New Books in African Studies

In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Imam Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the racial logics of the so-called “Enlightenment,” past and present.Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020) breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo (NOW-LO) Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae (La-Hi), and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism.Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."Becoming Human is forthcoming as an audio book version in early January 2021. Keep an eye out if you prefer to listen to your new books!We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Reading the petitions that resident of colonial Nigeria submitted to the government during World War II, Marquette University historian, Prof. Chima J. Korieh found a unique source for African political voices as they renegotiated their status as something more than colonial subjects. What emerged was a wider social history of Nigeria during World War II. The colonial state intensified its attention to economic extraction, and many Nigerians responded positively because they believed in the British cause against Nazi Germany. But this societal contribution to the war, Nigerians then began to make broader claims for citizenship, self-determination, and independence.Prof. Korieh’s new book extends Frederick Cooper’s portrait of decolonization as a process centered on the restructuring of labor relations in African colonial societies. He argues that the colonial intensification of extractive policies pushed Nigerian society towards a new evaluation of its own status. The post-war period brought almost immediate demands for political reform from newspapers like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s West African Pilot that had been highly support of Britain during the war.Nigeria and World War II: Colonialism, Empire, and Global Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2020) offers a multi-faceted portrait of a society in flux, and adds to our understanding of World War II as a global experience.Chima J. Korieh is a professor of history and director of Africana Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Paul Bjerk is an associate professor of African history at Texas Tech University and the author of Building Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (Rochester University Press, 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

As one of the most monumental and recognisable landmarks from Zanzibar’s years as a British Protectorate, the distinctive domed building of the Zanzibar Museum (also known as the Beit al-Amani or Peace Memorial Museum) is widely known and familiar to Zanzibaris and visitors alike. Yet the complicated and compelling history behind its construction and collection has been overlooked by historians until now. Drawing on a rich and wide range of hitherto unexplored archival, photographic, architectural and material evidence, this book is the first serious investigation of this remarkable institution.Although the museum was not opened until 1925, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897-1964 (Routledge, 2015) traces the longer history of colonial display which culminated in the establishment of the Zanzibar Museum. It reveals the complexity of colonial knowledge production in the changing political context of the twentieth century British Empire and explores the broad spectrum of people from diverse communities who shaped its existence as staff, informants, collectors and teachers. Through vivid narratives involving people, objects and exhibits, this book exposes the fractures, contradictions and tensions in creating and maintaining a colonial museum, and casts light on the conflicted character of the ’colonial mission’ in eastern Africa.Sarah Longair a Senior Lecturer at the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln.Ali Bennett is a recent PhD graduate from UCL and postdoctoral fellow from the Paul Mellon Centre in London. Her research focuses on the material and visual histories of British colonialism in eastern Africa. She also has interests in global and colonial art and architecture, and the histories of collecting and museums. She can be reached by email at a.bennett.14@ucl.ac.uk or on Twitter @alibeenet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The Swahili World (Routledge, 2017) presents the fascinating story of a major world civilization, exploring the archaeology, history, linguistics, and anthropology of the eastern coast of Africa. It covers a 1,500-year sweep of history, from the first settlement of the coast to the complex urban and rural spaces found there today. This is the first volume to explore the Swahili coast in chronological perspective. Each chapter offers a unique wealth of detail on an aspect of the region’s past, written by leading scholars on the subject. The result is a book that allows both specialist and non-specialist readers to explore the diversity of coastal East African traditions, how Swahili society has changed over time, and how our understandings of the region have shifted since Swahili studies first began in the nineteenth.Scholars of the African continent will find the most nuanced and detailed consideration of Swahili culture, language, and history ever produced. For readers unfamiliar with the region or the people involved, the chapters here provide an ideal introduction to a new and wonderful geography, at the interface of Africa and the Indian Ocean world.Stephanie Wynne-Jones is deputy head and senior lecturer in the department of archaeology at the University of YorkAdria LaViolette is professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of anthropology at the University of Virginia Jenny Peruski is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on ornamentation and bodily adornment in coastal eastern Africa. She can be reached by email at jperuski@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In addition to battling poverty, malnutrition, and disease, African countries today find themselves also having to fend off the numerous perils of climate change. The African problem is unique— socioeconomic development is crucial, but that also shouldn’t come at the cost of environmental destruction.In this episode, Dr Robin Attfield, Professor Emeritus at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, talks about how Africa finds itself vulnerable to not only drought but also the flooding of its coastline, among other untoward environmental effects of climate change and civil war. And how it is in the best interest of African nations to develop in a climate-friendly manner.This discussion is based on his paper “Africa and Climate Change” published in Brill’s Utafiti: Journal of African Perspectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America (Princeton University Press, 2019), Nadia Nurhussein explores late nineteenth and twentieth century African American cultural engagement with and literary depictions of imperial Ethiopia. Widely celebrated as one of two African nations to resist European colonization in the age of modern imperialism, Ethiopia captured the attention of a host of African American journalists, artists, writers, adventurers, and even financiers. Drawing on an array of images, plays, and texts from well-known figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and George Schuler to lesser known figures such as Harry Foster Dean and William Henry Ellis, Nurhussein shows how some African Americans came to embrace and others later critiqued an imperial Ethiopia.This work provides an innovative approach to the study of Ethiopianism as more than a concept but a concrete place.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) by Dr. Chinua Thelwell is a rich, well-researched, and sobering investigation of blackface minstrelsy as the “visual bedrock of a transcolonial cultural imaginary.” In tracing minstrel globalization across the Anglo-colonial and British imperial worlds beginning in the 1800s, Thelwell explores the ways that blackface minstrelsy helped to construct and maintain notions of exclusionary citizenship in racial states throughout the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific Ocean worlds.Thelwell shows that the South African Cape Colony became the minstrel nexus of these globalizing performance circuits. Putting this history in conversation with ongoing white settler colonialism and attendant plunder, annexation, and resource extraction, Thelwell argues that minstrel performances discursively strengthened the economic, social, and political cornerstones of the South African racial state, a state that ultimately developed into an apartheid state in the twentieth century. Through archival research and close readings of cultural artifacts, Thelwell shows that minstrel performances reflected gendered and racialized white fantasies of idealized Black laborers in events that normalized practices of racially exclusionary citizenship and reinforced labor exploitation. Exporting Jim Crow also significantly investigates subversive forms of Black resistance to these anti-black racial projects. For example, Thelwell interrogates how African American minstrels and Cape Coloureds attempted to change the terms of minstrel performance by creating shows that celebrated their own cultures and broadcasted images of equal citizenship. An important and critical study, Exporting Jim Crow enriches scholarship on blackface minstrelsy, South Africa, empire and colonialism, racial capitalism, and performance studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Brill, 2019 and Haymarket Books, 2020 paperback) examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenization of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally.Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor of African Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in New York. Elleni was born in Ethiopia, and raised in Toronto, Guyana, and Barbados. Trained at the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University (Toronto), her research interests include vernacular politics in the Horn of Africa, Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, and the problem of constituting Africa as an object of study.Listen to Mahmoud Ahmed’s Tizita. And read the review roundtable on Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory, with contributions by Alden Young, Samar al-Bulushi, Adom Getachew, and Wendell Marsh.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in history at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists.Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history.Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, in The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space (University of California Press, 2016) he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian’s craft.Alexis Wick is Associate Professor of History at the American University of Beirut.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. 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 wide-ranging history of the African diaspora and slavery in Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Matthew S. Hopper examines the interconnected themes of enslavement, globalization, and empire and challenges previously held conventions regarding Middle Eastern slavery and British imperialism. Whereas conventional historiography regards the Indian Ocean slave trade as fundamentally different from its Atlantic counterpart, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale UP, 2015) argues that both systems were influenced by global economic forces. The author goes on to dispute the triumphalist antislavery narrative that attributes the end of the slave trade between East Africa and the Persian Gulf to the efforts of the British Royal Navy, arguing instead that Great Britain allowed the inhuman practice to continue because it was vital to the Gulf economy and therefore vital to British interests in the region.Hopper’s book links the personal stories of enslaved Africans to the impersonal global commodity chains their labor enabled, demonstrating how the growing demand for workers created by a global demand for Persian Gulf products compelled the enslavement of these people and their transportation to eastern Arabia. His provocative and deeply researched history fills a salient gap in the literature on the African diaspora.Dr. Matthew S. Hopper is a Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. His book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. In recent years, he has been conducting archival work in Mauritius, Cape Town and the Seychelles for a new book project on the history of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean world.Robyn Morse is a History Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia. Her research focus includes archival memory, slavery, and socio-economic history in the Middle East and Indian Ocean World. She can be reached by email at rmm9hf@virginia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies