Podcast
New Books in African Studies
Episodes — page 4
- Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)
Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a different starting point? In Villag…
- Why Senegal’s Democracy Survived
In 2024, Senegal faced a severe constitutional and electoral crisis. The presidential vote was postponed, tensions escalated, and fears of democratic breakdown intensified. Yet dem…
- Wendy Wolford, "The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique" (U California Press, 2025)
Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social…
- Carl Death, "African Climate Futures" (Oxford UP, 2025)
This episode is brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. African Climate Futures (Oxford UP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined…
- Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982
In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on…
- Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)
Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longu…
- Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From its founding in 1893, to its d…
- Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022).…
- Todd Cleveland, "Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium" (Ohio UP, 2024)Trailer
At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any contin…
- Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With smal…
- Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the U…
- Nathan Munier, "Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
What happens when states experience a rapid increase in resource wealth? This book examines the significant diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, possibly the largest in over 1…
- Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (Bloomsbury, 2025) pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to in…
- Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)
Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (U California Press, 2025) traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent…
- Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (U Chicago Press, 2025) by Professor Toby Green tells the extraordinary story of…
- Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)
Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conceptual framework of the “Atlanti…
- Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tuni…
- Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023)
Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing longue durée national histories. Especially in the wake of the global history wave, national histories c…
- Charles G. Thomas, "Ujamaa's Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964-1979" (Ohio UP, 2024)
The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent…
- Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the p…
