African Studies

African Studies Book List

Forthcoming

Making Martial Races
Gender, Society, and Warfare in Africa
Edited by Myles Osborne

Featuring contributions by new and established Africanist scholars, this volume is the first book-length treatment of “martial race” in Africa. A key organizing principle of colonialism, the category of martial race was contested by African men and women as they sought to negotiate against the colonial state as well as within their home communities.

African History · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Military History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Africa · African Studies

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

Cover of 'Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa'

Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa
By Daren E. Ray

Drawing on archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and documentary evidence, this book uses a cis-oceanic framework to focus on littoral communities. It clarifies the relationship between ethnicity and other kinds of identities by framing research questions around a language family instead of an ethnic, religious, or diasporic group.

Imagine Lagos
Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City
By Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

Combining archival research with a digital humanities–focused examination of cartography, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi reveals the gendered, spatial, and environmental responses to historical, political, and social change in mid-nineteenth-century Lagos, Nigeria.

A Country of Defiance
Mapping the Casamance in Senegal
By Mark W. Deets

This analysis of culture and nationalism in the Casamance—home of the longest-running conflict on the African continent—considers colonialism, cartography, agriculture, religion, forests, education, and sports history to explain and analyze the complex identities that have driven the separatist movement as well as the Senegalese nation.

Social History · Human Geography · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Senegal · African Studies

Unruly Ideas
A History of Kitawala in Congo
By Nicole Eggers

In this conceptual history, Nicole Eggers argues that practitioners of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala can be understood as intellectuals, innovators, and vital participants in the construction and use of power. Eggers also explores the relationship between healing and violence in their frequently gendered central African manifestations.

Cover of 'Research as More Than Extraction'

Research as More Than Extraction
Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies
Edited by Annie Bunting, Allen Kiconco, and Joel Quirk

This book contributes to an increasingly significant interdisciplinary field that focuses on ethics, methods, and the politics of gender-based violence. Its contributors, the majority of whom are based in Africa, offer concrete examples of how to undertake responsible research in African contexts. Their close and careful analyses of gender, violence, and patriarchy provide an important corrective to simplistic and reductionist gender-based studies.

Violence in Society · Social Science, Methodology · Gender Studies · Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'Power, Patronage, and the Local State in Ghana'

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.

Available

Rewriting Modernity
Studies in Black South African Literary History
By David Attwell

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

Literary Criticism, Africa · South Africa · Literature · 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

Apartheid’s Leviathan
Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence
By Faeeza Ballim

Beginning in the 1960s, the security of electricity supply has shaped South Africa’s economic growth and prosperity, and electricity shortages have negatively inflected the rise of its postapartheid democracy. Construction delays and escalating costs have thwarted the nation’s mining, manufacturing, and power generation.

Apartheid’s Leviathan
Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence
By Faeeza Ballim

Cover of 'African Activists of the Twentieth Century'

African Activists of the Twentieth Century
Hani, Maathai, Mpama/Palmer, Saro-Wiwa
By Hugh Macmillan, Tabitha Kanogo, Robert R. Edgar, Roy Doron, and Toyin Falola

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Chris Hani, Wangari Maathai, Josie Mpama/Palmer, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. The volume complements history, social justice, and political science courses and is a useful collection for general readers interested in learning about Africa’s most influential historical figures.

Biography, Activists · History | Modern | 20th Century · African History · Kenya · Nigeria · South Africa · African Studies

Written Out
The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala
By Joel Cabrita

This biography of Twala, an unjustly neglected Black African literary figure in apartheid South Africa and colonial Swaziland (now Eswatini) shows that her posthumous obscurity has been no accident. The book charts how White scholars and politicians used racial and gendered prejudices to erase Twala’s work and claim her uncompensated intellectual labor for themselves.

Finding Dr. Livingstone
A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archives
Edited by Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman
· Foreword by Guido Gryseels and Dominique Allard

Never-before-published documents from Henry Stanley’s historic 1871 expedition to what is now Tanzania in search of David Livingstone recasts Stanley’s sensationalized narrative with new details about the people involved, their systems of knowledge, commerce, and labor, the natural environment, and the spread of modern colonial powers in Africa.

History | Expeditions & Discoveries · Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · History | Africa | East · Eastern Africa · Tanzania · African Studies

Convening Black Intimacy
Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa
By Natasha Erlank

This social history of twentieth-century Black intimacy and family life in South Africa is the first book to demonstrate the singular role of Christianity in reshaping sexual and marital traditions. It is a must-read for scholars interested in the politics of gender, sexuality, and family in South Africa, as well as for historians of Christianity.

Cover of 'African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2'

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
By Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman, Peter Karibe Mendy, Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut, and Pamela Scully

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 complements courses in history and political science and serves as a useful collection for general readers.

Biography & Autobiography | Political · African History · Political Science, Africa · Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia'

Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia
The Reformist Intellectuals of the Early Twentieth Century
By Bahru Zewde

In this exciting new study, Bahru Zewde, one of the foremost historians of modern Ethiopia, has constructed a collective biography of a remarkable group of men and women in a formative period of their country’s history. Ethiopia’s political independence at the end of the nineteenth century put this new African state in a position to determine its own levels of engagement with the West. Ethiopians went to study in universities around the world.

African History · African Studies · Ethiopia

Cover of 'African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950'

African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950
By Tabitha Kanogo

This book explores the history of African womanhood in colonial Kenya. By focussing on key sociocultural institutions and practices around which the lives of women were organized, and on the protracted debates that surrounded these institutions and practices during the colonial period, it investigates the nature of indigenous, mission, and colonial control of African women.The

Women’s Studies · History | Africa | East · Colonialism and Decolonization · Customs, Traditions, and Everyday Life · Kenya · Eastern Africa · Africa · African Studies

Cover of 'West African Challenge to Empire'

West African Challenge to Empire
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War
By Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer

West African Challenge to Empire examines the anticolonial war in the Volta and Bani region in 1915–16. It was the largest challenge that the French ever faced in their West African colonial empire, and one of the largest armed oppositions to colonialism anywhere in Africa. How such a movement could be organized in the face of European technological superiority despite the fact that this region is generally described as having consisted of rival villages and descent groups is a puzzle.

African History · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · African Studies · Burkina Faso · Mali

A Language for the World
The Standardization of Swahili
By Morgan J. Robinson

Based on extensive archival research, this intellectual history of Standard Swahili—a dialect of the Swahili language written in the Latin alphabet—argues that attention to the intertwined processes of codification from 1864 to 1964 lends new perspectives on history, colonialism, time, and cultural representation in East Africa and beyond.

Foreign Language Study | Swahili · Social History · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Eastern Africa · African Studies · Swahili

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century, Volume 2
Cabral, Machel, Mugabe, Sirleaf
By Allen F. Isaacman, Barbara S. Isaacman, Peter Karibe Mendy, Sue Onslow, Martin Plaut, and Pamela Scully

Biography & Autobiography | Political · African History · Political Science, Africa · Africa · African Studies

Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature
By James Currey

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart provided the impetus for the foundation of Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1962 with Achebe as the editorial adviser. Africa Writes Back presents portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers.

Literary Criticism, Africa · Africa · African Studies · African Literature