New Books in African Studies

Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Duke University Press, 2014), Christopher J. Lee recovers the forgotten experiences of multiracial peoples in the British colonies of Nyasaland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia. By carefully reading fragmented correspondence, colonial reports, periodicals and oral testimonies, the author traces the development of Anglo-African, Euro-African and Eurafrican identities that complicated colonial concepts of native and non-native. In light of their ambiguous status, multiracial individuals were generally marginalized and lived in a legal limbo. This led them to redefine kinship ties and political allegiances with the goal of improving their economic and social prospects. Ultimately, the book questions the analytical categories inherited both from colonial and nationalist historiographies and argues that they obscure the social, cultural and intellectual diversity that informs what it means to be African.Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Over decades, the Yoruba community of southwest Nigeria has thrived as an inter-religious community, balancing Christianity, Islam, and the ways of a modern and secular globalized world.In this episode, Dr. Adeyemi Balogun, from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, explores the fabric of the Yoruba society in terms of the founding and development of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria, the impact of colonialism, and the transformation of Islam over the last 20 years. His discussion is based on his paper titled “‘When Knowledge is there, Other Things Follow’: The Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria and the Making of Yoruba Muslim Youths”, published in Brill’s Islamic Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Who built Africa’s cities? Going beyond the colonial archive and the planner’s gaze, David Morton’s Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique (Ohio University Press, 2019) describes the incremental process through which Maputo’s suburbios – popular neighborhoods outside the formally planned city – were built and occupied. Through key episode’s in Mozambique’s urban history – from colonial responses to migrant labor to independence-era responses to flooding, he interprets the routine forms of house construction as critical political acts through which ordinary residents of the city have inserted themselves into the city and concretized urban belonging. The materiality of different building materials are central this story. The risks and obstacles of constructing permanent, concrete, housing in the face of politically enforced urban impermanence an d ambiguous legal status kept the popular suburbios in suspension.David Morton talks to host Jacob Doherty about the ways that the built environment both reflects and shapes the changing aspirations and achievements of the city’s residents. Offering a critical contribution to the process of decolonization in African cities, Morton examines the racial and spatial effects of colonial Portugal’s officially race-blind ideology as well as the ambivalent anti-urban bias of the early FRELIMO regime.David Morton is an assistant professor of African History at the University of British Colombia. He has written about architectural and planning histories, Portuguese colonialism, informal settlements, housing, and citizenship, and decolonization.Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is a fascinating, densely researched account of dockworkers and their organized responses to seismic economic and technological changes in the shipping industry between the 1940s and 1970s. Peter Cole examines the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and San Francisco’s Local 10 from its desegregation through its involvement in local and regional civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles. In Durban, Cole shows how South African unionists’ used stay-aways and strikes to fight racial capitalism, ultimately setting off a wave of protest in the early 1970s, only a few years before the Soweto Uprisings.Dockworker Power is a refreshing mixture of two methodological approaches that situates the study of black internationalism among workers. Cole boosts our understanding of the radical tradition on the world’s docks by dexterously shifting between comparative and transnational analysis. This approach importantly reveals the global consequences of containerization on workers who tried to insulate themselves from the excesses of technological change. Cole’s book shows the significance of dockworkers as power-players in regional politics, the world economy, and transnational social movements, as they fought for, established, and wielded their collective power to secure their own prosperity and assist others in struggles near and far.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence was one of the last crises of formal imperialism. British settlers in present-day Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, refused to accept demands from London that they accept requirements for majority rule before they could receive independence. In 1965, they declared independence and attempted to establish their own state that would preserve white minority rule indefinitely. For the next fifteen years, the Rhodesian government fought to win international acceptance and stabilize its own internal affairs. While the country remained a pariah state internationally, it won friends and supporters as well. Meanwhile, the ongoing resentment over the denial of economic and political rights for the country’s black majority soon spiraled into a guerilla war, one that threatened to drag in the Soviet Union.Eddie Michel’s The White House and White Africa: Presidential Policy Toward Rhodesia During the UDI Era, 1965-1979 (Routledge, 2018) examines the complicated relationship between the United States and Rhodesia. Michel charts the complicated course that successive presidential administrations navigated, particularly in terms of bolstering support for the white minority government or inflaming the country’s civil war into a broader regional conflict. Michel also makes clear the differences between different administration, noting for example the quiet support provided to Salisbury by the Nixon Administration. Ultimately, the White House under Carter played an important role in the negotiations that ended the civil war and white minority rule, allowing an independent Zimbabwe to come into existence in 1980.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Rupert Lewis has written a biography of Marcus Garvey published by the University Press of the West Indies in 2018. His book Marcus Garvey documents the forging of Garvey’s remarkable vision of pan-Africanism and highlights his organizational skills in framing a response to the radical global popular upsurge following the First World War (1914–1918). Central to Garvey’s response was the development of organizations under the umbrella of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which garnered the transnational support of several million members and sympathizers and challenged white supremacist practices and ideas.Garvey established the ideological pillars of twentieth century pan-Africanism in promoting self-determination and self-reliance for Africa’s independence. Although Garvey travelled widely and lived abroad in New York and London, he spent his early years in Jamaica. Rupert Lewis traces how Garvey’s Jamaican formation shaped his life and thought and how he combated the British colonial authorities as well as fought deep-rooted self-doubt and self-rejection among Jamaican black people. Garvey’s much neglected political and cultural work at the local level is discussed as part of his project to stimulate self-determination in Africa and its diaspora.Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In 2015, University of Toronto professor Julie MacArthur decided to follow a couple more leads in the search for the long-missing, feared-lost transcript of the trial of legendary Mau Mau leader Dedan KImathi. She found herself amidst the papers of an anti-colonial London lawyer Ralph Millner who assisted the august barrister Dingle Foot in defending Kimathi before the Court of Appeals in colonial Kenya. There she found the full file of not only the appellate case, but the original trial as well, transcripts, exhibits, and police reports.The file showed that a dubious file of the trial transcript in the Kenyan National Archives to be a forgery, but its discovery prompted the release of further files in Kenya. This momentous discovery not only sheds light on this key figure in Kenyan history, and the trauma and the Mau Mau rebellion, but also unstable nature of archives and historical memory. Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Ohio University Press, 2017) not only reproduces the entire trial transcript, in all its original discordant glory, but a set of insightful essays by major scholars of Kenyan history and literary culture, including David Anderson, John Lonsdale, Nicholas Kariuki Githuku, Simon Gikandi, and Lotte Hughes. Her own introduction and a forward by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo provide a helpful framework for considering the meaning of this important artifact of Africa’s colonial interlude. For anyone in Kenya in February 2020, you can catch the launch of her book at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri on February 18 and at the United States International Univeristy of Africa in Nairobi on February 21. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. Jacobs is also the founder and editor of the acclaimed Africa is A Country website, a leader His new book Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization, published by Indiana University Press in 2019.In it, Jacobs makes a potent argument about the role of the media, in its many new and old forms, as an arbiter of belonging and citizenship in our information-saturated age. Using South Africa since the 1994 “transition” from Apartheid to democracy as his case study, Jacobs analysis demonstrates the importance of not only understanding an ever-changing media landscape as part of any study of politics, but also how the media shapes how public goods as made accessible to whom and how.Media in Postapartheid South Africa is also a study of how the processes and structures of colonialism mix with the discursive tricks of political elites during Apartheid and after 1994, and how the media shapes how South Africans see themselves, in advertising, soap operas and reality shows.Susan Thomson is associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies