Research in International Studies, Africa Series

Waterhouses
Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos
By Mark Duerksen

How did Lagos, Nigeria, grow from a tiny island kingdom to a megalopolis famous for its frenetic and congested form of coastal urbanism? This first-of-its-kind history provides a comprehensive narrative for understanding one of Africa’s largest cities—its buoyant vibrancy and its two-headed problem of housing shortages and rising seas—today.

Architecture | Urban & Land Use Planning · History | Africa | West · Human Geography · Nigeria · African Studies

Power, Patronage, and the Local State in Ghana
By Barry Driscoll

This quantitative and qualitative account of Ghanaian development shows how closely fought elections drive subnational local state institutions to patronize party volunteers. Extrapolating from Ghana’s example, the author shows how locally salient varieties of patronage shape political competition in a variety of contexts.

Political Science | Political Process · Business & Economics | Development Studies · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · History | Africa | West · Ghana · African Studies

Afrofuturisms
Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
By Isaac Vincent Joslin

As a philosophical, literary, and visual aesthetic, Afrofuturism has been predominately defined through Anglophone, diasporic expressions. In Afrofuturisms Isaac Vincent Joslin reorients and expands this critical discourse toward colonial and postcolonial Francophone literature and film originating from continental Africa.

Literary Criticism, Africa · African Art · Literary Criticism | Science Fiction & Fantasy · Art | Film & Video · Africa · African Studies

Radical Utu
Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai
By Besi Brillian Muhonja

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Wangari Maathai is presented as a scholar whose contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges paralleled her renowned environmental activism.

Political Philosophy · Kenya · African Studies · Women’s Studies

Africa Every Day
Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent
Edited by Oluwakemi M. Balogun, Lisa Gilman, Melissa Graboyes, and Habib Iddrisu

Africa Every Day is a multidisciplinary and accessible counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on war, poverty, corruption, and other challenges on the continent. Essays address creative and dynamic elements of daily life without romanticizing them, showing that African leisure and popular culture are the product of dynamism and adaptation.

Popular Culture · Africa · African Studies · Customs, Traditions, and Everyday Life · African Literature

Making the Mark
Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
By Miroslava Prazak

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.In

Gender Studies · Anthropology · Women’s Studies · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · African Studies · Kenya

Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa
By Wayne Dooling

Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa examines the rural Cape Colony from the earliest days of Dutch colonial rule in the mid-seventeenth century to the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.For slaves and slave owners alike, incorporation into the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century brought fruits that were bittersweet.

African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · 17th century · 18th century · 19th century · South Africa · Khoisan · African Studies

Paths toward the Nation
Islam, Community, and Early Nationalist Mobilization in Eritrea, 1941–1961
By Joseph L. Venosa

In the early and mid-1940s, during the period of British wartime occupation, community and religious leaders in the former Italian colony of Eritrea engaged in a course of intellectual and political debate that marked the beginnings of a genuine national consciousness across the region.

African History · Nationalism · Islam · Religion · Eritrea · African Studies

African Video Movies and Global Desires
A Ghanaian History
By Carmela Garritano

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana’s commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production. Produced and consumed under circumstances of dire shortage and scarcity, African video movies narrate the desires and anxieties created by Africa’s incorporation into the global cultural economy.Drawing

Media Studies · Film and Video - History and Criticism · African Film · Media History · African Studies · Ghana · African Literature

African Intellectuals and Decolonization
Edited by Nicholas M. Creary

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West.As

African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · Social Science | Black Studies (Global)

Screening Morocco
Contemporary Film in a Changing Society
By Valérie K. Orlando

Since 1999 and the death of King Hassan II, Morocco has experienced adramatic social transformation. Encouraged by the more openly democraticclimate fostered by young King Mohammed VI, filmmakers have begunto explore the sociocultural and political debates of their country whilealso seeking to document the untold stories of a dark past.Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a ChangingSociety focuses on Moroccan films produced and distributedfrom 1999 to the present.Moroccan

Film and Video - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Morocco · African Film · African Studies · African Literature

The Twelve Best Books by African Women
Critical Readings
By Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan

The Twelve Best Books by African Women is a collection of critical essays on eleven works of fiction and one play, an important but belated affirmation of women writers on the continent and a first step toward establishing a recognized canon of African women’s literature.

Literary Collections | African · African Studies · African Literature

Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa
By Wayne Dooling

Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa examines the rural Cape Colony from the earliest days of Dutch colonial rule in the mid-seventeenth century to the outbreak of the South African War in 1899.For slaves and slave owners alike, incorporation into the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century brought fruits that were bittersweet.

African History · Slavery and Slave Trade · 17th century · 18th century · 19th century · South Africa · Khoisan · African Studies

The Sacred Door and Other Stories
Cameroon Folktales of the Beba
By Makuchi
· Foreword by Isidore Okpewho

The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native Cameroon.The

Legends, Myths, and Folk Tales · Literary Collections | African · Cameroon · African Studies · African Literature

Swahili beyond the Boundaries
Literature, Language, and Identity
By Alamin Mazrui

Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa’s lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Literary Collections | African · African Studies · Swahili

Empire in Africa
Angola and Its Neighbors
By David Birmingham

The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy.Empire

African History · Angola · African Studies

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough
Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community
By Mohamed Adhikari

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life.

African History · Race and Ethnicity · South Africa · African Studies · Apartheid