New Books in African Studies

In Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Marjorie Feld, associate professor of history at Babson College, explores the tension between the particularist and universalist commitments many American Jews have felt in the battle against apartheid. For Feld, the post-war debates among American Jews about how to deal with injustice in South Africa later expanded when the term apartheid was used in other contexts. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Feld brings a global perspective to the story of the American Jewish past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Education as Politics: Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s-1914 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) questions and complicates the two dominant narratives of African colonial education, namely that colonial education was a tool of indoctrination and that its establishment was resisted by chiefs and other traditional power brokers because of its perceived threat to their authority. Author Kelly M. Duke Bryant challenges these interrelated narratives by using archival sources – mainly correspondence – to demonstrate the nuanced reasons for both the early resistance to and the later acquiescence to, French colonial education. Duke Bryant looks at the evolution of schooling throughout Senegal during the early colonial period, and at the School of Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters in particular, and concludes that “colonial education reshaped local political processes and hierarchies in important ways”.Education as Politicsserves as a backdrop to the election of Blaise Diagne, the first African elected to the Assemble Nationale (French National Assembly) in 1914, and in the interview, Duke Bryant outlines the ways in which new forces mobilized by colonial schooling set the stage for this momentous event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who famously made the decision in the 1970s to henceforth only produce his creative work in his native Gikuyu, rather than in English, authors the foreword to Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2013), which he calls a “historic intervention in the debates about African philosophy.” The collection offers a balanced representation, along an east-west axis, of the continent, with essays in Luo, Gikuyu, Amharic, Igbo, Akan (also known as Twi), and Wolof. The dual-language format allows readers to see the text (including Ethiopic script) as written by the authors, with the English translation on the facing page. In this engaging interview, Chike Jeffers, editor of Listening to Ourselves, describes the genesis of the anthology and the project’s import for the expression and dissemination of African thought, going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2014). Although most work on the topic focuses on the “Middle Passage” – the shipping of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean – O’Malley chronicles the “final passages” that many captives faced from the Caribbean to ports scattered throughout the Americas. A significant percentage of enslaved people faced these added voyages, which could often be more brutal and unhealthy than the Middle Passage. O’Malley traces the effect of the intercolonial trade on African captives, as well its influence on the creation of an enslaved culture in the Americas. He also examines in great detail how this intercolonial trade shaped the markets of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which in turn dramatically affected diplomatic relations between European powers in the period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Kristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the “structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood.” It is a timely and fascinating study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Zachariah Mampilly is the author along with Adam Branch of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Zed Press, 2015). Mampilly is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College; Branch is assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University and a senior research fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, Uganda. Much of the Arab Spring took place in Africa, but little commentary connected those protests to the continent. In Africa Uprising, Mampilly and Branch unearth the connections between contemporary political protests in Africa and the long history of protest in various African countries. Building on the theoretical debates between Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon, Africa Uprising uses cases studies from Nigeria, Uganda, and Ethiopia to explain how the third wave of African protests have unfolded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism. While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to “rethink France,” the project here is, in the author’s own words, to “unthink France”. Indeed, France, decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interrogated in this work, as they were by the authors who are at the center of the project. Freedom Time is a book that takes seriously the futures envisioned by Casaire and Senghor, situating their projects historically and intellectually within contexts French and global, and considering the implications of their thought for a contemporary world still troubled by profound inequalities. It is an important book for those interested in the most urgent political questions, and in the problems and promises of freedoms past, present, and future. At the beginning of our interview, Gary mentions a video link I sent him before we spoke. It is a video of Lauryn Hill performing “Freedom Time,” a wonderful song that I was reminded of by this wonderful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?”  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn’t bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  The first is the problem of  the dog that didn’t bark.  The second is the fact that genocide studies often compares genocides that occurs in dramatically different contexts and cultures. The result is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking study.  It’s one that all genocide scholars will need to wrestle with.  And, with Straus a former journalist, non-specialists will find it readable and interesting as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and their role in the trade of textiles, ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean. The book not only enhances our understanding of an under researched pan-continental trade network but also, through its sensitive treatment of local markets as drivers of merchants’ patterns, pushes us to re-examine our understanding of trading networks themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Tales from a Muzungu (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) relates a Peace Corps Volunteer’s experiences living and working inUganda. Mixing keen observation, sensitivity, and insight with a mordant wit and sense of humor, Nicholas Duncan discusses the highs and lows of being a PCV in East Africa. Filled with moments of danger, absurdity, joy, and shock, Duncan’s book portrays the reality of what it is like to be aPeace Corps volunteer. The book should be read by all interested in development, and by those considering joining the Peace Corps. But the book is also much more. It is a story of whatDuncan’s Peace Corps experience tells us about the kinds of inventions sparked by cross-cultural dynamics: of the self, of Africa and Africans, and how these inventions shape our interconnected and globalized world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies