New Books in African Studies

The companion publication to the 2019-2020 traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa (Princeton University Press, 2019, published in association with the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University) tells the story of how trade routes across the Saharan Desert facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and objects between the 8th and the 16th century. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, Caravans of Gold is a selection of chapters that reach across academic fields and genres of writing, seeking to evoke the exhibition’s central themes, including cultural movement, archaeological fragments, and global connection. We talk to the exhibition’s curator and the publications’s editor, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, about this expansive project. The conversation ranges from the exhibition’s conception, how the catalogue was designed in relation to it, and best practices associated with building a project like this one. Moreover, Kathleen details the major themes and questions associated with the exhibition. What is the “medieval”? How can we understand historical movements across the Sahara? How does religion –specifically, Islam– play a role in this project?Kathleen Bickford Berzock is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She is the author of For Hearth and Altar: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection and the coeditor of Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display.Exhibition Schedule:Aga Khan Museum, TorontoSeptember 21, 2019–February 23, 2020Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DCApril 8–November 29, 2020Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Miriam Driessen, author of 'Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia', discusses the bitterness and lack of support experienced by Chinese road builders in Ethiopia. She explores the varied experiences and aspirations of Chinese workers, the resistance and agency of African workers, and the complexities of Chinese presence in Africa. The podcast also delves into the role of local state courts in regulating Chinese presence and the day-to-day experiences on the ground in Ethiopia.

They were throwing garbage in the streets.Rosalind Fredericks makes sense of the garbage-scape of Dakar, Senegal in the wake of the 2007 trash “revolts” against the city and country’s uneven and failing garbage infrastructure—and puts into readers’ senses the smelly, sticky, full-sensory politics of waste management in the Global South.Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) brings together studies of infrastructure with scholarship on labor to make a case for understanding, not infrastructure and labor, but laboring bodies as infrastructure. The book breaths fresh life into the moribund concept of neoliberalism to show how civic care, like household care, fell unevenly in Dakar on the bodies of women, youths, and economically precarious workers. Their bodies carried the scars, as well as the stigma, of governments’ piecemeal moves over three decades to keep the labor force that was managing waste both flexible and disposable—at times devolving responsibility onto individuals and informal sectors in the name of modernity, community, and Islamic piety.Garbage Citizenship is based on Fredericks’ political ethnography of Senegal and the book includes vivid, beautiful photos of people, machines, and garbage laboring together—and, at times, collaborating in their refusal to be governed. (Just check out the cover image!) With workers always in mind, Fredericks makes space for hope, tells us where she is working now, and, in this generous interview, suggests how we can give breathing room to social justice, too.Fredericks is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University. The interview was conducted collaboratively by Laura Stark and students in her Vanderbilt seminar, History of Global Health: Emma Dahill, Savannah Larkin, Andrew Medland, Hailey Silver, Jesse Pullen, Gavin Yuan and Claudia Vial.For ideas and resources on how to include the New Books Network in your classroom, feel free to email Laura Stark at laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu or see Stark’s essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato's Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Everyday Life in an In-Between City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) is a book about home and not-home, eloquently told about the hopes and dreams, fears and hardships of migrant women trying to make life and livelihoods in inner city Johannesburg. The result is an honest, raw and poignant ethnography of life “in-between” home and away, urban and rural, local and global, of what mobility means to those who seek the security of home in an unwelcoming place.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

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (University of Chicago Press 2019) is a study of the kinds of experimentation and creative engagements that young men in the urban public spaces of Niger undertake when confronted with the precarity and boredom of unemployed adult life. “The sitting that kills the pants” as a reflection of the space of the fada seeks to present a counterpoint to the ‘crisis of youth’ that is widely discussed and regulated in the global south. Adeline M. Masquelier offers a compelling ethnography of the possibilities of the fada, a space where young men gather, faced with the anxiety of being ‘good at being a man’ (Herzfeld 1985). The fada becomes a productive site to establish regimes, friendships and alternate practices of self-realization through music and dance, drinking tea and making conversation, discussing and practicing romantic courtship, pursuing zigzag politics and cultivating sartorial choices. These solidarities and the possibilities which coalesce around it situate the fada with the resources to counteract the anxieties that the elderly have about the ‘inversion of the inter-generational contract’ (Roth 2008). It does so by providing a set of repertoires that make adulthood meaningful in the absence of employment and state support.Adeline joins us for a conversation about her book on the history of the fada as a masculine-urban space, the study of ‘generation’ as an analytic for the study of kinship and change particularly in the study of so-called traditional societies in Africa and its bearings on the current field of ‘youth studies’, the possibilities of heterosexual love and romance imagined homosocialy and the practice of a visual language in ethnography.Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

David Wheat’s fantastic book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) argues that the extensive participation of Luso-Africans, Latinized Africans, and free people of color made possible Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean. For Wheat, the history of the region is entangled with older and deeper histories of Atlantic Africa and the Iberian world. Particularly, Wheat focuses on events and precedents that took place in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa, two regions that experienced very different patterns of exchange, conquest, and enslavement. Such emphasis on connection and entanglement pushes our listeners to move away from narratives that have argued that Africans and their descendants were brought to the New World simply to “replace” the labor of extinguishing indigenous communities. Instead, Wheat asks us to focus on the specific roles that these forced migrants had in the colonization of important Caribbean ports such as Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Panama City, Santo Domingo and their semirural hinterlands. We thus learn about the existence of Nharas and Morenas Horras, black women that held social power and prestige. We also hear about black peasants, men and women that were the basis of agricultural production, and that occasionally found ways to move up the social ladder, even managing to become property owners. This is then a nuanced story that complicates seemingly straightforward concepts such as “settler” and “colonialist,” and that asks us to re-conceptualize this period as one of social mobility, in which racial hierarchies were less stark and somewhat more flexible. As Wheat tell us by the end of the interview, this deep past teaches us that identities can, and have been in the past, flexible and prone to transformation. This is of course an important lesson for the present for questions about identity are ever more pressing in contemporary political debates.Lisette Varón Caravajal is a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are written. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@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

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Rwanda and South Africa have some of the highest rates of women’s political representation in the world, with significant growth particularly in the last 20 years. Through interviews with eleven women who have held formal political leadership since 1994 in Rwanda and South Africa, Women Political Leaders in Rwanda and South Africa: Narratives of Triumph and Loss (Barbara Budrich, 2016) explores the ways in which life experiences, education, activism, and social and cultural identities have shaped the individual journeys and contributions of women in politics in the two countries and investigates role of women’s political representation in achieving social and economic progress in the aftermath of conflict. Author Naleli Morojele, Human Rights Officer at the South African Human Rights Commission and PhD candidate at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, presents an in-depth look at the challenges that women encounter as they navigate patriarchal power structures and gendered expectations in the legislature, the home, and society at large and balance conflicting political identities based on gender, race, and class as they work to effect change.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies