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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776
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
777
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
778
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
779
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
780
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
781
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
782
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
783
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
784
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
785
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
786
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
787
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
788
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
789
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
790
James Copnall, “A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts...
July 2011 saw that rarest of events – an attempt to resolve a conflict in Africa by the redrawing of borders. It saw the birth of South Sudan as a fully fledged country after decades of conflict going back to the days of independence.
43 min
791
Susan Thomson, “Whispering Truth to Power” (Uni...
This spring, I taught a class loosely called “The Holocaust through Primary Sources” to a small group of selected students. I started one class by asking them the deceptively simple question “When did the Holocaust end?
55 min
792
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Sear...
Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Af...
70 min
793
Sean D. Murphy et al., “Litigating War: Mass Ci...
Professor Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and co-author of the book Litigating War: Mass Civil Injury and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (Oxford University Press,
52 min
794
Ellen J. Amster, “Medicine and the Saints” (Uni...
What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013).
76 min
795
Xolela Mangcu, “Biko: A Life” (Tauris, 2013)
Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under Apartheid rule,
31 min
796
Jennie Burnet, “Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Me...
In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a response. It is all we can do to pay attention to the present...
63 min
797
Jennifer Sessions, “By Sword and Plow: France a...
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So,
59 min
798
Gabrielle Hecht, “Being Nuclear: Africans and t...
We tend to understand the nuclear age as a historical break, a geopolitical and technological rupture. In Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012), Gabrielle Hecht transforms this understanding by arguing instead that nucl...
59 min
799
Lidwien Kapteijns, “Clan Cleansing in Somalia: ...
49 min
800
Simon P. Newman, “A New World of Labor: The Dev...
Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development ...
57 min