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The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield
In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation-making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, thus offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.
African History · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Nationalism · Nigeria · African Studies
Finding Dr. Livingstone
A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archives
Edited by Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman
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Foreword by Guido Gryseels and Dominique Allard
In 1871, journalist Henry M. Stanley embarked on a search for the famous explorer Dr. David Livingstone. In 1872, Stanley returned with the story of how he had found Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika, restored his health, and resupplied his expedition. This collection of unpublished documents reveals how Stanley shaped the account of his journey.
Diaries and Journals · African History · Africa · African Studies · Biography, Adventurers and Explorers
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 · Human Geography · Customs, Traditions, and Everyday Life
The Politics of Disease Control
Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920
By Mari K. Webel
Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, Webel prioritizes local histories to understand the successes and failures of a widely used colonial public health intervention—the sleeping sickness camp—in dialogue with African strategies to mitigate illness and death in the past.
African History · History of Science · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Human Geography
Seeing Like a Citizen
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
By Kara Moskowitz
In focusing on rural Kenyans as they actively sought access to aid, Moskowitz offers new insights into the texture of political life in the decolonizing and early postcolonial world. Her account complicates our understanding of Kenyan experiences of independence, and the meaning and form of development.
African History · Economic Development · Colonialism and Decolonization · Kenya · African Studies
Emergent Masculinities
Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age
By Ndubueze L. Mbah
Atlanticization—or interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade and Christianization—from 1750 to 1920 transformed gender into a primary mode of social differentiation in the Bight of Biafra. Mbah examines this process to fill a major gap in our understanding of gender’s role in precolonial Africa.
African History · Gender Studies · African Studies · Igbo · Slavery and Slave Trade · Western Africa · Atlantic Studies
Powerful Frequencies
Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002
By Marissa J. Moorman
Radio technology and broadcasting played a central role in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. Moorman details how settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire.
Age of Concrete
Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
By David Morton
Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.
African History · Human Geography · Urban History · Mozambique · African Studies · Urban Planning
Converging on Cannibals
Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670
By Jared Staller
In Converging on Cannibals, Jared Staller demonstrates that one of the most terrifying discourses used during the era of transatlantic slaving—cannibalism—was coproduced by Europeans and Africans. When these people from vastly different cultures first came into contact, they shared a fear of potential cannibals. Some Africans and European slavers allowed these rumors of themselves as man-eaters to stand unchallenged.
African History · African Studies · Atlantic Studies · Slavery and Slave Trade
Children of Hope
The Odyssey of the Oromo Slaves from Ethiopia to South Africa
By Sandra Rowoldt Shell
In Children of Hope, Sandra Rowoldt Shell details the life histories of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia in the late nineteenth century, liberated by the British navy, and ultimately sent to a Free Church of Scotland mission in South Africa, where their stories were recorded through a series of interviews.
African History · African Studies · Eastern Africa · Slavery and Slave Trade · Childhood · Children's Studies
Amílcar Cabral
A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary
By Peter Karibe Mendy
Amílcar Cabral’s charismatic and visionary leadership, his pan-Africanist solidarity and internationalist commitment to “every just cause in the world,” remain relevant to contemporary struggles for emancipation and self-determination. This concise biography is an ideal introduction to his life and legacy.
Biography, Activists · African History · Guinea-Bissau · African Studies
Modernist Art in Ethiopia
By Elizabeth W. Giorgis
In locating her arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Giorgis details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in narratives of modernity. The result is a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.
A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
By Terri Ochiagha
In the accessible and concise A Short History of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Terri Ochiagha asks new questions and brings wider attention to unfamiliar but crucial elements of the story, including new insights into questions of canonicity, and into literary, historiographical, and precolonial aesthetic influences.
African History · Literary Criticism, Africa · African Studies · African Authors
Pursuing Justice in Africa
Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices
Edited by Jessica Johnson and George Hamandishe Karekwaivanane
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Afterword by Kamari Maxine Clarke
Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on visions of justice across the African continent, featuring essays that engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines including activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and post-conflict reconciliation.
Anthropology · Human Rights · Gender Studies · Religion, Politics, and the State · Ethics · Africa · African Studies · Law
Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War
Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror
By Elizabeth Schmidt
Many challenges facing the African continent today are rooted in colonial practices, Cold War alliances, and outsiders’ attempts to influence its political and economic systems. Interdisciplinary and intended for nonspecialists, this book provides a new framework for thinking about foreign political and military intervention in Africa.
African History · National and International Security · Terrorism · Violence in Society · Africa · African Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization
