New Books in African Studies

In To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide (Cornell UP, 2023), Jennie E. Burnet considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, Burnet highlights the ways that complex decisions and behaviors emerge in the social, political, and economic processes that constitute a genocide.To Save Heaven and Earth explores external factors, such as geography, local power dynamics, and genocide timelines, as well as the internal states of mind and motivations of those who effected rescues. Framed within the interdisciplinary scholarship of genocide studies and rooted in cultural anthropology methodologies, this book presents stories of heroism and of the good done amid the evil of a genocide that nearly annihilated Rwandan Tutsi and decimated the Hutu and Twa who were opposed to the slaughter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2008) is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in chilling detail a world nearly lost to history: the “floating dungeons” at the forefront of the birth of African American culture.Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. His “histories from below,” including The Slave Ship: A Human History, have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, and have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He has produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” with playwright Naomi Wallace. He is currently writing a book about escaping slavery by sea in antebellum America.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How has a Christian movement, founded at the turn of the twentieth century by the son of freed slaves, become the fastest-growing religion on Earth? This is the religion of the Holy Spirit, with believers directly experiencing God and His blessings: success for the mind, body, spirit, and wallet. Pentecostalism is a social movement. It serves impoverished people in Africa and Latin America and inspires anti-establishment leaders from Trump to Bolsonaro. It throws itself into culture wars and social media, offering meaning and community to the rootless and marginalised in a fragmenting world.Reporting this revolution from twelve countries and six US states, Elle Hardy weaves a timeless tale of miracles, money, and power, set in our volatile age of extremes. Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World (Hurst, 2022) exposes the Pentecostal agenda: not just saving souls but also transforming societies and controlling politics. These modern prophets, embedded in our institutions, have the cash and the influence to wage their holy war.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics? Beyond Piety and Politics: Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa (Indiana UP, 2022) provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories—religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist—and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution. They also reveal how intrafaith variation in political attitudes is not due simply to doctrinal differences but is also a product of the social aspects of religious association operating within political contexts.Sabri Ciftci is a professor of political science and Michael W. Suleiman Chair at Kansas State University. His research interests include Islam and democracy, Middle East, and Turkish foreign policy. Ciftci is the author of Islam, Justice, and Democracy (2021, Temple University Press) and co-author of Beyond Piety and Politics (2022, Indiana University Press). He has also widely published in journals like Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, Democratization, and Foreign Policy Analysis among others. When not researching or teaching, Ciftci likes to spend time with his family, hike, or draw Islamic calligraphy.Michael Wuthrich is an associate professor of political science and the associate director of the Center for Global and International Studies at the University of Kansas. In addition to co-authorship of Beyond Piety and Politics, he is the author of National Elections in Turkey: People Politics and the Party System and numerous journal articles. His research explores campaigns and elections in Turkey, institutions and politics in Iran, and populism, religion, and gender in politics comparatively in MENA and beyond.Ammar Shamaileh is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research interests primarily reside at the intersection of comparative non-democratic politics and political behavior. His current research focuses on autocratic ruling networks. He is the author of the book Trust and Terror and the coauthor of Beyond Piety and Politics. His work has appeared in Comparative Politics, International Interactions, Political Research Quarterly and Omran, among other journals.Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Stephanie Wolfe and Matthew Kane's In the Shadow of Genocide: Justice and Memory Within Rwanda (Routledge, 2023) brings together scholars and practitioners for a unique inter-disciplinary exploration of justice and memory within Rwanda. It explores the various strategies the state, civil society, and individuals have employed to come to terms with their past and shape their future. The main objective and focus is to explore broad and varied approaches to post-atrocity memory and justice through the work of those with direct experience with the genocide and its aftermath. This includes many Rwandan authors as well as scholars who have conducted fieldwork in Rwanda. By exploring the concepts of how justice and memory are understood the editors have compiled a book that combines disciplines, voices, and unique insights that are not generally found elsewhere.Including academics and practitioners of law, photographers, poets, members of Rwandan civil society, and Rwandan youth this book will appeal to scholars and students of political science, legal studies, French and francophone studies, African studies, genocide and post-conflict studies, development and healthcare, social work, education and library services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Sara Pugach's African Students in East Germany, 1949-1975 (U Michigan Press, 2022)explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history and the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a drive to offer development aid to newly independent countries and encourage them to side with either the United States or Soviet Union in the Cold War. African leaders recognized their significance to both Soviet and American blocs and played on the desire of each to bring newly independent nations into their folds.Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

On the Frontiers of the Indian Ocean World: A History of Lake Tanganyika, c.1830-1890 (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first interdisciplinary history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century. Philip Gooding deploys diverse source materials, including oral, climatological, anthropological, and archaeological sources, to ground interpretations of the better-known, European-authored archive in local epistemologies and understandings of the past. Gooding shows that Lake Tanganyika's shape, location, and distinctive lacustrine environment contributed to phenomena traditionally associated with the history of the wider Indian Ocean World being negotiated, contested, and re-imagined in particularly robust ways. He adds novel contributions to African and Indian Ocean histories of urbanism, the environment, spirituality, kinship, commerce, consumption, material culture, bondage, slavery, Islam, and capitalism. African peoples and environments are positioned as central to the histories of global economies, religions, and cultures.Philip Gooding is a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Ocean World Centre and a course Lecturer in the History and Classical Studies department at McGill University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at the Department of  History, University of London (SOAS) in 2017. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Laura Ann Twagira, an associate professor of history, head of African Studies, and an affiliate with science in society program and feminist gender sexuality studies program at Wesleyan University, talks about her book, Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Embodied Engineering examines how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule. Twagira charts how women in Mali resisted some technological changes in agriculture and kitchens while embracing others, often in the name of pursuing their own notions of how food should taste. Twagira and Vinsel also talk about the need to redefine concepts, such as engineering and technology, in different contexts, and how doing so challenges reigning paradigms, such as that the goal of technology adoption should be increasing productivity and replacing labor - two values that women in Mali rejected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to have vanished into thin air. Today, the Third World seems to be “a closed chapter in world history.” But my guests today are determined that it not remain so. In their new edited volume, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South, historians Gyan Prakash, Jeremy Adelman, and their collaborators argue that the multiple and overlapping projects of the Third World offer an alternative globalism to neoliberal globalization. Characterized, fundamentally, by the search for freedom from imperial domination, a focus on the Third World helps reframe our understanding of the second half of the twentieth century.Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Spencer Segalla’s Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 (U Nebraska Press, 2021) explores natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization and Cold War. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Spencer Segalla argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. Empire and Catastrophe will interest environmental historians, North Africa area studies specialists, and historians of France and French imperialism. Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954 is available open access online for no charge.Dr. Segalla, professor of history at the University of Tampa, completed his Ph.D. at Stonybrook in 2003. In addition to Empire and Catastrophe, he has published The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 with the University of Nebraska Press in 2009.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies