New Books in African Studies

Land and Maritime Empires in the Indian Ocean (Educatt, 2017) reconceptualizes the history of the Indian Ocean through the themes of mobility, encounters, empires, and slavery. The book aims to reshape the historical understanding of Africa and Asia. It approaches Afro-Asiatic connections from different methodological perspectives. Nicolini and de Silva Jayasuriya have reread the Indian Ocean history's role away from traditional politics and international relations. They stated in the introduction: “We are both aware that the study of the history of the Indian Ocean can no longer be considered merely as hagiographic reconstructions, but must take into consideration a number of historical-political-institutional aspects. These include the presence of different cultural, social, and religious groups, together with the affirmation of the Omani Ibadites dominance between the mid-seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. the fundamental influence of the Indian mercantile and other Asian communities; and the impact with the Swahili population of the Eastern African coast and the Sub-Saharan regions. All of these issues should also be considered in relation to links with Europe and with the newly United States of America."Beatrice Nicolini is a professor of African History, Institutions, Religions, Conflicts, and Slavery in the Indian Ocean World, at the Catholic University, Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on the connections between South-Western Asia, the Persian/Arab Gulf, and East Africa. Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study (University of London) and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (Great Britain & Ireland). Her research focuses on migration, commerce, and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

What history and motivations make up the discourses we are taught to hold, and spread, as common sense? As a member of Brazil's upper middle class, Ana Beatriz Ribeiro grew up with the image that to be developed  was to be as European as possible. However, as a researcher in Europe during her country's Workers' Party era, she kept reading that Africans should be repaid for developing Brazilian society – via Brazil's "bestowal" of development upon Africa as an "emerging power." In Modernization Dreams, Lusotropical Promises: A Global Studies Perspective on Brazil-Mozambique Development Discourse (Brill, 2020), Ribeiro investigates where these two worldviews might intersect, diverge and date back to, gauging relations between representatives and projects of the Brazilian and Mozambican states, said to be joined in cooperation more than others.Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @Candela_Marini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Brandon Mills is the author of The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020. The World Colonization Made explores the beginnings and ends of the colonization movement from the late-18th century to the coming of the Civil War. Mills uses African colonization to explore how ideas of American empire developed during the country’s formative years. From politics to racial ideology, Mills is able to chart a clear history of what the colonization movement in America meant for a diverse group of people in the United States, and how this vision ultimately could not create a nation many hoped it would.Brandon Mills teaches in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Denver.  Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Situated at a crossroads of trade in the late nineteenth century, and later the economic capital of German East Africa, the thriving caravan and port town of Bagamoyo, Tanzania is one of many diverse communities on the East African coast which has been characterized as 'Swahili'. In Making Identity on the Swahili Coast: Urban Life, Community, and Belonging in Bagamoyo (Cambridge UP, 2019), Steven Fabian combines extensive archival sources from African and European archives alongside fieldwork in Bagamoyo to move beyond the category of 'Swahili' as it has been traditionally understood. Revealing how townspeople - Africans, Arabs, Indians, and Europeans alike - created a local vocabulary which referenced aspects of everyday town life and bound them together as members of a shared community, this first extensive examination of Bagamoyo's history from the pre-colonial era to independence uses a new lens of historical analysis to emphasize the importance of place in creating local, urban identities and suggests a broader understanding of these concepts historically along the Swahili Coast in the Indian Ocean World. Dr. Steven Fabian is a former associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He was President of the Tanzania Studies Association from 2015 to 2017 and currently serves as co-chair of Radical History Review. Dr. Fabian is currently a teacher of African and world history at Horace Mann School in New York City. His book Making Identity on the Swahili Coast is a 2020 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize finalist, awarded by the African Studies Association. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Marissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates Angolan history with the radio at its center. From its 1930s beginnings, radio has been used by actors as disparate as Portuguese settlers, guerrilla liberation movements, African nationalists and the postcolonial state to project and contest power across Angola’s sparsely populated territory. Moorman’s account pays special attention to the immateriality of radio, the clandestine and intimate experience of “listening in” while also attending to the technological—and techno-political—foundations on which that act of imagination relies.Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Duke UP,  2016), Antoinette Burton reframes our understanding of the postcolonial Afro-Asian solidarity that emerged from the 1955 Bandung conference. Afro-Asian solidarity is best understood, Burton contends, by using friction as a lens to expose the racial, class, gender, sexuality, caste, and political tensions throughout the postcolonial global South. Focusing on India's imagined relationship with Africa, Burton historicizes Africa's role in the emergence of a coherent postcolonial Indian identity. She shows how—despite Bandung's rhetoric of equality and brotherhood—Indian identity echoed colonial racial hierarchies in its subordination of Africans and Blackness. Underscoring Indian anxiety over Africa and challenging the narratives and dearly held assumptions that presume a sentimentalized, nostalgic, and fraternal history of Afro-Asian solidarity, Burton demonstrates the continued need for anti-heroic, vexed, and fractious postcolonial critique.Antoinette Burton is a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a specialty in colonial India and an ongoing interest in Australasia and Africa. She is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau, and Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India.Micheal Rumore is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His work focuses on the Indian Ocean as an African diasporic site. He can be reached at mrumore@gradcenter.cuny.edu.Zifeng Liu is a PhD candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the East, including the palace at Khartoum where General Charles Gordon was killed. ‘It was a sorry sight, a ruin. His blood still upon the staircase’. The Sudan, or more properly, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of the Sudan lasted from 1898 to 1956, and was one of many glimpses of the exotic that appeared in the Holmes stories. That Conan Doyle included the little vignette about Gordon reveals the place of the Sudan in the public consciousness of empire.In Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Lia Paradis explores the myriad ways in which the Sudan, whose internal politics were influenced and shaped by Britain, figured in metropolitan culture. Like many locales of empire, the Sudan influenced literature, perceptions of self, framed ideals of manhood, of nation, and of Britain’s place in the world. This book is a ‘biography of an administrative cohort’, a meticulous and fascinating recovery of a network of officials and civil servants whose immersion in Sudanese culture shaped how this remote and foreboding corner of Africa found its way into letters, newspapers, magazines, images and volumes that were eagerly consumed in London.Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisterial, broadly researched monograph that illuminates the social life of Black Power politics across the African diaspora from the 1950s through the 1980s. Told through Bermudian activist and engineer Pauulu Kamarakafego’s life, Swan takes readers on a journey through Black radical diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, western, eastern, and southern Africa, and Oceania. A global history of Pan-African organizing, Swan examines various dimensions of Black radicalism, and importantly demonstrates the centrality of environmental activism to Black Power and anticolonial politics. As Swan reconstructs this complex web of global Black radicalism, he also uncovers the ways that Black activists and organizations pivoted in response to international networks of Western surveillance and subterfuge. Readers come to appreciate how Black radicalism shaped anticolonial independence struggles in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, for instance, while evaluating how those struggles in turn, reformulated global Black Power. Scholars seeking to understand the enduring and far-reaching entailments of Black radical politics should study this path-breaking book on Black internationalism.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend. In a country with over 1,000 reported pageants, these events are more than superficial forms of entertainment. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside the world of Nigerian beauty contests to see how they are transformed into contested vehicles for promoting complex ideas about gender and power, ethnicity and belonging, and a rapidly changing articulation of Nigerian nationhood. Drawing on four case studies of beauty pageants, this book examines how Nigeria's changing position in the global political economy and existing cultural tensions inform varied forms of embodied nationalism, where contestants are expected to integrate recognizable elements of Nigerian cultural identity while also conveying a narrative of a newly-emerging, globally-relevant Nigeria. Oluwakemi M. Balogun critically examines Nigerian pageants in the context of major transitions within the nation-state, using these events as a lens through which to understand Nigerian national identity and international relations.Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices, and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar, and Cape Town. Through an investigation of the texts, ritual practices, and scholarly networks that went alongside Sufi expansion, Anne K. Bang's Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform (Brill, 2014) places religious change in the western Indian Ocean within the wider framework of Islamic reform.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies