New Books in African Studies

The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700 – 1850 (Ohio UP, 2024) examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa—from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone—through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. While much of the historiography of commerce in Africa in the eighteenth century has focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of western Africa's engagement with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters. Jody Benjamin is a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive. In broad terms, Prof. Benjamin's scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race to reshape how historians think about western Africa's role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. Dr. Benjamin's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. From 2022-2023, he was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness,” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Prior to Howard University, Dr. Benjamin taught at the University of California, Riverside. You can learn more about his work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. 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 the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, William Jennings, a senior lecturer in French at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and author of Dibia's World.: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation (Liverpool UP, 2023). William discusses the importance of names, voice and the community life of a hundred slaves on an early sugar plantation. Dibia's World follows the story of Dibia, an educated man in Africa, stolen across the sea and sold into slavery. He spent the rest of his life on a sugar plantation, where he worked with Agoüya, drank Aboré's rum, married Izabelle and had a son named Paul. This book tells the story of the community he lived in with a hundred others in a colonial outpost of the Caribbean. It depicts the everyday life of enslaved Africans and Native Americans in remarkable detail, showing their names, relationships, skills, health and interactions, as they contended with and resisted their enslavement. Most studies of plantation life examine well-established colonies in the century before abolition.  This work provides a counterpoint by depicting the founding population of an African-American community in the early years of the industrial sugar plantation complex. Drawing on a planter's manuscript, shipping records, missionary accounts and seventeenth-century scraps of paper, Dibia's World will appeal to specialists as well as general readers interested in the early Atlantic world, Creole societies, slavery and African-American 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

The African cities of Bata and Al-Hoceima were created during the Spanish colonial rule of Equatorial Guinea and Morocco. Spain's African Colonial Legacies: Morocco and Equatorial Guinea Compared (Brill, 2022) constructs their local history to analyse how Spanish colonialism worked, what its legacies were and the imprints it left on their national histories. The work explains the revision of collective memories of the past in the present as a form of decolonisation that seeks to build different foundations for the future in a transnational and glocal framework. The result is an exciting puzzle of individual and collective memories in which Africans contest their colonial cultural heritage and shape their identities at a global level. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country's most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine's chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine's members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country's largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. Alongside the Shrine's story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (FSG, 2024) offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future. The Black Utopians is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.  Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

An enthralling tour of the world's rarest and most endangered languages Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.  Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the stories of the world's rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity. Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices. She travels the globe—from Australia and Finland to India, the Canary Islands, Namibia, Scotland, and Paraguay—showing how these languages are not mere words and syntax but keepers of diverse worldviews, sites of ethnic conflict, and a means for finding surprising commonalities. Readers learn the basics of how various language systems work—with vowels and consonants, whistles and clicks, tonal inflections, or hand signs—and how this kaleidoscope of self-expression carries vital information about our planet, indigenous cultures and tradition, and the history and evolution of humankind. Rare Tongues is essential reading for anyone concerned about the preservation of endangered languages and an eloquent and disarmingly personal meditation on why the world's linguistic heritage is so fundamental to our shared experience—and why its loss should worry us all. Lorna Gibb is associate professor of creative writing and linguistics at the University of Stirling. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Christian mission in the modern era has generally been conceptualized as a Western endeavor: “from the West to the rest.” The rise and explosive growth of world Christianity has challenged this narrative, emphasizing Christian mission as “from everywhere to everywhere.” Dr. Las Newman contributes to this revitalized perspective, interrogating our understanding of modern missions history by drawing attention to the role of African West Indians in the spread of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. This comparative study of three nineteenth-century missionary expeditions critiques common narratives around West Indian involvement in the missionary enterprise. In To Die in Africa's Dust: West Indian Missionaries in Western Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Langham, 2024), Dr. Newman proposes that far from being misguided adventurers or nostalgic exiles, African West Indians were fueled by a quest for emancipation that was birthed in the crucible of Caribbean slave society. Acting as agents of the Western missionary enterprise, they nevertheless shaped an understanding of Christian mission as a force for justice and freedom that carried with it personal, religious, and socio-political implications. Dr. Newman argues that it was this conception, embraced and championed by African West Indians, that enabled the missionary project in Western Africa to survive, flourish, and ultimately take firm root in African soil. This study questions historical interpretations of the Western missionary endeavor, exploring the pivotal role of native agents in cross-cultural Christian mission and allowing readers to hear from marginalized voices as they tell their own stories of engagement, struggle, and liberation. Dave Broucek is a former mission worker in the West Indies and a mission educator and mission administrator. As a lifelong learner in the field of global mission, he values authors who tell the lesser-known stories of mission history and who provide critical reflection on the practice of Christian mission. He considers it a privilege to host authors such as Dr. Newman in a project to disseminate their work to a wider public. 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 Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2017), Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s. Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana's economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race. Bianca Murillo is a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is a historian of modern Africa, with research and teaching interests in global economies, decolonization, and race and gender studies. While her work focuses on twentieth-century Ghana, her research on international business and capitalism is comparative and transnational. Dr. Murillo has published articles in the journals Gender & History, Enterprise & Society, and Africa. Her current book project, Financing Africa's Future, is a history of debt, foreign investment, and fraud in Ghana's post-independence era. Recent writings featuring this research appear in Africa is a Country and History Workshop. Murillo's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program (U.S. Department of Education). She is an elected board member of the Business History Conference (Association) and has served as an elected committee member and committee chair for the American Historical Association. You can learn more about her work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. 150,000,000 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video. Learn how to make the most of our library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The World Was in Our Hands: Voices from the Boko Haram Conflict (Cassava Republic Press, 2025) is a moving, often provocative, and ultimately vital collection of first hand accounts of people living through the Boko Haram conflict. From abducted girls to brash soldiers, and from community leaders to simple fishermen, this collection provides an insight into the realities of those living through the conflict, making this an essential cultural archive. The World Was in Our Hands covers themes of patriarchy, the economy, climate change, and corruption, to paint a picture that is much broader than what has been captured through news coverage. Out April 22! Chitra Nagarajan is an activist, researcher and writer. She has spent the last 15 years working to analyse conflict, build peace, and promote and protect human rights, particularly in West Africa, and is involved in feminist, anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist and queer movements. She focuses on anti rights movements, civilian protection, climate, economic, gender, and racial justice, conflict analysis and sensitivity, and social inclusion. She is also the co-editor of She Called Me Woman: Nigeria's Queer Women Speak. Visit her website to learn more about her and her research, and for more information about upcoming publicity events for The World Was in Our Hands: Voices from the Boko Haram Conflict. Jessie Cohen is an editor at the New Books Network. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University 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 Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke UP, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg's former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present.  Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism's center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Freshly out from under French colonial rule in 1960, the West African nation of Dahomey (now Benin) became home to the largest number of coups d'état in history, earning the reputation of the “sick child of Africa.” Country politics eventually aligned with Marxist and socialist ideologies stimulating French opposition that resulted in mercenary intervention.  Opération Crevette: Benin, Mercenaries, and the Survival of a New State (Lexington Books, 2024) brings together the voices of the involved mercenaries, political rulers, and local witnesses to reveal a struggle for power in the former French colony. Opération Crevette was a mercenary operation which was intended to remove Benin's eleventh president from power in the 1970s. This book analyzes the political, social, and economic factors that led to this operation, as well as the foreign interference from nations like France and America. Les and Monique Sosnowski provide a unique perspective of international politics, exposing French instigated military intervention and the immense influence Western nations have played in shaping the Africa we know today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

African Literature and US Empire Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024) demonstrates how African literature grapples with the enforced optimism of US empire that circulates in postcolonial nations: Unsettles chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Brings together African literary studies, affect studies, and U.S. empire studies Diagnoses and critiques how U.S. empire is sustained through cycles of optimism and disappointment Includes chapters on both classic postcolonial fiction by writers such as Buchi Emecheta and Miriam Tlali and recent anglophone African novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ekow Duker Postcolonialism has long been associated with post-nationalism. Yet, the persistence of nation-oriented literatures from within the African postcolony and its diasporas registers how dreams of national becoming endure. In this fascinating new study, Hallemeier brings together African literary studies, affect studies and US empire studies, to challenge chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nigerian and South African writings in African Literature and US Empire, while often attuned to the trans- and extra- national, repeatedly scrutinize why visions of national exceptionalism, signified by a ‘pan-African' Nigeria and ‘new' South Africa, remain stubbornly affecting, despite decades of disillusionment with national governments beholden to a neocolonial global order. In these fictions, optimistic forms of nationalism cannot be reduced to easily critiqued state-sanctioned discourses of renewal and development. They are also circulated through experiences of embodied need, quotidian aspiration and transnational, pan-African relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

North Korea was an important player in the decolonisation of Africa. Freedom fighters across the continent received vital assistance from Pyongyang, and almost all southern African independence leaders travelled to the North Korean capital at some point, in search of support. This alliance has continued into the twenty-first century, with African postcolonial governments throwing a lifeline to Pyongyang's increasingly isolated economy by hiring North Korean companies, despite United Nations sanctions. In Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa (Hurst, 2025), Dr Tycho van der Hoog examines the relations between victorious southern African liberation movements and North Korea, from the 1960s to the present. He explains why African presidents sang and danced at parties in Pyongyang, and why North Korean books were translated into Swahili and Afrikaans. He reveals how African soldiers were trained in guerrilla warfare by North Korean instructors, and how North Korean labourers construct monuments in Africa in the shape of AK-47s. And he explores the question of how revolutionary regimes, motivated by a need for survival, work together to defy the global order. Based on extensive research across four continents—including recently disclosed African liberation archives and Korean diplomatic cables—this innovative study is the first book on African–North Korean relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy during and as a result of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama (1904-1908). It posits that Namibia, far from being a colonial backwater of the early 20th century, became highly integrated into the labor flows and economies of West and Southern Africa, and even for a time was one of the most sought-after regions for African migrants because of relatively high wages and numerous opportunities resulting from the war's demographic devastation paired with an economic frenzy following the discovery of diamonds.  In highlighting the life stories of migrants in Namibia from regions as diverse as the Kru coast of Liberia, the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and the Ovambo polities of Northern Namibia, this work integrates micro-history into larger African continental trends. Building off of written sources from migrants themselves and utilising the Namibian Worker Database constructed for this project, this book explores the lives of workers in early colonial Namibia in a way that has hereto not been attempted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa. Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the Congo Free State alike. Without men like him, Africa's history might have unfolded very differently. How did an ordinary son of a Washington bookseller become the agent of American corporate greed and European imperial ambition? Why did he choose to act in ways that ranged from thoughtless and amoral to criminal and unforgivable? With unblinking clarity and precision, historian Arwen P. Mohun interrogates the life and actions of her great-grandfather in American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa (Chicago UP, 2023). She seeks not to excuse the man known as Dorsey but to understand how individual ambition and imperial lust fueled each other, to catastrophic ends. Ultimately, she offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather's pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans. Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across modern South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found organizing ambitious culinary ventures for friends and family. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The Contemporary African Kitchen: Home Cooking Recipes from the Leading Chefs of Africa (Phaidon Press, 2024) is an elegant collection of 120 home cooking recipes from Africa's most​ exciting culinary voices today. Extensively researched and thoughtfully​ curated by James Beard Award winning chef, author, and restaurateur​ Alexander Smalls in collaboration with Dine Diaspora CEO Nina Oduro,​ this bold volume celebrates Africa's extraordinary gastronomic past and​ present across a breadth of dishes.​ Composed of 55 countries with more than 1.4 billion people, and​ 2,000-plus languages spoken, Africa is home to distinct and diverse​ culinary traditions.  The Contemporary African Kitchen centers Africa's​ multifaceted cuisine and, as Smalls writes in the introduction, seeks to​ bring it into the “contemporary, modern, and stunning realm, illustrated through a myriad of stories, images, and recipes, all of which highlight​ Africa's gifts to the world, through people and cuisine.” To accomplish​ this, Smalls and Oduro meticulously selected 33 of Africa's most​ innovative and influential figures working today, all of whom were born or​ raised across the continent or have demonstrated contributions across​ countries, among them: Sinoyolo Sifo, Matse Uwatse, Eric Adjepong,​ Rōze Traore, Mogau Seshoene, and Dieuveil Malonga. 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 Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2025), Dr. Philip A. Martin investigates a fundamental political challenge faced by post-conflict states: how to create obedient national militaries from the remnants of insurgent forces. When civil wars end, non-state armed groups often integrate into post-conflict militaries. Yet rebel-military integration does not always happen smoothly. In some cases, former rebels cooperate with new leaders, forming powerful national armies that underpin postwar stability. In others, they resist the authority of new leaders, maintaining clandestine armed networks that disrupt centralized state-building. Dr. Martin argues that how field commanders of non-state armed groups governed during the war explains this variation. Rebel commanders who build accountable governance systems gain strong social support from rebel-ruled communities, becoming locally embedded. Thanks to these community ties, which persist after the war, these embedded commanders have the leverage to push the central government for concessions, resist directives to disarm fighters, or even orchestrate coup d'états. Conversely, rebel commanders who governed coercively are less likely to sustain community ties. Without the ability to mobilize collective action after the war, these non-embedded commanders have stronger incentives to cooperate with new regime leaders. Wielding in-depth evidence from Côte d'Ivoire and cases of rebel-military integration elsewhere, Martin shows that good governance during wartime can—ironically—lead to poor postwar state consolidation. Rather than preparing insurgents to be successful state builders, effective rebel governance can hinder post-conflict state-building. As costly peace operations come under increasing scrutiny, Strong Commanders, Weak States offers fresh guidance on how transitions to peace can better succeed. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Today I talked to Kara Cooney about Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches (American U in Cairo Press, 2024). The book is a meticulous study of the social, economic, and religious significance of coffin reuse and development during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods, illustrated with over 900 images.  Funerary datasets are the chief source of social history in Egyptology, and the numerous tombs, coffins, Books of the Dead, and mummies of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties have not been fully utilized as social documents, mostly because the data of this time period is scattered and difficult to synthesize. This culmination of fifteen years of coffin study analyzes coffins and other funerary equipment of elites from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-second Dynasties to provide essential windows into social strategies and adaptations employed during the Bronze Age collapse and subsequent Iron Age reconsolidation. Many Twentieth to Twenty-second Dynasty coffins show evidence of reuse from other, older coffins, as well as obvious marks where gilding or inlay have been removed. Innovative vignettes painted onto coffin surfaces reflect new religious strategies and coping mechanisms within this time of crisis, while advances in mummification techniques reveal an Egyptian anxiety about long-term burial without coffins as a new style of stuffed and painted mummy was developed for the wealthy. It was in the context of necropolis insecurity, economic crisis, and group burial in reused and unpainted chambers that a complex, polychrome coffin style emerged. The first part of this book focuses on the theory and evidence of coffin reuse, contextualized within the social collapse that characterized the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties. The second part presents photo essays of annotated visual data for over sixty Egyptian coffins from the so-called Royal Caches, most of them from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Illustrated throughout with high-quality images, the line drawings and color and black-and-white photographs are ideal for careful study, especially evidenced in the digital edition, where pages can be enlarged for close examination. Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptology and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Specializing in social history, gender studies, and economies in the ancient world, she received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, she was co-curator of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her popular books include The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, and The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. Her latest academic book is Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches. Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector. 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 Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people's thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region's deeper past. Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History is available open access here. Rhiannon Stephens is a Professor of History at Columbia University who specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review. Rhiannon's current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University, M.A. in Climate & Society from Columbia University, and B.A. in Swahili & History from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. 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 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa. In The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Lindsay O'Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Dr. O'Neill also shows how the princes' experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police. War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Dr. Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked—but not reducible to—the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Dr. Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population. How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post-9/11 imperial warfare. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The road to Queen Elizabeth II's implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the throne. In Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans (Leuven UP, 2024), Raphael Chijioke Njoku examines Queen Elizabeth II's role in the African decolonization trajectories and the postcolonial state's quest for genuine political and economic liberation since 1947. By locating Elizabeth at the center of Anglophone Africa's independence agitations, the account harnesses the African interests to tease out the monarch's dilemma of complying with Whitehall's decolonization schemes while building an inclusive and unified Commonwealth in which Africans could play a vital role. Njoku argues that to gratify British lawmakers in her complex and marginal place within the British parliamentary system of conservative versus reformist, Elizabeth's contribution fell short of African nationalists' expectations on account of her silence and inaction during the African decolonization raptures. Yet ultimately, the author concludes, she helped build an inclusive and unified organization in which Africans could assert and appropriate political and economic autarky. Kanayo Nomeh, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, specializing in Africa's diaspora relations, superpowers and geopolitical rivalry, and African-China sociopolitical dynamics. 