

In the middle of the 20th century, there was a passionate affair, between the Soviet empire and newly independent West African states. It was a short, intense, and acrimonious love story built on shared dreams for a noncapitalist future. Alessandro Iandolo’s new book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell UP, 2022), explores the history of this unlikely romance. The book traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Union’s engagement with these three West African nations, which Iandolo argues were at the center of the Soviet search for development in the Third World. 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. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african

In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations. When Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Foundi

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are hugely influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. His legacy remains with us today, having inspired movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the US and South Africa. Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015) is a critical biography of his extraordinary life. Peter Hudis draws on the expanse of his life and work - from his upbringing in Martinique and early intellectual influences to his mature efforts to fuse psychoanalysis and philosophy and contributions to the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria - to counter the monolithic assumption that Fanon's contribution to modern thought is defined by the advocacy of violence. Mehdi Sanglaji is writing a PhD thesis on political violence, religion, and all that jazz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support

For most of human history, the Mediterranean was home to a significant number of pastoralists, who herded livestock along seasonal migratory routes. Today, traces of this pastoralist presence have all but disappeared. Dr. Andrea Duffy's book Nomad's Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the 19th-Century Mediterranean World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) seeks to answer the question - what caused the decline and retreat of Mediterranean pastoralism? Dr. Duffy explores the development of a French environmental policy which was centered around forestry and afforestation, and led to the targeting and demonization of pastoralists not only in France but throughout the Mediterranean world. In this episode, Dr. Duffy joins me to talk about pastoralism in 19th-century France, Algeria, and Anatolia, nomadism vs. transhumance, environmentalism past and present, and the legacies of pastoralism around the Mediterranean today.  Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more ab

Violent Islamic extremism is affecting a growing number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some, jihadi Salafi organizations have established home bases and turned into permanent security challengers. However, other countries have managed to prevent the formation or curb the spread of homegrown jihadi Salafi organizations. In Salafism and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Sebastian Elischer provides a comparative analysis of how different West and East African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. In doing so, he establishes a causal link between state-imposed organizational gatekeepers in the Islamic sphere and the absence of homegrown jihadi Salafism. Sebastian Elischer is an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. His research is focused on political Islam, violent extremism, and ethnicity, and democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation (Ca

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, raciali

The marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. In The Future of Black Studies (Pluto Press, 2022), Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black experience. Taking Marxism and Black Experientialism, Afro-Futurist and Diaspora frameworks, he projects a radical future for the discipline at this time of social crisis. Choosing cornerstones of culture, such as the music of Sun Ra, the movie Black Panther and the writer Octavia Butler, he looks at the trajectory of Black liberation thought since slavery, including new research on the rise in the comparative study of Black people all over the world. Turning to look at how digital tools enhance the study of the discipline, this book is a powerful read that will inform and inspire students and activists. Amanda Joyce

This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey is joined by Jason Stearns, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, who discusses how the Congolese government is invested in conflict on its territory. Stearns traces the current conflict back to the Belgian colonial heritage that created an ethnic disbalance in the population that was then exploited by the authoritarian leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, to maintain power. It later triggered the regional invasion of Congo in which the territory was divided between neighboring countries until the country was finally reunified in 2003. When former rebels lost power in a democratic process and tried to regain it through military means, neighboring countries scrambled to profit from extraction and influence. This left little incentive to put an end to the conflict, and forced the incumbent president to side with the military establishing a system of clientelistic networks in order to stay in power. Finally, Stearns comments on

The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Encounter and Social Change in the Great Lakes c.1865-1935 (James Currey, 2020) is a vivid portrayal of Kivebulaya's life that interrogates the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change under colonization, and the influence of emerging polities in the practice of Christian faiths. Apolo Kivebulaya was a practitioner of indigenous religion and a Muslim before he became in 1895 a Christian missionary from Buganda to Toro and Ituri. He is still admired as a churchman and missionary in the Anglican churches of Uganda, Congo, Tanzania and Kenya, and is a significant civic figure in school curricula in Uganda. This book provides insight into religious encounter in the Great Lakes region of Africa, in which individuals like Kivebulaya remade themselves through conversion to Christianity and re-ordered social relations through preaching a transnational religion which brought technological advantage. In re-examining Apolo's life the author reveals the historic social

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil.  Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques--black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)--in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this b

In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical frame through which to understand discourses of globalization: the so-called Chinese Atlantic. Elaborating on and complicating various Atlantic discourses (among them Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”), Metzger follows the flows of Chinese labor and capital throughout the Atlantic world, examining various media and aesthetic practices, among them documentary film, public art, and tai chi. As the title implies, Metzger’s book combines multiple disciplinary approaches, including, of course art history and performance studies, to chart the theatricality of seascapes across multiple Atlantic locales. To borrow one of Metzger’s own conceptual metaphors, the book “incorporates” histories and aesthetic genealogies from the Caribbean to the coasts of England and South Africa to propose new modes of apprehending globalization as it constituted through the movement of Chinese p

Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that radical efforts to transform the social and geopolitical order trigger intense counterrevolutionary conflict, which initially threatens regime survival, but ultimately fosters the unity and state-building that supports authoritarianism. Steven Levitsky is the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government at Harvard University. Lucan Way is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he co-directs the Petro Jacyk Program for the Stud

In this episode, I interview Prof. Stephanie Decker about her new book Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria (Routledge, 2022). Prof. Mick Rowlinson also joined the conversation about the book. British multinationals faced unprecedented challenges to their organizational legitimacy in the middle of the twentieth century as the European colonial empires were dismantled and institutional transformations changed colonial relationships in Africa and other parts of the world. This book investigates the political networking and internal organizational changes in five British multinationals (United Africa Company, John Holt & Co., Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, Bank of West Africa and Barclays Bank DCO). These firms were forced to adapt their strategies and operations to changing institutional environments in two English-speaking West African countries, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) and Nigeria, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. Decolonizatio