New Books in African Studies
Episodes
Aomar Boum, "Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa" (Stanford UP, 2023)
26 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the lead-up to World War II, the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism in Europe foreshadowed Hitler's genocidal campaign against Jews. But the h...
Saskia Coenen Snyder, "A Brilliant Commodity: Diamonds and Jews in a Modern Setting" (Oxford UP, 2022)
25 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of ...
Christoph Kalter, "Postcolonial People: The Return from Africa and the Remaking of Portugal " (Cambridge UP, 2022)
23 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the space of a few months in 1975, more than 500,000 Portuguese settlers fled their homes in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tomé and Princ...
Philip Gooding, "Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Droughts, Floods, and Global Climatic Anomalies in the Indian Ocean World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores histories of droughts and floods in the...
Jonathan Adeyemi, "Contemporary Art from Nigeria in the Global Markets: Trending in the Margins" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
21 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How does the art market work? In Contemporary Art from Nigeria in the Global Markets: Trending in the Margins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Jonathan ...
Enrique Martino, "Touts: Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea" (de Gruyter, 2022)
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Touts: Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea (de Gruyter, 2022) is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor mar...
Algeria and France: Grievances and the Effects of Decolonialism
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI's director, John Torpey interviewed Laetitia Bucaille about the factors that explain variation in resen...
Nienke Boer, "The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World" (Duke UP, 2023)
16 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World (Duke University Press, 2023), Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary ...
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
10 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it sig...
Neil Ten Kortenaar, "Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021)
10 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the decade before and after independence, Nigerians not only adopted the novel but reinvented the genre. Nigerian novels imagined the new state, wi...
Brian Valente-Quinn, "Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
06 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: ...
Shanee Stepakoff, "Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone" (Bucknell UP, 2021)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Content note: This episode contains discussions of violence, including rape and mutilation Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes t...
Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U ...
Brahim El Guabli, "Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence" (Fordham UP, 2023)
30 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence (Fordham UP, 2023) investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are wr...
Yvan Yenda Ilunga, "Humanitarianism and Security: Trouble and Hope at the Heart of Africa" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
27 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Humanitarianism and Security: Trouble and Hope at the Heart of Africa (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) contends that the search for stability and peace re...
Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of ...
Thomas M. Lekan, "Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti" (Oxford UP, 2020)
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How did the Serengeti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari? In Our Gigan...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Islam and Blackness" (Oneworld Academic, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Bla...
Roni Mikel-Arieli, "Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948-1994)" (de Gruyter, 2022)
28 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Thro...
Anjan Sundaram, "Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime" (Catapult, 2023)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has written three books on African people and places: Democratic Republic of Congo in Stringer, Rw...
Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd, "Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936" (APS, 2022)
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd cata...
Gediminas Lesutis, "The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering" (Routledge, 2021)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Based on critical theory and ethnographic research, Gediminas Lesutis' book The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Sufferi...
Chrisanthi Giotis, "Borderland: Decolonizing the Words of War" (Oxford UP, 2022)
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Ribara Uwariraye et al., "Survivors Uncensored: 100+ Testimonies from Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide" (2022)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Authentic, harrowing, and inspirational, Survivors Uncensored contains more than 100 recollections of events narrated by those who lived through the...
Herman Wasserman, "The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Yuval Katz discusses the book The Ethics of Engage...
Sharon Shalom, "From Sinai to Ethiopia: The Halakhic and Conceptual World of the Ethiopian Jews" (Gefen Books, 2016)
08 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
Birth Rates and the Future of Social Movements: A Discussion with Jack Goldstone
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"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, ...
Ulrike Krause, "Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains dif...
Kyama M. Mugambi, "A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya" (Baylor UP, 2020)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken...
William Carruthers, "Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology" (Cornell UP, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—...
Jennie E. Burnet, "To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide" (Cornell UP, 2023)
04 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British...
Elle Hardy, "Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World" (Hurst, 2022)
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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? T...
Sabri Ciftci et al., "Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa" (Indiana UP, 2022)
27 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond...
Stephanie Wolfe and Matthew Kane, "In the Shadow of Genocide: Justice and Memory Within Rwanda" (Routledge, 2023)
22 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Stephanie Wolfe and Matthew Kane's In the Shadow of Genocide: Justice and Memory Within Rwanda (Routledge, 2023) brings together scholars and practi...
Sara Pugach, "African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, stu...
Philip Gooding, "On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
07 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Technology in 20th Century Mali
06 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Laura Ann Twagira, an associate professor of history, head of African Studies, and an affiliate with science in society program and feminist gender se...
Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman, "Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to ha...
Spencer D. Segalla, "Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
04 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebrask...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume tit...
Harry Gamble, "Contesting French West Africa: Battles Over Schools and the Colonial Order, 1900–1950" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After the turn of the twentieth century, schools played a pivotal role in the construction of French West Africa. But as this dynamic, deeply research...
Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Miguel Valerio, "Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
14 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens ...
Paul S. Landau, "Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries" (Ohio UP, 2022)
13 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the middle of the twentieth century, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela organized a group of revolutionary freedom fighters to openly denounce the rac...
Antonia Witt, "Undoing Coups: The African Union and Post-coup Intervention in Madagascar" (Zed Books, 2020)
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the beginnings of independence, a number of African nations have been plagued by repeated coup d'états. Within the African Union (AU), there ha...
Alessandro Iandolo, "Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968" (Cornell UP, 2022)
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
08 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Ri...
Peter Hudis, "Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades" (Pluto Press, 2015)
07 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and Th...
Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Mediterranean
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For most of human history, the Mediterranean was home to a significant number of pastoralists, who herded livestock along seasonal migratory routes. T...
Sebastian Elischer, "Salafism and Political Order in Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Violent Islamic extremism is affecting a growing number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some, jihadi Salafi organizations have established home...
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, "She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how d...
Abdul Alkalimat, "The Future of Black Studies" (Pluto Press, 2022)
29 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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-pu...
Involution and Negative Equilibrium: Explaining the Ongoing Conflict in the Congo
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey is joined by Jason Stearns, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Frase...
Emma Wild-Wood, "The Mission of Apolo Kivebulaya: Religious Encounter and Social Change in the Great Lakes C. 1865-1935" (James Currey, 2020)
25 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 K...
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy ...
Noémie Ndiaye, "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
21 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of ...
Sean Metzger, "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2020)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020), Sean Metzger proposes a new analytical f...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolutio...
Stephanie Decker, "Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History: British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria" (Routledge, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I interview Prof. Stephanie Decker about her new book Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History British Multinational Co...
Joanne Yao, "The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order" (Manchester UP, 2022)
14 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental ...
Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950" (Stanford UP, 2022)
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's book Wartime North Africa: A Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford UP, 2022), the first-ever collection of ...
Janet I. Lewis, "How Insurgency Begins: Rebel Group Formation in Uganda and Beyond" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How and why do rebel groups initially form? Prevailing scholarship has attributed the emergence of armed rebellion to the explosion of pre-mobilized p...
Ruti G. Teitel, "Transitional Justice" (Oxford UP, 2000)
04 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Societies that are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies face a daunting question: should they punish the rep...
Burleigh Hendrickson, "Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar" (Cornell UP, 2022)
03 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell UP, 2022) explores how activists in 1968 transformed university...
Henni Alava, "Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Henni Alava, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, on her fascinating new book published by Bloo...
Ryan Thomas Skinner, "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
29 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of...
Florian Köhler, "Space, Place and Identity: Wodaabe of Niger in the 21st Century" (Berhahn Book, 2020)
29 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Known as highly mobile cattle nomads, the Wodaabe in Niger are today increasingly engaged in a transformation process towards a more diversified livel...
Kwasi Konadu, "Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire" (Hurst, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kwasi Konadu's book Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire (Hurst, 2022) p...
Cajetan Iheka, "African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics" (Duke UP, 2021)
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside...
Dawne Y. Curry, "Social Justice at Apartheid's Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
21 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dawne Y. Curry’s Social Justice at Apartheid’s Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), wh...
Jan Selby et al., "Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What are the implications of climate change for twenty-first-century conflict and security? Rising temperatures, it is often said, will bring increase...
Cynthia Kros et al., "Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History" ( Wits UP, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Archives of Times Past: Conversations about South Africa’s Deep History (NYU Press, 2022) is an exploration of particular sources of evidence on so...
Abiodun Alao, "Rage and Carnage in the Name of God: Religious Violence in Nigeria" (Duke UP, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Rage and Carnage in the Name of God (Duke University Press, 2022), Dr. Abiodun Alao examines the emergence of a culture of religious violence in ...
Andrew Fitzmaurice, "King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century" (Princeton UP, 2021)
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian ...
Sarah Quesada, "The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Lati...
Michael Francis Laffan, "Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945" (Columbia UP, 2022)
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) tr...
Kwame Edwin Otu, "Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana" (U California Press, 2022)
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022) is an ethnogr...
Scott Bukatman, "Black Panther" (U Texas Press, 2022)
21 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Ye...
Thomas E. Burman et al., "The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650" (U California Press, 2022)
21 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the developmen...
Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic impl...
Camilla Hawthorne, "Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean" (Cornell UP, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an original study of Black politics a...
Anima Adjepong, "Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra" (UNC Press, 2021)
11 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian pra...
Saheed Aderinto, "Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria" (Ohio UP, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were ...
Robyn D'Avignon, "A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa" (Duke UP, 2022)
10 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of...
Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, "Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story" (Pluto Press, 2021)
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Colonialism persists in many African countries due to the continuation of imperial monetary policy. Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc St...
Monika Nalepa, "After Authoritarianism: Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Transitional justice – the act of reckoning with a former authoritarian regime after it has ceased to exist – has direct implications for democrat...
Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth ce...
NBN Classic: Tsega Etefa, "The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019)
02 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Are ethnic conflicts in Africa...
NBN Classic: Hennie van Vuuren, "Apartheid Guns and Money: A Tale of Profit" (Hurst, 2019)
01 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In his new book, Apartheid Gun...
Reeva Spector Simon, "The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II" (Routledge, 2019)
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Incorporating published and archival material, Reeva Spector Simon's book The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa: The Impact of World War II (...
Zachary Levenson, "Delivery As Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City" (Oxford UP, 2022)
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why ...
Peter J. Kalliney, "The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature" (Princeton UP, 2022)
26 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Litera...
Luke Messac, "No More to Spend: Neglect and the Construction of Scarcity in Malawi's History of Health Care" (Oxford UP, 2020)
23 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dismal spending on government health services is often considered a necessary consequence of a low per-capita GDP, but are poor patients in poor count...
Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the...
Olúfemi Táíwò, "Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously" (Hurst, 2022)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, o...
Martin Kalb, "Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa" (Berghahn, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and sufferi...
Adam A. Blackler, "An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered...
Mohamed Adhikari, "Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples" (Hackett, 2022)
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Dr. Mohamed Adhikari about his book Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022). "This book e...
L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster, "Sex in the Middle East and North Africa" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)
08 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster,'s edited volume Sex in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) examines the sexual practices, politic...