New Books in African Studies

By Marshall Poe

Society & Culture Places & Travel

What's New Books in African Studies about?

Interviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books

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New Books in African Studies episodes:

04.21.2024
Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to...
04.20.2024
Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, "Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya" (U Toronto Press, 2024)
Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya (University of Toronto Press, 2024) tells the story of how settler colonialism becomes memorialized and lives on through ecological relations. Drawing on eight years of research in Laikipia, Kenya, Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio...
04.14.2024
Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015)
In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact on the world, primarily centered on the Atlantic trade. Opening with a clear discussion of the problems of defining...
04.12.2024
Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
What does living “precariously” mean in Casablanca? In 2014 it meant being labeled tcharmil (seeming to endanger public order) and swept up by the police, if you were an unemployed young man sporting a banda haircut and gathering with your mates on a street...
04.11.2024
100 Years of Radio in South Africa: Then and Now
Today’s book is: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), edited by Dr. Sisanda Nkoala (with Gilbert Motsaathebe). The book focuses on South African radio stations and broadcasters in the...
04.06.2024
Rabiat Akande, "Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Set in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge...
03.28.2024
Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023)
Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing longue durée national histories. Especially in the wake of the global history wave, national histories can seem decidedly 20th century. But what if you’re asked to take up that...
03.26.2024
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning...
03.24.2024
Maarten Couttenier, "Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)" (Routledge, 2023)
Maarten Couttenier's Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922) (Routledge, 2023) examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of 'race' structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole...
03.22.2024
Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)
In the 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on domestic accountability for international crimes across the globe. In identifying...
03.21.2024
Noo Saro-Wiwa, "Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China" (Canongate Books, 2024)
Just a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer...
03.14.2024
Ali Bhagat, "Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism (Cornell UP, 2024) answers a straightforward question: how are refugees governed under capitalism in this moment of heightened global displacement? To answer this question, Ali Bhagat takes a dual case study approach to explore...
03.14.2024
Tayo Agunbiade, "Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)
Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) is a curation of insightful and engaging narrations aimed at freeing women from the margins of Nigeria's history. It chronicles their protest movements against colonial administrations, including "monster" petitions...
03.10.2024
Sean M. Kelley, "American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" (Yale UP, 2023)
A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive...
03.04.2024
Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Cristina Brito's book Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) deals with peoples' practices, perceptions, emotions and feelings towards aquatic animals, their ecosystems and nature on the early modern Atlantic coasts by addressing exploitation, use,...
03.03.2024
Noah L. Nathan, "The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
States are often minimally present in the rural periphery. Yet a limited presence does not mean a limited impact. Isolated state actions in regions where the state is otherwise scarce can have outsize, long-lasting effects on society. The Scarce State: Inequality...
03.02.2024
Mpho Ngoepe and Sindiso Bhebhe, "Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts: Recalling the Pasts" (Routledge, 2024)
Mpho Ngoepe and Sindiso Bhebhe's Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts: Recalling the Pasts (Routledge, 2024) revisits the definition of a record and extends it to include memory, murals, rock art paintings and other objects. Drawing on five years of research and examples from Zimbabwe,...
02.29.2024
Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023)
In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make...
02.27.2024
Obert Bernard Mlambo, "Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
In this highly original book Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Obert Bernard Mlambo offers a comparative and critical examination of the relationship between military veterans and land expropriation in the client-army of...
02.18.2024
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)
How can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton UP, 2023), historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale,...
02.18.2024
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, "The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South" (Northwestern UP, 2019)
Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But "dictator novels" do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The...
02.16.2024
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)
Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New...
02.12.2024
Lehasa Moloi, "Developing Africa?: New Horizons with Afrocentricity" (Anthem Press, 2024)
Developing Africa? New Horizons with Afrocentricity (Anthem Press, 2024) is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development,...
02.11.2024
Ana Lucia Araujo, "The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the...
02.09.2024
Kerstin Bree Carlson, "The Justice Laboratory: International Law in Africa" (Brookings Institution Press, 2022)
Ever since World War II, the United Nations and other international actors have created laws, treaties, and institutions to punish perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These efforts have established universally recognized norms and have resulted in...
02.06.2024
Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)
During the “global land grab” of the early twenty-first century, legions of investors rushed to Africa to acquire land to produce and speculate on agricultural commodities. In Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures (Cornell UP, 2024),...
02.03.2024
Paul Stoller, "Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Wisdom From the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times (Cornell University Press, 2023) describes what anthropologists can do to contribute to the social and cultural changes that shape a social future of wellbeing and viability. Paul Stoller shows how anthropologists can...
02.01.2024
The Conflict in Sudan
Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode...
01.31.2024
Democracy in Malawai
In this episode of Ufahamu Africa, cohost Kim Yi Dionne presents on the state of democracy in Malawi as part of a panel at the 2023 African Studies Association. The panel focused on democratic backsliding and sites and actors that...
01.24.2024
Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)
During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by the eve of the American Revolution, grown into an Atlantic-wide system through which fifty thousand men, women, and children...
01.14.2024
Kathryn Mathers, "White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation" (Routledge, 2022)
In White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation (Routledge, 2022), Kathryn Mathers interrogates the white savior industrial complex by exploring how America continues to present an imagined Africa as a space for its salvation in the 21st...
01.12.2024
Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while...
01.09.2024
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020)
This original research on the forgotten Libyan genocide specifically recovers the hidden history of the fascist Italian concentration camps (1929-1934) through the oral testimonies of Libyan survivors. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida's book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, 2020) links...
01.08.2024
Paul F. Diehl et al., "When Peacekeeping Missions Collide: Balancing Multiple Roles in Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The contemporary world is beset with a wide variety of conflicts, all of which have features without historical precedent. While most accounts of peacekeeping focus on attempts to limit violent conflict, this traditional view hardly captures the variety of challenges...
01.08.2024
Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
Rita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social...
01.05.2024
China’s Environmental Footprint in Ghana: Non-State Responses
Musicians and community activists in Ghana have raised their voices to increase awareness of the environmental impact of Chinese activities in the country. The chart-topping song “Greedy men” by Stonebwoy directly criticizes Chinese illegal gold mining in the region. On...
01.03.2024
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
In his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale of scholarship for social change, An-Naim proposes advancing the universality of human rights...
01.02.2024
Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)
There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing....
12.31.2023
Kathleen Klaus, "Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Kathleen Klaus, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco has written a terrific book, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. Kathleen’s book is richly researched and beautifully written. She...
12.30.2023
Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016)
Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument,...
12.27.2023
Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)
Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in...
12.24.2023
George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
George MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War...
12.21.2023
Adrienne E. Strong, "Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania" (U California Press, 2020)
Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania (University of California Press, 2020) is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday...
12.20.2023
Jenny Trinitapoli, "An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known. An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (U Chicago Press, 2023) advances a new...
12.19.2023
Tom Buitelaar, "Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) - as the only permanent international court that addresses crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes - has important potential to end impunity and find justice for victims of atrocities, it is dependent on...
12.17.2023
Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship,...
12.15.2023
Troels Burchall Henningsen, "Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms" (Routledge, 2021)
Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms (Routledge, 2021) by Dr. Troels Burchall Henningsen examines the political and military dynamic between threatened local regimes and Western powers, and argues that the power of informal politics forces local regimes...
12.14.2023
Louis-Alexandre Berg, "Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Security assistance has become the largest component of international peacebuilding and stabilisation efforts, and a primary tool for responding to civil war and insurgency. Donors and peacekeepers not only train and equip military and police forces, they also seek to...
12.13.2023
Have We Entered a New Era of African Politics and International Relations?
Is the recent resurgence of military coups reshaping politics in sub-Saharan Africa? Is faith in multiparty elections waning among citizens? And how do emerging military juntas impact regional stability and democracy? Listen to Nic Cheeseman, Mwita Chacha and Obert Hodzi...
12.11.2023
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts...

What's New Books in African Studies about?

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New Books in African Studies episodes:

Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

Charis Enns and Brock Bersaglio, "Settler Ecologies: The Enduring Nature of Settler Colonialism in Kenya" (U Toronto Press, 2024)

Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015)

Cristiana Strava, "Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

100 Years of Radio in South Africa: Then and Now

Rabiat Akande, "Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Maarten Couttenier, "Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)" (Routledge, 2023)

Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Noo Saro-Wiwa, "Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China" (Canongate Books, 2024)

Ali Bhagat, "Governing the Displaced: Race and Ambivalence in Global Capitalism" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Tayo Agunbiade, "Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)

Sean M. Kelley, "American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" (Yale UP, 2023)

Cristina Brito, "Humans and Aquatic Animals in Early Modern America and Africa" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

Noah L. Nathan, "The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mpho Ngoepe and Sindiso Bhebhe, "Indigenous Archives in Postcolonial Contexts: Recalling the Pasts" (Routledge, 2024)

Carly Goodman, "Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction" (UNC Press, 2023)

Obert Bernard Mlambo, "Land Expropriation in Ancient Rome and Contemporary Zimbabwe: Veterans, Masculinity and War" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, "The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South" (Northwestern UP, 2019)

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)

Lehasa Moloi, "Developing Africa?: New Horizons with Afrocentricity" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Ana Lucia Araujo, "The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Kerstin Bree Carlson, "The Justice Laboratory: International Law in Africa" (Brookings Institution Press, 2022)

Youjin B. Chung, "Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania's New Enclosures" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Paul Stoller, "Wisdom from the Edge: Writing Ethnography in Turbulent Times" (Cornell UP, 2023)

The Conflict in Sudan

Democracy in Malawai

Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)

Kathryn Mathers, "White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation" (Routledge, 2022)

Judith Surkis, "Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" (Routledge, 2020)

Paul F. Diehl et al., "When Peacekeeping Missions Collide: Balancing Multiple Roles in Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)

China’s Environmental Footprint in Ghana: Non-State Responses

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)

Kathleen Klaus, "Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016)

Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World" (UNC Press, 2018)

George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

Adrienne E. Strong, "Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania" (U California Press, 2020)

Jenny Trinitapoli, "An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tom Buitelaar, "Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Troels Burchall Henningsen, "Western Intervention and Informal Politics: Simulated Statebuilding and Failed Reforms" (Routledge, 2021)

Louis-Alexandre Berg, "Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Have We Entered a New Era of African Politics and International Relations?

Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)