Podcast
New Books in African Studies
Episodes — page 28
- Ndubueze L. Mbah, "Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age" (Ohio UP, 2019)
In Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Ohio University Press, 2019), Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atl…
- April Sizemore-Barber, "Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the "Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world." This national rainbow notably extended beyond t…
- Andrew Farrand, "The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity" (New Degree Press, 2021)
"Algeria is different." Africa's largest country is a place that few western academics have studied or been able to travel to. The modern nation, forged in the anticolonial struggl…
- Anne Meng, "Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Why do weak autocrats create strong autocracies? Using game-theoretic logic and an analysis of the post-colonial experience of sub-Saharan Africa, Anne Meng shows that by creating…
- Ben Guest, "Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: A Namibian Odyssey" (2021)
Today I talked to Ben Guest about his new book Zen and the Art of Coaching Basketball: A Namibian Odyssey (2021). Pressure plays, buzzer-beaters, and mindfulness meditation: A team…
- Anna Hedlund, "Hutu Rebels: Exile Warriors in the Eastern Congo" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
In 1994, almost one million ethnic Tutsis were killed in the genocide in Rwanda. In the aftermath of the genocide, some of the top-echelon Hutu officers who had organized it fled R…
- Gregg Mitman, "Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia" (New Press, 2021)
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U…
- Max Siollun, "What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule" (Hurst, 2021)
In this ambitious book, Max Siollun provides an overview of Nigerian history from 1472 to the 1950s. As such, What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule (Hur…
- Cheikh Anta Babou, "The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making" (Ohio UP, 2021)
The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutio…
- Susanna Fioratta, "Global Nomads: An Ethnography of Migration, Islam, and Politics" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Countering the traditional narrative of "migration as crisis," Global Nomads tells the story of a group of people for whom migration is not a symptom of a disordered world, but rat…
- Sean Andrew Wempe, "Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford UP, 2019) reveals the various ways in which Colonial Germans attempted to cope with…
- Daniel Larsen, "Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek…
- Ousmane Oumar Kane, "Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts" (James Currey, 2021)
In 1937, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, travelling to Mecca to make his first hajj, encountered Egyptian scholars who couldn’t fathom that Niasse’s erudition was a product of his fully Sen…
- Ebenezer Obadare, "Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria" (Zed Books, 2018)
Throughout its history, Nigeria has been plagued by religious divisions. Tensions have only intensified since the restoration of democracy in 1999, with the divide between Christia…
- Danny Adeno Abebe, "From Africa To Zion" (Miskal, 2021)
In 1984, in an unprecedented act of brotherhood, Israel airlifted thousands of persecuted and starving Ethiopian Jews from Africa to Israel. They had been waiting in Ethiopia for m…
- Devaka Premawardhana, "Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the so-called explosion of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest…
- Aaron Y. Zelin, "Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad" (Columbia UP, 2020)
Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite…
- Sarah J. Zimmerman, "Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire" (Ohio UP, 2021)
Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage Wes…
- Leslie Anne Hadfield, "A Bold Profession: African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2021)
The first African nurse was certified in the Ciskei region of South Africa during the early decades of the twentieth century. Since then, African nurses have played a key role in t…
- Mai Hassan, "Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
When trying to understand how to help countries escape poverty, economists initially focused on macro topics like inflation, government deficits, trade balances, and capital inflow…
