New Books in African Studies

By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains a controversial cosmetic practice. Lynn M. Thomas’ new book, Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (Duke University Press, 2020), investigates what she calls its “layered history.” Focused principally on South Africa, the book quickly makes evident how closely connected skin lightening is to the history of the United States and other parts of the African continent. Over the course of the twentieth century, and particularly in the context of minority rule in South Africa, skin lighteners have raised thorny debates about race, respectability and self-regard. Thomas examines these questions but shows how class and gender intersect with race to complicate our understanding of who brightens, and why. A complex history of capitalism, medicine, media and technology informs Thomas’ intimate portrayal of these perilous cosmetics. Beneath the Surface is a deeply social history of a singularly fraught commodity.Dr. Elisa Prosperetti teaches African and global history at SciencesPo Paris. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at www.elisaprosperetti.net. 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 early 19th century, on the floodplain of the Niger river’s inland delta in West Africa (present-day Mali), the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi emerged. The new State, locally known as the Maasina Diina, sought to consolidate its dominance over Fulani, Bamanan, and Arma military and political elites, as well as Jenne and Timbuktu’s scholarly establishment. It also attempted to reach a balance of power with neighboring Sokoto. The arsenal of tools the Caliphate deployed to achieve these goals included war, economic expansion, diplomacy, and the crafting of a historical chronicle known as the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh.In two separate strands of historiography, scholars have tackled the genesis and literary construction of the chronicle on the one hand, and the history of the Caliphate on the other. The new book Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Ahmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), brings both together. Mauro Nobili argues that the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh was a coherent and historically contingent product of the Caliphate. It was designed as a result of one Ḥamdallāhi scholar’s assessment of what it would take to legitimize claims to power and authority in the hotly contested political landscape of 19th-century Muslim West Africa.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in History at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Where do good ideas come from? How does an idea go from creation to a research project? How is historical research done? And how does research find its way into a finished book? And what impact can a book have?Today, I discuss these topics and more with my colleague and friend Dr. Neil Roberts. Dr. Roberts teaches Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts is also the Chair and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science and Religion. Additionally, Roberts is the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies.Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to reflect on the state of research about the genocide.Among the many books that were published in the past year, Joyce E. Leader's new book From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide (Potomac Books, 2020) stands out. Leader was the Deputy Chief of Mission in Rwanda from 1991 through April 1994. As such, she was ideally positioned to witness Rwanda's slide into catastrophe. The book is an unusual combination of memoir, reflection and lessons learned. Leader offers a nuanced interpretation of the causes of the violence, one that supplements other secondary research. She also reflects on how we can apply the lessons of Rwanda to future conflicts.But most interesting are her own reflections on her experiences. Leader paints vivid pictures of what it was like to live in Rwanda before and at the very beginning of the genocide. And she is unusually honest and self-reflective about ways in which foreign diplomats could have acted differently. It's an important and valuable book.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In Collecting Food, Collecting People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa (Yale University Press, 2016), Kathryn M. De Luna documents the evolving meanings borne in the collection of wild foods for an agricultural people in south central Africa around the turn of the first millennium. It is a history of everyday life that bears great insight into how people adapt meaning from different aspects of life to create new forms of social organization. Specifically, her study helps explain how expertise in hunting and gathering became a basis for social status in a decentralized society. In doing so, her study upends long-standing Enlightenment notions about the evolutionary role of agricultural surplus as a driver of social complexity. De Luna is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University.Paul Bjerk is an associate professor of African History at Texas Tech University, and the author of Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (Rochester University Press, 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

How should we understand the pervasiveness – and virulence – of anti-Black violence in the United State? Why and how is anti-Black racism different from other forms of racism? How does it permeate our moral and political ideals? Frank Wilderson III combines memoir and works of political theory, critical theory, literature, and film to offer a philosophy of Blackness.In his new book Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020), Wilderson insists that the social construct of slavery – as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence – permeates our principled and practical assumptions. It is not a relic but a worldview that supports our conception of, for example, what it means to be human. For Wilderson, Blacks remain slaves in the human world because “at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life.” To define what it means to be human, we require people who are slaves.While the podcast highlights the theory, the book uses accessible autobiographical stories as examples of the philosophical claims. Wilderson’s remarkable life – from his childhood in mid-century Minneapolis to his work with the African National Congress during apartheid – serves to demonstrate that there are no easy solutions (thus his afropessimism) given the level of hatred and violence.Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

“What is Africa to me?”, African-American writer Countee Cullen asked in Color, his 1925 collection of poems. African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019) lays out the long history of African American engagement with the continent. Nemata Blyden’s sweeping narrative weaves together iterations of Cullen’s question that have kept re-emerging from the 1600s through the 2010s, and various answers that Black people in the United States have come up with. Early on, enslaved Africans preserved and transmitted aspects of their culture.In the 19th century, some Black Americans chose to settle on the continent as missionaries, often readily adopting a civilizational discourse that mirrored Western portrayals of Africa as backwards. Others, including members of the Negro Convention movements, fiercely rejected the idea of emigration. Arguments on either ends of this spectrum, as Blyden shows, were both steeped in quests to achieve freedom and justice. In the 1920s and beyond, Pan-Africanism blossomed, followed decades later by the Civil Rights and decolonization movements. Black Americans and Africans alike, people such as Eslanda Goode Robeson or Asadata Dafora, circulated across the Atlantic, crafting and spreading their own ideas about the continent’s place in Black liberation. In this episode, Blyden also gives us a fascinating glimpse of her own family’s history, connecting the West Indies, West Africa, and North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.Madina Thiam is a PhD candidate in African History at UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (UNC Press, 2017), examines Rastafarian repatriation to Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, Monique A. Bedasse situates Rastafarianism’s connection to black radical politics and internationalism within Tanzania, the site for pan-African solidarity in independent Africa after 1966. In doing so, she reveals the ways various state and non-state actors such as Michael Manley and CLR James helped to shape the process of Rastafarian repatriation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the prism of European colonization, and argues that widening our gaze might force us to redefine our understanding of colonialism — and its limits.As a sequel of sorts to his first book, Oualdi explores the life and afterlife of one figure, the manumitted slave and Tunisian dignitary Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah, as an aperture through which to understand the financial, intellectual, and kinship networks that mingled with processes of colonialism and Ottoman governance in unexpected ways to produce the modern Maghreb.A master class in how historians might untangle the relationship between the personal and the political, A Slave between Empires centers Husayn — and North Africa — at the crossroads of competing ambitions, imperial and intimate. Engaging with sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages, and corralling French, Tunisian, and Anglophone historiographies into one conversation, Oualdi’s newest book is not to be missed.M'hamed Oualdi is full professor at Sciences Po in Paris.Nancy Ko is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow and a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she examines the relationship between Jewish difference and (concepts of) philanthropy and property in the late- and post-Ottoman and Qajar Middle East. She can be reached at [nancy.ko@columbia.edu]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies