New Books In 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

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. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 198

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 of Africana Studies at Vassar College; Branch is assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University and a senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, Uganda. Much of the Arab Spring took place in Africa, but little commentary connected those protests to the continent. In Africa Uprising, Mampilly and Branch unearth the connections between contemporary political protests in Africa and the long history of protest in various African countries. Building on the theoretical debates between Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon, Africa Uprising uses cases studies from Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia to explain how the third wave of African protests have unfolded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! htt

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: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism. While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to “rethink France,” the project here is, in the author’s own words, to “unthink France”. Indeed, France, decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interrogated in this work, as they were by the authors who are at th

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 nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn’t bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  The first is the problem of  the d

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 their role in the trade of textiles, ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean. The book not only enhances our understanding of an under researched pan-continental trade network but also, through its sensitive treatment of local markets as drivers of merchants’ patterns, pushes us to re-examine our understanding of trading networks themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 sense of humor, Nicholas Duncan discusses the highs and lows of being a PCV in East Africa. Filled with moments of danger, absurdity, joy, and shock, Duncan’s book portrays the reality of what it is like to be aPeace Corps volunteer. The book should be read by all interested in development, and by those considering joining the Peace Corps. But the book is also much more. It is a story of whatDuncan’s Peace Corps experience tells us about the kinds of inventions sparked by cross-cultural dynamics: of the self, of Africa and Africans, and how these inventions shape our interconnected and globalized world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia. The impulse behind this program was philanthropic: to bring disadvantaged children living in crowded cities a better future by settling them in pristine, wide-open spaces, introducing them to nature, and letting them feel the sun on their backs. Yet the program was shot through with eugenic ideas and the racism of the age. British children were emissaries of the “kith and kin” empire, sent to “whiten” its outposts. But they could also be subject to repatriation–sometimes years after having been sent away in the first place–if their “racial fitness” was called into question. Race, nation, and identity form one of many themes Ellen Boucher examines in her fascinating, and sometimes painful, book Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the Br

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 practice during the decolonization of European empires in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an “intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments” (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive account of “Colonial

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 development of the port of Benguela. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of huma

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 they embarked on a nearly twenty-year adventure as Christian missionaries to two peoples in western Africa — the Grebo in Liberia, and the Mpongwe in present-day Gabon. Erskine Clarke‘s By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey (Basic Books, 2013) tells their story, but it also the tale of how profoundly different people in a globalizing world struggled, and sometimes succeeded, in reaching a common understanding. Even more than a model of Atlantic scholarship, By the Rivers of Water is a also a beautifully written study sure to engage readers interested in the exploding field of Atlantic history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Latour’s meaning of the word–as a material object that anticipates effects in specific settings. Cloatre follows the text from its consolidation in European meeting halls to its use in the former French and British colonies of Ghana and Djibouti. Pills for the Poorest is a significant ethnography of law and healthcare in Africa that shows precisely how this paper tool begat new buildings, relationships, experts, and, indeed, pills, but only in particular places, among certain people, and for particular kinds of pharmaceuticals. Cloatre is a broadly trained scholar and talented researcher who shows the power of Actor Net

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 meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise. Cold war geopolitical maneuvering and efforts by Lumumba’s domestic adversaries culminated in his assassination, with the support or at least tacit complicity of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the CIA, and the UN Secretariat. Georges Nzongola‘s concise book Patrice Lumumba (Ohio University Press, 2014) provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining his strengths and weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the n

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 the periods of decolonization (1956-75) and the Cold War (1945-91), as well as the periods of state collapse (1991-2001) and the “global war on terror” (2001-10). In the first two periods, the most significant intervention was intercontinental. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the former colonial powers entangled themselves in numerous African conflicts. During the period of state collapse, the most consequential interventions were intracontinental. African governments, sometimes assisted by powers outside the continent, supported warlords, dictators, and dissident movements in neighboring countries and fought for control of their neighbors’ resources. The global war on terror, like the Cold War, increased the foreign military presence on the African continent and generated external support for

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 (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions of people caught up in the trade who ended up toiling on plantations in the New World (or who never made it) were victims, but the figures Sparks details were hardly that. Instead, they skillfully parlayed their superior numbers, knowledge of local conditions, and control of a crucial commodity — people — to establish themselves as major players in this bloody commerce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives. Ask most people what they think of when they hear these words, and most often they will respond pictures of computers, the Internet, and mobile systems. But these pictures fail to encapsulate the true meanings of technology and innovation because they are narrow, and reflect bias toward the idea of the digital or information society. What’s needed is a broad view of technology and innovation that encompasses a wide variety of the ways that different communities solve problems. In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT 2014), Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, asserts that technological innovations are ways in which regular people solve the problems that they face in

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 International Service at American University. Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read. Learn more abou