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.
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Scott Straus, “Making and Unmaking Nations: War...
Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?” Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes. But,
73 min
777
Pedro Machado, “Ocean of Trade: South Asian Mer...
Pedro Machado‘s Ocean of Trade:South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c.1750-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed and engaging account of Gujarati merchants and their role in the trade of textiles,
43 min
778
Nicholas Duncan, “Tales from a Muzungu” (Peace ...
Tales from a Muzungu (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) relates a Peace Corps Volunteer’s experiences living and working inUganda. Mixing keen observation, sensitivity, and insight with a mordant wit and sense of humor,
46 min
779
Ellen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge U...
For almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia.
53 min
780
Matthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (O...
In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and practice during the decolonization of European empires i...
64 min
781
Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and t...
Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and development of the port of Benguela.
58 min
782
Erskine Clarke, “By the Rivers of Water: A Nine...
Jane Bayard Wilson and John Leighton Wilson were unlikely African missionaries, coming as they did from privileged slaveholding families in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively. Yet in 1834 they embarked on a nearly twenty-year adventure as Christi...
65 min
783
Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Expl...
Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a landmark international agreement for healthcare: the World ...
45 min
784
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, “Patrice Lumumba” (Oh...
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African ...
49 min
785
Elizabeth Schmidt, “Foreign Intervention in Afr...
Elizabeth Schmidt‘sForeign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013)depicts the foreign political and military interventions in Africa during the periods of decolonization (1956-75) and the Cold W...
41 min
786
Randy J. Sparks, “Where the Negroes Are Masters...
A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press,
59 min
787
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Work...
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives.
37 min
788
Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riot...
Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.
27 min
789
Michelle Moyd, “Violent Intermediaries: African...
In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari,
64 min
790
Lisa L. Gezon, “Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultur...
Khat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumption is an important part of Yemeni social and political life.
80 min
791
Olufemi Taiwo, “Africa Must be Modern: A Manife...
Olufemi Taiwo‘s unremittingly honest and daring book, Africa Must be Modern: A Manifesto (Indiana University Press, 2014), confronts the reluctance, if not outright hostility, of many Africans to embrace modernity.
62 min
792
Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Moveme...
Amy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights. At the center of Evrard’s book is the 2004 reform...
63 min
793
Ernest Harsch, “Thomas Sankara: An African Revo...
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during a military coup that brought down his government. Although his time in office was relatively sho...
71 min
794
Todd Cleveland, “Stones of Contention: A Histor...
“Diamonds are forever” or “Blood diamonds”–the one a pithy marketing slogan showing how diamonds encapsulate enduring love and commitment and the other a call to conscience about the violence and suffering the quest for diamonds has entailed throughout...
47 min
795
Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story...
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education,
30 min
796
Deborah Mayersen, “On the Path to Genocide: Arm...
I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US. We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report. Earthquakes are something that happen somewhere else. Recently, however,
62 min
797
What Do We Now Know About the Rwandan Genocide ...
In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life. The real life part suffered most of all. But every once in a while,
67 min
798
Toby Green, “The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Sla...
Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands,
42 min
799
Samuel Totten, “Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba...
Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is different. In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mou...
82 min
800
Donovan Chau, “Exploiting Africa: The Influence...
Donovan Chau is the author of Exploiting Africa: The Influence of Maoist China in Algeria, Ghana, and Tanzania (Naval Institute Press, 2014). Chau is an associate professor of political science at California State University.
32 min