New Books In African Studies

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 temporal and geographical boundaries in the academic study of black religion in the Americas in his new book, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Johnson places the productive forces in African American religion at the intersection of empire and colonialism and within the constructs of notions of democratic freedom. His study requires this analytical reformulation in order to examine how Black religious history unfolds within changing social and political contexts over the longue duree. In our conversation we discussed Afro-European commercialism, European views on Indigenous African religious practices, Black Christianization, violent state regulation, nineteenth century political theologies, Black settler colonialism and the creation of Liberi

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 Sudan’s Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2016), Noah Salomon, Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College, arrests the concept of the Islamic State away from its contemporary stereotypical life by offering a rich and dazzling account of state power and formation in the Sudan. Contesting recent arguments about the impossibility of an Islamic State, Salomon explores the social life of an attempted Islamic State in multiple and often unexpected locations of everyday life. What emerges from his brilliant and ferociously multilayered analysis is an account of the political irreducible to the structure of the nation-state, permeating varied discursive, institutional, and affective registers. In our conversation we talked about the idea of doing an ethnography of the state, colonial and NIF projects of ci

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 rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he means that policy should be decoded so its secrets can be laid bare, rather than treated as an impenetrable mystery. To this end, in the book, as well as in the interview, Gros uses a variety of methodological approaches to explain/explicate the relative roles of agency and institutions in the history of healthcare policy in Africa. The book’s central thesis is that healthcare policy does not take place in a vacuum and it fills an important gap in the scholarship by examining the impact of factors including debt relief, conflict, humanitarianism, brain drain and globalization on policy affecting and affected by the health and wealth of Africans. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu.

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 out about the vital importance clean water can have on a community, drawing on her personal experience to educate others. Author Susan Verde and New York Times bestselling illustrator Peter H. Reynolds were inspired by Georgie’s story, and together all three have crafted a poignant picture book called, The Water Princess (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2016). Perfect for classroom teaching and for bedtime reading, The Water Princess illustrates one girl’s dream of helping her community, while educating readers on this important global issue. A percentage of the proceeds are being donated to the Ryan’s Well Foundation and to the Georgie Badiel Foundation. Susan Verde writes children’s books and teaches kid’s yoga and mindfulness. She is also the author of the picture books The Museum, and You and Me, I Am

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 empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges the notion of identity and the politics that surround it. Ray plumbs the depth of an array of archival material, which includes travel narratives, visual sources, administrative records, wills, and personal and official correspondence. She also conducted interviews to further piece together the inner lives of Africans and Europeans to show how interracial marriages and relationships evolved in Ghana. In a very compelling way, Ray deconstructs intersexual economies to show their linkages to the slave trade and beyond. Her opening vignette not only sets the stage for the themes she addresses to illustrate how Africans had agency even when it came to marrying across the color line. Shortlisted for the United Kingdom’s Fage and Oliver Prize and the winner of the Amer

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. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of

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 the creation of the Boy Scouts. Tracking Burnham’s journeys from the American frontier all the way to Africa, Kemper vividly unpacks this story of this exciting life, setting it in historical context and analyzing its ambiguities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 just with that one word.) It’s not just because its a beautifully crafted work of prose. And it’s not just because its quite literally a page-turner. The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016) is also a masterful biography of an idea: the life story of the Hamitic hypothesis and its relationship to to the histories of exploration, science, ideas of human origins, and much much more. Robinson’s book opens with an account of reporter David Ker going to the London mansion of Henry Morton Stanley in 1885 to interview the man who was at that point the world’s most famous explorer. (As Robinson puts it, Stanley resided in London, but in truth he lived nowhere.) As the story unfolds we learn about Stanley’s encounter with the white race of Gambaragara

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 book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage. In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines how the banjo came into existence in the Americas and what it reveals about debates about American culture. Dubois book starts in Africa with a wide range of instruments that shaped the banjo. He then follows these instruments as they cross the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, winding up in the Caribbean and in North America. Sifting through travelers accounts and documents in archives, Dubois shows how the banjo brought together African peoples in the Americas, creating a familiar but new instrument and sound. He describes

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 filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Pentecostal Christianity on the other. More specifically, Sensational Movies shows the affinity between cinematic and Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this in depth account, more than two decades in the making, Meyer takes us into the nexus of imagination, imaginaries, and images in contemporary Ghana. Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support o

