New Books In African Studies

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 favorite trope of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who promoted his books and lectures by pushing the idea of Africa as a dark place – a phrase that had all kinds of meanings – racial, intellectual, geographical. Today I speak with Jeannette Eileen Jones, author of In Search of Brightest Africa, Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936 (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century. Jones is associate professor of history and ethnic studies at University of Nebraska Lincoln. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Cru

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 fortune. Some of these he had found, but ultimately he had found much more adversity than success. Ultimately, as Dannel Jones writes, he had spiraled downward on the social ladder, from barrister to worker in a munitions factory, from a satirist of the social order to a tuberculosis patient in a state hospital. This is the story she tells in An African in Imperial London: The Indomitable Life of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor (Hurst, 2018). It is a meticulously researched book about a man whose life, while it might be obscure, opens upon an interesting view. And like all good historical biography, it provokes us to think differently about the past and about ourselves–about our choices, our failures, our successes, and our luck. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Hi

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 about oceanic trade and exploration. But there is a lot to tell. Jane Hooper talks about Madagascar and its importance to the history of Indian Ocean trade and exploration. Hooper is the author of Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800, recently published by Ohio University Press (2017). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Supp

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 to virologists and epidemiologists, broke out in West Africa, infecting twenty-eight thousand people and killing eleven thousand. Stephan Bullard, associate professor of biology at the University of Hartford, discusses the 2013 outbreak which is the subject of his new book, A Day to Day Chronicle of the 2013-16 Ebola Outbreak, now out with Springer Press (2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about yo

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 in turn enslaved by those nations. As prisoners, their ransom and redemption became a form of commerce, which in a curious way created communication networks that brought together these different peoples. Captivity integrated the Mediterranean. That is in part the argument of today’s guest on Historically Thinking, Daniel Hershenzon, an Assistant Professor in the Literature, Cultures, and Languages Department at the University of Connecticut. His new book is The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). It’s a book that is the best possible kind of historical revisionism, challenging us to revise the way that we think about an “accepted past.” Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You

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 debates were recorded by an expanding political press, whose products were read and debated in London’s many coffee houses. The Enlightenment began in Scotland, and unleashed new ideas about natural law, natural rights, and the perfectibility of society that drove the great democratic revolutions. On the other hand, the eighteenth century was defined by the survival of the old. For some historians, power continued to be channelled through the institutions of the ancien regime: the monarchy, the Church and the aristocracy. But that world was changing. Public attention turned to other places, namely Britain’s expanding global empire that brought new goods, fresh ideas, and very diverse peoples into British consciousness. Ryan Hanley is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Research Associate in History at the Un

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 (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature

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 flurry of newspaper and radio remembrances of the events of April and May of 1994.  The number of book-length narratives was similarly small. Now Andrew Wallis has published a significant new survey of the origins and aftermath of the genocide. Stepp’d in Blood:  Akazu and the Architects of the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsis (Zero Books, 2019), engages the deep roots of the genocide.  Wallis argues that the decision to commit genocide emerged out of a political crisis.  Their power and wealth threatened by the emergence of a multi-party political process and an RPF invasion, a small group of politicians, governmental officials and family members around  Juvenal and Agathe Habyarimana resorted to massive violence in order to secure their positions.  While the violence targeted Tutsis especially, it was essentiall

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' new book An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun (Indiana University Press, 2018) provides a deeply empathetic portrait of rural life in Singida, in central Tanzania. Her study is both a memoir of rural life during a food shortage and a deeply insightful analysis of how subsistence farming and the ongoing threat of hunger structures relationships and politics. Phillips engages the work of prominent analysts of hunger and politics like James Scott, Amartya Sen, and James Ferguson, engaging their insights but also expanding upon them with her recognition of how people build and maintain relationships that protect them as they live in constant vulnerability or precarity. Her study illustrates how this precarity influences people's participation in Tanzania's society by m

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 Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblage

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 empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present?  Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains and racists to boot? If so University of Exeter Professor of History, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day has the very book that you are looking for, Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter Books, 2019). Professor Black, in his usual mandarin style, shows the reader how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today as well, and the selective manner in which certain countries are castigated or not castiga

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 Tropical Africa (Reprint edition; Cambridge University Press, 2016), James L. A. Webb explains the disproportionate impact that malaria has on the African continent by examining the evolution of parasites, vectors, and human hosts and the different attempts at controlling and eradicating the disease. The author investigates these histories in the context of colonialism, independence, population movement, demographic growth, economic development, urbanization and violent conflict. This book is a contribution to the emerging field of historical epidemiology and makes use of archival sources previously unavailable to historians. It offers important insights to historians of Africa, as well as to students of medicine and public health. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State Univer

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 poorly understood not just by ordinary citizens but by policymakers as well. This ignorance informs foreign relations with African states: as Maxine Waters once put it, when it came to the Rwandan Genocide, she couldn’t tell whether the Hutus or the Tutsis were right, and because of that she couldn’t tell anybody else what to do. Consequently, the drivers of foreign intervention in Africa are often ill-informed about local contexts, and this has driven a number of disastrous foreign interventions that have rarely fixed the problems they set out to resolve. In Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror (Ohio UP, 2018), Elizabeth Schmidt picks up where she left off in an earlier book and examines several different foreign interventions in Africa. Using a variety of

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 stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon

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, foreigners, misfits, and the surveillance of numerous figures who appeared to threaten the stability of empire. In this detailed and compelling study of what the author has termed the “culture of suspicion” of the years between the world wars, readers are exposed to a range of colonial personalities, practices, and anxieties. Another great title in the University of Nebraska Press’s series, "France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization," the book is a history of intrigue in a distinct region of the French empire that was connected to a more global circulation of bodies and ideas in this period. Focused on suspects and surveillance in the port city of Dakar in Senegal, the book traces a variety of ways in which colonial authorities sought to suppress forms of political activity including communism, pan-Afri

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 their independence. Through an insightful reading of Swahili language press, Dr. Emma Hunter's new book Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania (Cambridge University Press, 2017) documents the emergence of a public sphere in Tanzania, which predated the nationalist period and allowed for a wide range of voices to debate ideas about political authority and society. Without losing sight of the transnational arena where many of these ideas were vigorously discussed, the book examines the diverse meanings that notions such as progress, democracy, representation and freedom acquired in local contexts. By doing so Dr. Hunter offers a longer and more complex history of political thought in Tanzania from the early twentieth century to the first decade after independence. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Prof

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 contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

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 long been deemed “an essentially unstudiable object,” its legends and descriptions illegible to the unaugmented eye. Now, aided by multispectral imaging technology — and a dogged team of technicians — Van Duzer has rendered Martellus legible and reproduced the map in vivid form, both in the pages of this book and, still more systematically, in an online space that accompanies the text. Van Duzer’s new book Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence (Springer, 2019) is both an example of and an articulate argument for the possibilities of multispectral imaging. In tracing the circuits by which Martellus came to inform subsequent geographic knowledge — as manifest in Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe, in Christopher Columbus’s own wager that the “New World” might become acc

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 the ways the Rwandan genocide shaped governance, policy and memory in that country.  She begins by recounting what we now know about the genocide, revisiting older interpretations, revising some common assumptions and rethinking earlier arguments.  But most of her book is about the way the RPF understood the genocide and its causes and how that understanding shaped the choices Paul Kagame and his party made about governing Rwanda. Her conclusions are sobering.  The RPF, she argues, has governed in a way that divides Rwandans into victims and perpetrators, leaving no space for the complexities of real life.  In doing so, government policies have made it more difficult for individuals to mourn and for communities to wrestle seriously with what happened in their homes, hills and churches.  And, under the RPF, a saniti

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 transnational contemporary context in South Africa. Through careful analysis of historical textual discourses, Ingram carefully guides his readers through important polemics that manifested amongst the Deoband ‘ulama and its implications for Muslim publics and their performance of a “traditional” Islam. The study, then, goes onto highlight why and how the Deoband movement’s relationship to Sufism has been miscategorized and crucially situates the Deoband ‘ulama’s own complex relationship with Sufism, especially Sufi ethics and comportment. Overall, Ingram challenges his readers to think more carefully about Sufism in the 21st century. This book is a must read for those interested in Sufism, South Asian Islam, and global transnational Islam. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. H