New Books in African Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com

Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork


Society & Culture
Places & Travel
701
Caitlín Eilís Barrett, "Domesticating Empire: E...
Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden...
99 min
702
Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British E...
Professor Black shows the reader how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today.
44 min
703
James L. A. Webb, "The Long Struggle against Ma...
It is estimated that malaria kills between 650,000 to 1.2 million Africans every year; experts believe that nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in Africa...
66 min
704
Elizabeth Schmidt, "Foreign Intervention in Afr...
Using a variety of different case studies, Schmidt illuminates some of the patterns that have informed western intervention in Rwanda, Somalia, and elsewhere, and the complicated role of international institutions in this process.
57 min
705
Elena Schneider, "The Occupation of Havana: War...
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...
46 min
706
Kathleen Keller, "Colonial Suspects: Suspicion,...
Focused on suspects and surveillance in the port city of Dakar in Senegal, the book traces a variety of ways in which colonial authorities sought to suppress forms of political activity including communism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, black radicalism, and pan-Islamism...
58 min
707
Emma Hunter, "Political Thought and the Public ...
Hunter documents the emergence of a public sphere in Tanzania, which predated the nationalist period and allowed for a wide range of voices to debate ideas about political authority and society...
50 min
708
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Op...
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic...
29 min
709
Chet Van Duzer, "Henricus Martellus’s World Map...
The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has long been deemed “an essentially unstudiable object"...
58 min
710
Susan Thomson, "Rwanda: From Genocide to Precar...
Thomson examines the postwar history of Rwanda to consider the ways the Rwandan genocide shaped governance, policy and memory in that country...
57 min
711
Brannon D. Ingram, "Revival from Below: The Deo...
Through careful analysis of historical textual discourses, Ingram carefully guides his readers through important polemics that manifested amongst the Deoband ‘ulama...
52 min
712
Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vita...
The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts...
48 min
713
Calvin Schermerhorn, "Unrequited Toil: A Histor...
Writing a synthesis on the history American Slavery is quite a job. Calvin Schermerhorn, though, has done a wonderful job of it.
56 min
714
Jesse A. Zink, "Christianity and Catastrophe in...
Zink’s book is an outstanding account of the growth and evolution of Anglican Christianity among the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan...
38 min
715
Patrick Eisenlohr, "Sounding Islam: Voice, Medi...
Through the exploration of na‘t, or devotional poetic recitations that honor the prophet Muhammad, Eisenlohr captures the sensory dimension of Islam...
37 min
716
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
717
Ruma Chopra, “Almost Home: Maroons between Slav...
After being exiled from their native Jamaica in 1795, the Trelawney Town Maroons endured in Nova Scotia and then in Sierra Leone. In Almost Home: Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone (Yale University Press,
37 min
718
Jonathon Earle, “Colonial Buganda and the End o...
In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda,
49 min
719
Joanna Davidson, “Sacred Rice: An Ethnography o...
Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a book about change. The Jola, a people living in Guinea-Bissau, have long cultivated rice and formed their social identity ar...
57 min
720
Edward J. Watts, “Mortal Republic: How Rome Fel...
Despite enduring for nearly five centuries, the Roman Republic ended in a series of crises and wars that discredited the idea of republics in the West for centuries. In Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), Edward J.
62 min
721
Miranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Sto...
A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose.
33 min
722
Ching Kwan Lee, “The Specter of Global China: P...
Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018),
47 min
723
Jill Kelly, “To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Vio...
Today we talked with Jill Kelly about her new book To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996 published by Michigan State University Press in 2018. Her book is a history of ukukhonza,
61 min
724
Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Par...
How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel Un...
32 min
725
Paul Bjerk, “Julius Nyerere” (Ohio University P...
Paul Bjerk’s compact biography Julius Nyerere, published as part of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series follows closely on the heels of his monograph on the same subject – Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovere...
85 min