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. Rethinking the “narratives of failure” that have hitherto dominated studies of the Communist Party of Algeria (PCA), the book looks at the movement “on its own terms,” rather than as a mere political subsidiary of the French Communist Party (PCF). Examining the role of the French state in suppressing communism in Algeria prior to 1962, the book also looks closely at the tensions between communism and nationalism as the struggle for independence developed over the course of the twentieth century. Inclusive of both urban and rural populations, and flexible with respect to religious and nationalist beliefs and ideals, the PCA opened up “political space” in ways that other left movements/parties in France and elsewhere were either unwilling or unable to do. Drawing on a range of materials that include archival source

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 and Caribbean communities. Krista A. Thompson looks carefully and sees in the glittery surfaces of contemporary art, photographic and video practices in proms and dancehalls, and the visual culture of hip-hop the generative power of alternative modalities of being. Taking us to New Orleans, Jamaica, the Bahamas and on the global hip-hop circuit, this book engages with the discourses of art history and dissolves its Eurocentric bearings.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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. Williams, was the beginning of the international Anti-apartheid movement. In The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (I.B.Tauris, 2015), Williams marries two histories that are usually treated separately, the history of the British anti-apartheid movement (AAM) and the history of black activism in Britain to reveal a hidden history of black anti-apartheid activism in Britain. The book argues that black individuals rejected the AAM because it did not engage with domestic forms of racism and discrimination. The predominantly white constituency of the AAM as an organization, and its close ties to the African National Congress rather than the Pan Africanist Congress, added further discomfort. Williams ushers in evidence from a variety of published and unpu

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 Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (University of Rochester Press, 2015), “focuses on sovereignty and discursive agency as main interpretive lenses” of the peaceful course pursued by Nyerere and his colleagues before and after Tanzanian independence. Although Nyerere’s biography is not the focus of this book (during the interview Bjerk nonetheless tantalizingly alludes to a biographical project currently in the works), Nyerere’s formative exposure to British Utilitarianism, and the thought of John Stuart Mill in particular, is unquestionably fundamental to his vision of postcolonial statehood, including his unwavering belief in the one-party state. The central contention of Building a Peaceful Nation is that meaning-making is at the core of political activity, and th

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 studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Much attention is paid to Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, especially the contentious role of women’s rights in those countries. Less attention has been paid to Muslim democracies in Africa. Kang’s book focuses on the politics of women’s rights in one such country: Niger. Women’s rights activists in Niger have fought to participate in democratic governance, but haven’t won every recent battle. Kang highlights several successes as well as policy areas where women’s organizations have failed to win policy victories. The book has much to say about social movements and also the evolving way Muslim majority democracies grapple with human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! htt

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 perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities.  Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history. Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 particularist and universalist commitments many American Jews have felt in the battle against apartheid. For Feld, the post-war debates among American Jews about how to deal with injustice in South Africa later expanded when the term apartheid was used in other contexts. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Feld brings a global perspective to the story of the American Jewish past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 education, namely that colonial education was a tool of indoctrination and that its establishment was resisted by chiefs and other traditional power brokers because of its perceived threat to their authority. Author Kelly M. Duke Bryant challenges these interrelated narratives by using archival sources – mainly correspondence – to demonstrate the nuanced reasons for both the early resistance to and the later acquiescence to, French colonial education. Duke Bryant looks at the evolution of schooling throughout Senegal during the early colonial period, and at the School of Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters in particular, and concludes that “colonial education reshaped local political processes and hierarchies in important ways”.Education as Politicsserves as a backdrop to the election of Blaise Diagne, the first Africa

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 Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013), which he calls a “historic intervention in the debates about African philosophy.” The collection offers a balanced representation, along an east-west axis, of the continent, with essays in Luo, Gikuyu, Amharic, Igbo, Akan (also known as Twi), and Wolof. The dual-language format allows readers to see the text (including Ethiopic script) as written by the authors, with the English translation on the facing page. In this engaging interview, Chike Jeffers, editor of Listening to Ourselves, describes the genesis of the anthology and the project’s import for the expression and dissemination of African thought, going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksne

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, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014). Although most work on the topic focuses on the “Middle Passage” – the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean – O’Malley chronicles the “final passages” that many captives faced from the Caribbean to ports scattered throughout the Americas. A significant percentage of enslaved people faced these added voyages, which could often be more brutal and unhealthy than the Middle Passage. O’Malley traces the effect of the intercolonial trade on African captives, as well its influence on the creation of an enslaved culture in the Americas. He also examines in great detail how this intercolonial trade shaped the markets of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which in turn dramatically affected diplomatic relations between European power