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 The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism. Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them. The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring. 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 Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 (Princeton UP, 2024), A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the fortunes of African entrepreneurs under colonial rule. Examining the lives and careers of 100 merchants in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1850 and 1931, Hopkins challenges conventional views of the contribution made by indigenous entrepreneurs to the long-run economic development of Nigeria. He argues that African merchants in Lagos not only survived, but were also responsible for key innovations in trade, construction, farming, and finance that are essential for understanding the development of Nigeria's economy. The book is based on a large, representative sample and covers a time span that traces mercantile fortunes over two and three generations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Hopkins shows that indigenous entrepreneurs were far more adventurous than expatriate firms. African merchants in Lagos pioneered motor vehicles, sewing machines, publishing, tanneries, and new types of internal trade. They founded the construction industry that built Lagos into a major port city, moved inland to start the cocoa-farming industry, and developed the finance sector that is still vital to Nigeria's economy. They also took the lead in changing single-owned businesses into limited liability companies, creating freehold property rights and promoting wage labour. In short, Hopkins argues, they were the capitalists who introduced the institutions of capitalism into Nigeria. The story of African merchants in Nigeria reminds us, he writes, that economic structures have no life of their own until they are animated by the actions of creative individuals. Thomas E Kingston is a Berkeley Fellow and PhD student at UC Berkeley where he works on histories of knowledge, empire and capital, in the context of colonialism in Asia. He is an Economic History Society Student Ambassador, the Editorial Director of the Association for Southeast Asian Studies and a passionate rugby player. His website can be found at www.thomasekingston.com 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 An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo (Duke UP, 2024), anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imagine and articulate alternative ways of living in a global regime of antiblackness. Rachel Marie Niehuus is an anthropologist and a surgeon currently on faculty in the Department of Surgery at University of North Carolina. Her next project continues this study of world-making through an analysis of the role of medicine in what might come after the world of Man. Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp's aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press, 2024) considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski's story of his years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, is narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. The story is told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home's residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison nurse, and readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds. Casey Golomski is an associate professor of anthropology and women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and lives in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois 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

Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment. For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely unavailable. Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment?  In Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg (Princeton UP, 2024), Benjamin Bradlow explores this question, examining the effectiveness of urban governance in two “megacities” in young democracies: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Both cities came out of periods of authoritarian rule with similarly high inequalities and similar policy priorities to lower them. And yet São Paulo has been far more successful than Johannesburg in improving access to basic urban goods. Bradlow examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped these outcomes. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in both cities, including interviews with informants from government agencies, political leadership, social movements, private developers, bus companies, and water and sanitation companies, Bradlow details the political and professional conflicts between and within movements, governments, private corporations, and political parties. He proposes a bold theoretical approach for a new global urban sociology that focuses on variations in the coordination of local governing power, arguing that the concepts of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” explain processes of change that bridge external social mobilization and the internal coordinating capacity of local government to implement policy changes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Utilizing Strategic Theory as a framework for warfare and incorporating the testimonies and experiences of eight genocide survivors as well as military personnel, Jonathan R. Beloff's The Strategy to End the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda: Understanding the War in Kigali (Lexington Books, 2025) examines the various tactics and operations used by the Rwandan Patriotic Army to provide critical insights into decision-making during the Rwandan Civil War and genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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 assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Thinking together the histories of European integration and African decolonization, Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era (Cornell University Press, 2022) is a pathbreaking study of how the two continents continued to make another's histories in the years after the Second World War. Tracking the ways that young people and education figured in plans for the future of both the French empire and of an integrated Europe, the book pursues archival traces and arguments that illuminate continuing debates about race, religion, inclusion, national, and transnational identities. Pursuing policies and programs aimed at French imperial reform and renewal alongside attempts to inculcate a sense of Europeanness in a new generation of transnational citizens, Marker's chapters examine the contours of a postwar vision of a united Europe understood as at once "colorblind" and white, secular and Christian. When African students made claims for greater equality, they faced a "postwar racial common sense" that pointed up the limits of French and African solidarity in an era of decolonization.  Drawing on an impressive body of research, Black France, White Europe will be of tremendous readers to scholars of France, Africa, and Europe. The book is a compelling history of the present that connects contemporary debates about race, religion, and belonging to a longer durée of national, transnational, imperial, and postcolonial worldmaking. I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation as much as I did! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes's works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author's compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa.  In Cervantine Blackness (Penn State UP, 2024), Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes's cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes's work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he's into called Love is the Message.  We're glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence's name from his great book on Arthur Russell. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and a prolific author. Tim and Jeremy have been longtime collaborators and when the clubs closed and universities cut faculty hours due to covid, they started podcasting.  The way I'd describe their show is, imagine the amazing college class you never got to take where you learn about the intersections of global dance music and radical politics, from the 1960s to today. They do shows on disco, Motown, reggae, tropicalia, funk, you name it with a strong cultural studies perspective. And I think the episode we're going to hear today is a perfect example of their approach—it's ostensibly an episode about Fela Kuti, but it's also terrific seminar on the Black Atlantic and the political history of Nigeria.  So thanks, Ben, for the recommendation. Thanks, Tim and Jem for sharing the pod with me and doing this episode swap. And thanks everyone for listening. Talk next month! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

By the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered “weapon of the weak” while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events. In Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved—they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities. Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts—British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas—bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Dr. Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period (Oxford UP, 2024) is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar years. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual and social change in the Muslim world, when ideas of Islamic progress and development were hotly debated. How did this process play out in Zanzibar? Based on a wide range of sources—Islamic and colonial, private and public—Anne K. Bang examines how these concepts were received and promoted on the island, arguing that a new ideal emerged in its intellectual arena: the Muslim modern. Tracing the influences that shaped the outlook of this new figure, Bang draws lines to Islamic modernists in the Middle East, to local Sufi teachings, and to the recently founded state of Saudi Arabia. She presents the activities of the Muslim modern in the colonial employment system, as a contributor to international debates, as an activist in the community, and more. She also explores the formation of numerous faith-based associations during this period, as well as the views of the Muslim modern on everything from funerary practices and Mawlid celebrations to reading habits. A recurring theme throughout is the question with which many Muslim moderns were confronted: who should implement development? And for whom? Anne K. Bang is Professor of African Islamic History at the University of Bergen. She has published widely on Islamic intellectual exchanges in the Indian Ocean, and particularly on East Africa. She has also led several projects to bring the scriptural sources of this history to wider attention. Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi is an Emirati historian who focuses on the intersection of occultism and imperialism in the Indian Ocean world. After completing his studies in cultural anthropology at Rutgers University as a Fulbright fellow, he pursued a PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His dissertation, An Enchanted Sea: Occultism and Imperialism in the Early Modern Indian Ocean World, 1450-1750, examines the connected histories of occult sciences and empire-building across Arabia, East Africa, and South Asia, told through intellectual projects that accompanied the rise of the Omani Yaʿrubī Empire and its diasporic communities. His recent work includes the article, “I Authored This Book in the Absence of My Slave: Enslaved East Africans and the Production of Occult Knowledge across the Omani Empire,” published in Monsoon Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Victim participation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has routinely been viewed as an empty promise of justice or mere spectacle for audiences in the Global North, providing little benefit for victims. Why, then, do people in Kenya and Uganda engage in justice processes that offer so little, so late? How and why do they become the court's victims and intermediaries, and what impact do these labels have on them?  Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a response to these poignant questions, demonstrating that the notion of ‘justice for victims' is not merely symbolic, expressive, or instrumental. On the contrary — as Leila Ullrich argues — the ICC's methods of victim engagement are productive, reproducing the Court as a relevant institution and transforming victims in the Global South into highly gendered and racialized labouring subjects. Challenging the Court's interplay with global capitalist relationships, the book makes visible the hidden labour of justice, and how it lures, disciplines, and blames both victims and victims' advocates. Drawing on critical theory, criminological analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, Kenya, and Uganda, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court illuminates how the drive to include victims as participants in international criminal justice proceedings also creates and disciplines them as blameworthy capitalist subjects. Yet, as victim workers learn to ‘stop crying', ‘be peaceful', ‘get married', ‘work hard', and ‘repay debt', they also begin to challenge the terms of global justice. Dr. Leila Ullrich is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law. Her research lies at the intersection of international criminal justice, transitional justice, victimology, and border criminology. Her work focuses on how global justice institutions construct gendered and racialized subjects and how these groups engage with or resist these processes. Outside academia, Leila worked as social stability analyst on the Syrian refugee crisis at the United Nations Development Programme in Lebanon and she has also worked as an intern for the ICC. She has also worked for the German Bundestag and the BBC World Service. Alex Batesmith is an Associate Professor in Legal Professions in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Kenny Cupers traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Dr. Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition. Dr. Cupers draws from both canonical and unknown sources and archives in Germany, Namibia, and Poland to situate Wilhelmine and Weimar design projects in an expansive discourse about the relationship between soil, settlement, and race. This reframing reveals connections between colonial officials planning agricultural hinterlands, garden designers proselytizing geopolitical theory, soil researchers turning to folklore, and Bauhaus architects designing modern communities according to functionalist principles. Ultimately, The Earth That Modernism Built shows how the conviction that we can design our way out of environmental crisis is bound to exploitative and divisive ways of inhabiting the earth. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

As climate crisis ensues, a transition away from fossil fuels becomes urgent. However, some renewable energy developments are propagating injustices such as landgrabs, colonial dispossession, and environmentally destructive practices. Changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help us ensure a globally just wind energy future. Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara (WVU Press, 2024) contributes to a fairer energy horizon by illuminating the role of imaginaries—how we understand energy sources such as wind and the meanings we attach to wind—in determining the wider politics, whether oppressive or just, associated with energy systems. This book turns to various cultures and communities across different time periods in Western Sahara to explore how wind imaginaries affect the development, management, and promotion of wind farms; the distribution of energy that wind farms produce; and, vitally, the type of politics mediated by all these elements combined. Highlighting the wind-fueled oppression of colonial energy systems, the book shows the potential offered by nomadic, Indigenous wind imaginaries for contributing to a fairer energy future. 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 this fascinating interview, Nathanael J. Homewood discusses his new book,Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Stanford University Press, 2024). Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary among the embodied, experiential gifts—a loud, messy, and noisy experience that ends only when the possessed body falls to the ground silent and docile, the evil spirits rendered powerless in the face of the holy spirit-wielding-prophets. And nowhere is Ghanaian Pentecostal obsession with demons more pronounced than with sexual demons. Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Demons are a knowledge regime, one that shapes how Pentecostals think about, engage with, and construct the cosmos. Deliverance Pentecostals reiterate and tarry with the demonic, especially sexually, as a realm of invention whereby alternative ways of being, sensing, and having sex are dreamed, practiced, and performed. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities. Nathanael Homewood is the Associate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. His areas of specialty are global Christianity, religion and sexuality, African religion, and Pentecostalism. He has earned a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, an M.Div in Global Christianity from Yale Divinity School, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Emanuela Trevisan Semi's Taamrat Emmanuel: An Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual, Between Colonized and Colonizers (Centro Primo Levi, 2018) is an insightful biographical study of a key figure among Ethiopian Jews of the early 20th Century. Taamrat Emmanuel was profoundly fascinated by European Jewish culture, by Western thought, and by Italy's language and customs. …His free spirit, his independence and critical thinking, his suspicion of power, his sarcasm, and his irony flowered and were nurtured during his years in Italy as a young man. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Press, 2024) grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.  Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions. Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism. 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 1918, South Africa's climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren't disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers' agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari's basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Dr. McKittrick's timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz's plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, Dr. McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies