New Books in African Studies

Kathleen Keller’s new book, Colonial Suspects: Suspicion, Imperial Rule, and Colonial Society in Interwar French West Africa (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) is teeming with mysterious persons, foreigners, misfits, and the surveillance of numerous figures who appeared to threaten the stability of empire. In this detailed and compelling study of what the author has termed the “culture of suspicion” of the years between the world wars, readers are exposed to a range of colonial personalities, practices, and anxieties. Another great title in the University of Nebraska Press’s series, "France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization," the book is a history of intrigue in a distinct region of the French empire that was connected to a more global circulation of bodies and ideas in this period.Focused on suspects and surveillance in the port city of Dakar in Senegal, the book traces a variety of ways in which colonial authorities sought to suppress forms of political activity including communism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, black radicalism, and pan-Islamism. Reading carefully a set of sources generated by imperial administrators fearful of a rising resistance to French rule from different quarters, the book explores the attitudes and representations of authorities while pursuing the life stories and experiences of the suspects themselves. Offering readers a fascinating new account of a pivotal period in the history of French empire, Colonial Suspects makes exciting contributions to the historiographies of French West Africa, the interwar years, the movement of people and politics, as well as the study of imperial authority and the colonial imagination more broadly.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Histories of African nationalism and decolonization have often assumed that political ideas such as freedom and democracy were imported into African colonies and helped motivate Africans to seek their independence. Through an insightful reading of Swahili language press, Dr. Emma Hunter's new book Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania (Cambridge University Press, 2017) documents the emergence of a public sphere in Tanzania, which predated the nationalist period and allowed for a wide range of voices to debate ideas about political authority and society. Without losing sight of the transnational arena where many of these ideas were vigorously discussed, the book examines the diverse meanings that notions such as progress, democracy, representation and freedom acquired in local contexts. By doing so Dr. Hunter offers a longer and more complex history of political thought in Tanzania from the early twentieth century to the first decade after independence.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

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Chet Van Duzer, an accomplished historian of cartography, trains his sight in this book on one uniquely important map produced in early modern Europe. The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has long been deemed “an essentially unstudiable object,” its legends and descriptions illegible to the unaugmented eye. Now, aided by multispectral imaging technology — and a dogged team of technicians — Van Duzer has rendered Martellus legible and reproduced the map in vivid form, both in the pages of this book and, still more systematically, in an online space that accompanies the text. Van Duzer’s new book Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence (Springer, 2019) is both an example of and an articulate argument for the possibilities of multispectral imaging. In tracing the circuits by which Martellus came to inform subsequent geographic knowledge — as manifest in Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe, in Christopher Columbus’s own wager that the “New World” might become accessible to European eyes, and most profoundly in Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507, which first applied the name “America” in its modern sense — Van Duzer argues for a radically new understanding of this period in cartographic representation. Moreover, in considering Martellus’s own influences, which included inter alia African traditions of mapping the lands south of Egypt, he adds critical complexity to our understanding of how — and for how long — European and non-European geographic practices have been entwined. In its sources, its methodology, and its ultimate revisions to received narratives of cartographic priority, the book has the flavor of an early modern detective tale. It will reward scrutiny by a wide readership. 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 you put Humpty-Dumpty back together again?Susan Thomson's new book Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (Yale University Press, 2018) examines the postwar history of Rwanda to consider the ways the Rwandan genocide shaped governance, policy and memory in that country.  She begins by recounting what we now know about the genocide, revisiting older interpretations, revising some common assumptions and rethinking earlier arguments.  But most of her book is about the way the RPF understood the genocide and its causes and how that understanding shaped the choices Paul Kagame and his party made about governing Rwanda.Her conclusions are sobering.  The RPF, she argues, has governed in a way that divides Rwandans into victims and perpetrators, leaving no space for the complexities of real life.  In doing so, government policies have made it more difficult for individuals to mourn and for communities to wrestle seriously with what happened in their homes, hills and churches.  And, under the RPF, a sanitized, modernized Kigali has raced ahead while rural areas struggle.It's a carefully argued and well-supported critique.  Anyone considering the postwar history of Rwanda will have to wrestle with its claims.  And anyone interested more broadly in the aftermath of genocide will benefit from reading Thomson's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its transnational contemporary context in South Africa. Through careful analysis of historical textual discourses, Ingram carefully guides his readers through important polemics that manifested amongst the Deoband ‘ulama and its implications for Muslim publics and their performance of a “traditional” Islam. The study, then, goes onto highlight why and how the Deoband movement’s relationship to Sufism has been miscategorized and crucially situates the Deoband ‘ulama’s own complex relationship with Sufism, especially Sufi ethics and comportment. Overall, Ingram challenges his readers to think more carefully about Sufism in the 21st century. This book is a must read for those interested in Sufism, South Asian Islam, and global transnational Islam.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political restructuring in Dakar by focusing on the city’s complex history of garbage collection in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from activist clean-up movements to NGO-led development projects to massive sanitation worker strikes. She pays particular attention to the themes of generation, gender, and religion in her analysis of the ways in which people become integrated into the infrastructural life of the city; in so doing, she invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This fascinating book will be useful not only for anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of West Africa, but also for anyone interested in the emerging interdisciplinary fields of new materialism and discard studies.Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

At this point, it is hard to fathom the shear volume of studies of American slavery that scholars have produced. And new works on American slavery are being published at a remarkable clip. As a result, writing a new synthesis of this scholarship is a monumental feat.  Dr. Calvin Schermerhorn, however, has taken done the job, and wonderfully. His new book Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves the history of slavery into that of the United States from the founding of the nation to the Reconstruction era.Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The most recent addition to Baylor University Press’s Studies in World Christianity is Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Rise of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor UP, 2018), by Jesse A. Zink, who is among many other things principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College. Zink’s book is an outstanding account of the growth and evolution of Anglican Christianity among the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan. Zink traces the origins of the Anglican mission to the Dinka people, explains its early weakness, and documents its transformation after the expulsion from Sudan of foreign missionaries in 1964. As Dinka Christians took their faith back to their rural heartland, and as the church’s leaders began to tolerate the informal authority of prophetic figures, Anglicanism itself began to change. Zink’s extraordinary account describes multiple conversions – the conversion of Dinka people to Anglican religion, and their conversion of Anglican religion into the cultural forms that support the faith and practice of one of the fastest-growing churches in the region.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World(University of California Press, 2018) by Patrick Eisenlohr is an exciting ethnographic study of Mauritian Muslims’ soundscapes. Through the exploration of na‘t, or devotional poetic recitations that honor the prophet Muhammad, Eisenlohr captures the sensory dimension of Islam, particularly through a linguistic anthropological analysis of performance, poetry, and acoustics. The book situates Mauritian Muslim’ practices and devotions within the context of Islamic piety both across the Indian Ocean but also through a transnational and diasporic lens. In doing so, it highlights the sectarian differences that follow the performance of na‘t within the Muslim world, signaling to the intersubjectivity of Islamic piety. The study challenges scholars of Islam to take sonic atmospheres seriously, especially as it provides key insights into Islamic identity formation, piety, and ritual practices.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies