New Books in African Studies

In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a response. It is all we can do to pay attention to the present moment. Lingering on the consequences of the past seems to take too much of our finite attention. Jennie Burnet‘s fantastic new book Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), offers a useful corrective to this fascination with the immediate. Jennie is interested primarily in what it means to live in a society ruptured by violence. She writes about how people try to speak, or not speak, about the killing that destroyed their families or those of their neighbors. She reflects on how the government’s decision to try to forestall future violence by eliminating ethnic categories affects individuals’ efforts to shape their own identity and self-understanding. She analyzes the way practices of memorialization reflect changing ways of understanding and narrating past atrocities. And she allows her subjects to share the challenges of living in a world where the past is always present. Jennie, both in print and in the interview, is thoughtful, articulate and compassionate. I hope the interview gives you a taste of the richness of her book. Genocide Lives in Us won the 2013 Elliot Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology. It also received an honorable mention for the 2013 Melville J. Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So, when they attacked and subdued vast stretches of the world, they did so without regret or second-thought. All that changed after French Revolution. France was not, ostensibly at least, ruled by people whose business was war. Yet, even for the French republicans, imperialism remained attractive. And so the question was put: how does a republican state “do” imperialism? In her excellent book By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011), Jennifer Sessions tells us how with reference to the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. The answer the French gave was strikingly simple: you make you imperial subjects into citizens and your imperial territories part of the mother country. That was the theory, at least. Sessions shows us how it worked out–or didn’t work out–in practice. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nuclearity is a process, a phenomenon, a property distributed among and across objects. In this multi-sited study of several localities in Africa, Hecht weaves together narratives of atomic history, African history, and the histories of mining, economies, and health. Part I of the book looks carefully at the invention of a global market in uranium, exploring the place of African ores in a worldwide uranium trade in a series of accounts of the market and technopolitics in areas that include Niger, Gabon, Namibia, Europe, and the US. Part II focuses on the bodies and work of African mine workers and the production of nuclearity in the context of occupational health in locations that include Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa, and Namibia. Being Nuclear is grounded on several years of research extending across multiple media of historical evidence, including interviews, archives of very different sorts in different places, and experiences in underground mine shafts, haul pits, and other spaces of the story. It is a fascinating, transformative, and important study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Lidwien Kapteijns is author of Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). She is the Kendall/Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College. When the Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-1991) was expelled from Mogadishu in January 1991, the violence unleashed by competing political... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In 2010, for the first time, an African nation hosted the FIFA World Cup. The advertisements surrounding the tournament used graphics and sounds intended to conjure the image of a vibrant, exotic land. In fact, though, the African-ness of the South African World Cup was pretty thin, when not wholly fabricated. For example, the music that introduced ESPN’s World Cup coverage sounded very African, as it opened with the sounding of an ox horn (the promo showed a bare-chested tribesman blowing the horn atop a mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun) and then built with pulsing drums and a choir singing layered refrains. But the piece had been written by a composer from Utah, the musicians had recorded it in Utah, and the choir consisted of members of the Broadway cast of The Lion King. At least Shakira’s ubiquitous song “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” had a more substantial African connection. It had been lifted, initially without credit, from a Cameroonian military song made popular in the 1980s by the group Golden Sounds. The ironies of the 2010 tournament in South Africa are revealed in a number of essays in Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space (University of Michigan Press, 2013), edited by Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann. In the interview with Peter, we learn of the findings and observations of the volume’s contributors: an international collection of anthropologists, architectural critics, bloggers, geographers, sociologists, journalists, photographers, and former players who all attended matches in South Africa. They make sharp criticisms of class divides at the venues, the nationalism and commercialism, and, of course, the imperial reach of FIFA. But as we hear from Peter, the book’s authors were also fans. When mixing with other fans outside the stadiums, and then cheering their teams when the matches began, even normally skeptical academics and journalists were caught up in the event. Their experiences show that, for all its faults, the FIFA World Cup is still an incomparable event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in the colony from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of French rule and the significance of local agency in its various forms, Foster interrogates the relationship between metropole and colony while exploring a religious landscape in Senegal that included French, African, and metis Catholics; Muslims; and animists. The book’s chapters explore a variety of fascinating themes and events, from a scandal involving a nun accused of becoming pregnant in 1886, to the trial of an African accused of murdering a Wolof agent of the French empire, to the impact of the First World War and the Popular Front in colonial Senegal. Rethinking French republicanism, laicite, and assimilation in their colonial manifestations during the Third Republic, Faith in Empire has much to offer readers interested in debates about the imperial past and its legacies; historical and contemporary struggles over secularism; and the complicated relationship between religion and politics in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The question Lee Ann Fujii asks in her new book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) is a traditional one in genocide studies. Her research builds on earlier scholars such as Christopher Browning, James Waller and Scott Strauss. Her eye for nuances and for the complexities of local relationships allows her to extend this earlier research in helping us to understand why neighbors killed neighbors in Rwanda. However. The metaphor she uses to help illuminate her explanations is both new and remarkably insightful. She argues that genocide must be viewed as a script. This script has directors and producers. but it also has actors. And the actors, far away from the directors, are able to interpret the script in ways that makes genocide make sense to their own lives and circumstances. sometimes this leads them to kill more people than they had been ordered to kill. But sometimes it leads individuals to ignore or save people who logically should have been targeted, sometimes in startling ways. It gives individual actors the ability to alter the desired pace and nature of the killings. And, as Fujii says, it casts traditional categories of perpetrators, bystanders and victims into question. Fujii’s emphasis on genocide as process and on genocide as a script transformed the way I talk about mass killing. That makes this an important book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

With elegant and accessible prose, Catherine Higgs takes us on a journey in Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). It is a fascinating voyage fueled by the correspondence of Joseph Burtt, a man who had helped found a utopian commune before being sent by the chocolate magnate William Cadbury in the early 1900s to investigate labor conditions on cocoa plantations in Africa. For almost two years, Burtt observed and wrote and fevered his way to the large Portuguese colony of Angola, to Mozambique in Portuguese East Africa, and finally to Transvaal in British southern Africa. Higgs’s wonderfully evocative account uses Burtt’s journey to tell a much larger story about competing British and Portuguese colonial interests in Africa that was fueled, in part, by tensions over very different notions of “labor” and “slavery.” It is a story of the co-creation of two vital commodities of the twentieth century – chocolate and human beings – that invites readers into the hospitals, roads, ships, and plantations that were such crucial sites of negotiation over the basic components of a free human life. It is an engaging and assignable book built on archival work that will satisfy both academic historians and a general audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies