New Books in African Studies

Cars promise freedom, autonomy, and above all, movement but leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, exposed of deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of road networks, and oil production. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the paradoxes and ambivalences of automobility through the lens of West African films, novels, plays, and poems. From the melodramas of Nollywood to the socialist realism of Ousmane Semebene, African artists have delved into the pleasures and anxieties of the road to theorize capitalist development, globalization, patriarchy, and the ethics of accumulation. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, Lindsey Green-Simms joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss how West African entrepreneurs appropriated colonial technologies, how stalled cars embodied the crises of structural adjustment, and what new, feminist, mobilities and imaginaries emerge from the pages, screens, and stages of West African popular and literary culture.Lindsey Green-Simms is an associate professor of Literature at American University with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. She specializes in post-colonial film and literature with particular emphasis on issues of gender, sexuality, globalization, and mobility. Her work has appeared in Transition, Journal of African Cinemas, Camera Obscura, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on a project on African queer cinema.Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has received greater scholarly attention. Moreover, Morocco’s continuing alignment with both the United States and France after 1956 has deemphasized Morocco’s importance, compared to more radical anti-colonial states such as Ghana, Guinea, or Tanzania. Lastly, the sultan’s own popularity within his country and the survival of the monarchy today meant that the independence struggle has often been understood through his personality specifically.David Stenner’s Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (Stanford University Press, 2019) enriches our understanding of Morocco’s nationalist movement. Stenner examines a collection of previously poorly-studied activists whose work began in the international zone in Morocco and then filtered out into the Arab world, France, and to the United States. Stenner shows how this was accomplished, namely via a decentralized system of activists who worked to win over sympathizers and transform them into allies. One consequence of this was that it was highly effective: Morocco became a global issue for a time, even amidst the competing issues of the early Cold War. At the same time, this approach had a number of weaknesses. The fact that it was decentralized and had no hierarchies also made it relatively easy to co-opt, and many important activists found themselves sidelined in the period after independence.Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In her new book, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Wayne State University Press, 2017), Elizabeth R. Baer, professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College examines the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust. Using concepts such as, racial hierarchies, lebensraum (living space), Rassenschande (racial shame), and Endlösung (final solution) thatwere deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. The Genocidal Gaze is an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. The book further demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Today’s Namibia was once the German colony of South West Africa, for a 30-year period spanning of 1884 to 1915. From 1904-1908, German colonial troops committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero and Nama people, many of whom rebelled against the labour and land impositions of colonial rule. Victims of the genocide did not receive justice, for the German colonial authority considered the violence of the day to be a by-product of its policy of settler colonialism.Only in 2015, 100 years after the end of formal German rule, has the German government begun to atone for the Herero/Nama genocide, acknowledging the policy of massacres, starvation, forced deportations as genocidal violence. Descendants of survivors of the Herero/Nama genocide, frustrated with the denial of justice launched in 2017 an alien tort case in the United States. They sought German reparations for the “incalculable damages” wrought by German colonial rule and the policy of genocide. Their case was denied in March 2019, essentially absolving German of legal responsibility for its moral crimes. For now, at least.Enter Reinhart Kössler’s book, Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past(University of Namibia Press, 2015), argues that both the German government needs to address its legacy of settler colonial rule, and that ordinary German citizens need to know their country’s violent past. Kössler advocates a way forward for dialogue and debate on Germany’s Namibian past, and what Namibians can do to gain closure on this painful chapter of their country’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and media and performance studies. The field’s contextual roots as well as historical backdrop, nevertheless, span centuries. Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories (Peter Lang, 2018), edited by Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, assesses where the field is now by exploring the nuances of how the past – colonial, Weimar, National Socialist, post-1945, and post-Wende – informs the present and future of Black German Studies; how present generations of Black Germans look to those of the past for direction and empowerment; how discourses shift due to the diversification of power structures and the questioning of identity-based categories; and how Black Germans affirm their agency and cultural identity through cultural productions that engender both counter-discourses and counter-narratives.Examining Black German Studies as a critical, hermeneutic field of inquiry, the contributions are organized around three thematically conceptualized sections: German and Austrian literature and history; pedagogy and theory; and art and performance. Presenting critical works in the fields of performance studies, communication and rhetoric, and musicology, the volume complicates traditional historical narratives, interrogates interdisciplinary methods, and introduces theoretical approaches that help to advance the field.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated.Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere.In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco.Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

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. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cannabis as a crop, commodity, and tool in African culture and in the history of slavery. He showcases the plant-person relationship and offers valuable lessons about colonialism and rise of 'big marijuana' in 2019.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Joseph Hill's new book Wrapping Authority: Women Islamic Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal (University of Toronto Press, 2018), is an ethnographic study of women Sufi leaders in the Taalibe Baay or Fayda branch of the Tijaniyya. Hill provides life stories of various fascinating and powerful female muqaddamas (or Sufi leaders) in Dakar and explores how they navigate the complexity of their gendered authority in religious, familial, and public domains. The book examines the ambiguity of female religious leadership and its manifestation through piety and performance, be it through cooking, motherhood, and/or the use of a female voice. Hill frames these pious actions through the semiotic acts of “wrapping” (as opposed to “veiling”), as it provides a more expansive analytical framework for his project. The book will be of interest to those who work on gender and women in Islam, as well as those who engage contemporary Sufism, West African Islam, and anthropology of Islam.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

When President Trump talked of Africa as a continent of “shithole countries” where people lived in huts, he was drawing on a set of ideas made popular in the 19th century. “Darkest Africa” became a favorite trope of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley who promoted his books and lectures by pushing the idea of Africa as a dark place – a phrase that had all kinds of meanings – racial, intellectual, geographical.Today I speak with Jeannette Eileen Jones, author of In Search of Brightest Africa, Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884-1936 (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Jones talks about the many different groups, from naturalists and conservationists to African American artists and intellectuals, who begin to recast Africa in the America imagination in the early 20th century. Jones is associate professor of history and ethnic studies at University of Nebraska Lincoln.Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

In 1919 a man named Ohlohr Maigi died of tuberculosis in London, in deep poverty. He had arrived over a decade before in the imperial capital bearing different name, seeking education, fame and fortune. Some of these he had found, but ultimately he had found much more adversity than success. Ultimately, as Dannel Jones writes, he had spiraled downward on the social ladder, from barrister to worker in a munitions factory, from a satirist of the social order to a tuberculosis patient in a state hospital.This is the story she tells in An African in Imperial London: The Indomitable Life of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor (Hurst, 2018). It is a meticulously researched book about a man whose life, while it might be obscure, opens upon an interesting view. And like all good historical biography, it provokes us to think differently about the past and about ourselves–about our choices, our failures, our successes, and our luck.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies