
Podcast

Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann inves…

Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and…

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subje…

Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw and highly contested in…

By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African D…

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he…

This podcast marks the beginning of a new occasional series of podcasts about the genocide in Rwanda. In the next few months we’ll hear from Timothy Longman, Sara Brown, Erin Jesse…

In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about h…

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with…

In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s…

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press, 2016), is an excellent addition to the larger, and ever-expanding, genre of…

Few images attached to Islam and to the Islamic legal tradition (the Sharia) in particular are more often and more disturbingly sensationalized than that of the stoning punishment.…

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula rep…

In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills…

Apartheid in South Africa formally ended in 1994, but the issue of poverty and what to do about it remained as contentious as it had been a century earlier. In the new book, Povert…

Rwanda’s homegrown gacaca law has been widely hailed as a successful indigenous solution to the unprecedented problem of the country’s 1994 genocide. In his book Inside Rwanda’s Ga…

Brandon Kendhammer takes a fresh approach to the juxtaposition of Islam and democracy in his latest book, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nig…

In my time doing this podcast, I’ve covered a number of books about transitional justice. All have been insightful and interesting. But few of them focused carefully on the trials…

Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Afri…

The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal…
