New Books in African Studies 4k1e56

Leonard CassutoView on AmazonThe discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won't. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won't even finish their degrees. It's little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sad state. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to "fix" American graduate schools. Listen in.

Kristin PetersonView on AmazonKristin Peterson's new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the "structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood." It is a timely and fascinating study.

Zachariah Mampilly is the author along with Adam Branch of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Zed Press, 2015).  Mampilly is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Africana Studies at Vassar College; Branch is assistant professor of…

Let's begin with what Paul Bjerk's new book isn't: a biography or evaluation of Julius Nyerere. Instead, according to a letter that Bjerk sent me in advance of our interview, Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960-1964 (University of Rochester Press, 2015), "focuses on sovereignty and discursive agency as main interpretive lenses" of the peaceful course pursued by Nyerere and his colleagues before and after Tanzanian independence. Although Nyerere's biography is not the focus of this book (during the interview Bjerk nonetheless tantalizingly alludes to a biographical project currently in the works), Nyerere's formative exposure to British Utilitarianism, and the thought of John Stuart Mill in particular, is unquestionably fundamental to his vision of postcolonial statehood, including his unwavering belief in the one-party state. The central contention of Building a Peaceful Nation is that meaning-making is at the core of political activity, and that without understanding how meanings are produced through discourse, Tanzania's continental exceptionalism is difficult, if not impossible, to understand. The book, and the interview, explore in depth the development (and pitfalls) of a discursive strategy designed to work at both the grassroots and cosmopolitan levels,  produce a sustainable democratic system, and "minimize conflict during the transition to independence",  all within a highly complex geopolitical context.

Gary Wilder's new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, "thinking with" and "working through" the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism. While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to "rethink ," the project here is, in the author's own words, to "unthink ". Indeed, , decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interrogated in this work, as they were by the authors who are at the center of the project. Freedom Time is a book that takes seriously the futures envisioned by Césaire and Senghor, situating their projects historically and intellectually within contexts French and global, and considering the implications of their thought for a contemporary world still troubled by profound inequalities. It is an important book for those interested in the most urgent political questions, and in the problems and promises of freedoms past, present, and future. At the beginning of our interview, Gary mentions a video link I sent him before we spoke. It is a video of Lauryn Hill performing "Freedom Time," a wonderful song that I was reminded of by this wonderful book.

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, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn't bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  The first is the problem of  the dog that didn't bark.  The second is the fact that genocide studies often compares genocides that occurs in dramatically different contexts and cultures. The result is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking study.  It's one that all genocide scholars will need to wrestle with.  And, with Straus a former journalist, non-specialists will find it readable and interesting as well.

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 of Gujarati merchants and their role in the trade of textiles, ivory and slaves across the Indian Ocean. The book not only enhances our understanding of an under researched pan-continental trade network but also, through its sensitive treatment of local markets as drivers of merchants' patterns, pushes us to re-examine our understanding of trading networks themselves.

Tales from a Muzungu (Peace Corps Writers, 2014) relates a Peace Corps Volunteer's experiences living and working in Uganda. Mixing keen observation, sensitivity, and insight with a mordant wit and sense of humor, Nicholas Duncan discusses the highs and lows of being a PCV in East Africa. Filled with moments of danger, absurdity, joy, and shock, Duncan's book portrays the reality of what it is like to be a Peace Corps volunteer. The book should be read by all interested in development, and by those considering ing the Peace Corps. But the book is also much more. It is a story of what Duncan's Peace Corps experience tells us about the kinds of inventions sparked by cross-cultural dynamics: of the self, of Africa and Africans, and how these inventions shape our interconnected and globalized world.

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 in Africa in the mid-twentieth century. His story follows the transcultural Nigerian psychiatrists who tried to transform the discourse around and treatment of mental illness in both their local contexts and in global psychiatric circles. The decolonization of psychiatry, Heaton argues, had an "intensely cross-cultural, transnational, and international character that cannot be separated from local, regional, and national developments" (5). Heaton shows how, amid these contexts and changes, Nigerian psychiatrists actively participated in negotiating postcolonial modernity and the place of global psychiatry within it. The book begins by tracing the larger story from colonialism to postcolonialism: the first chapter offers an essential, incisive of "Colonial Institutions and Networks of Ethnopsychiatry"; the second chapter lays out the decolonizing of psychiatric institutions and networks in the 1950s and 1960s, a story told mainly through the fascinating figure of Thomas Adeoye Lambo. In the remaining four chapters, Heaton narrows the aperture of historical lens to explore particular cases: Nigerian migrants in the UK who experienced psychiatric issues; debates about culture-bound syndromes such as "brain fag disease" and universality of psychiatric diseases; encounters between psychotherapists and "traditional" healers; and the ambivalence around the use and meaning of drug therapies by Nigerian psychiatrists. Black Skin, White Coats persuasively shows us that postcolonial psychiatry in particular and postcolonial modernity more broadly are best understood in of connectivity and interrelatedness rather than provincial dichotomies. In so doing, he also succeeds in bringing together scholarly areas such as African Studies, the history of medicine and psychology, and postcolonial studies.

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. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of human beings. As historian John Thornton observes, Candido’s book “will be a starting point for studies of the region for years to come.”

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] 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 Christian missionaries to two peoples in western Africa — the Grebo in Liberia, and the Mpongwe in present-day Gabon. Erskine Clarke's By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey (Basic Books, 2013) tells their story, but it also the tale of how profoundly different people in a globalizing world struggled, and sometimes succeeded, in reaching a common understanding. Even more than a model of Atlantic scholarship, By the Rivers of Water is a also a beautifully written study sure to engage readers interested in the exploding field of Atlantic history.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Medicine] 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 Trade Organization’s “Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.” Cloatre takes seriously the idea of TRIPS as a technology in Bruno Latour’s meaning of the word—as a material object that anticipates effects in specific settings. Cloatre follows the text from its consolidation in European meeting halls to its use in the former French and British colonies of Ghana and Djibouti. Pills for the Poorest is a significant ethnography of law and healthcare in Africa that shows precisely how this paper tool begat new buildings, relationships, experts, and, indeed, pills, but only in particular places, among certain people, and for particular kinds of pharmaceuticals. Cloatre is a broadly trained scholar and talented researcher who shows the power of Actor Network Theory as an analytic device, and yet does so with a spirit of critique in the best sense: that is, as an act of sympathetic, yet persistent, questioning. As a text itself, the book has potential to reshape the thinking of readers from a wide range of fields, from law, science studies, healthcare policy, and beyond.

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 political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise. Cold war geopolitical maneuvering and efforts by Lumumba’s domestic adversaries culminated in his assassination, with the or at least tacit complicity of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the CIA, and the UN Secretariat. Georges Nzongola’s concise book Patrice Lumumba (Ohio University Press, 2014) provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining his strengths and weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the national, continental, and international contexts of Lumumba’s political ascent and his elimination by the interests threatened by his ideas and reforms. Lumumba’s death, his integrity and dedication to ideals of self-determination, self-reliance, and pan-African solidarity assure him a prominent place among the heroes of the 20th century African independence movement and the African Diaspora.

Elizabeth Schmidt's Foreign 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 War (1945-91), as well as the periods of state collapse (1991-2001) and the “global war on terror” (2001-10). In the first two periods, the most significant intervention was intercontinental. The United States, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the former colonial powers entangled themselves in numerous African conflicts. During the period of state collapse, the most consequential interventions were intracontinental. African governments, sometimes assisted by powers outside the continent, ed warlords, dictators, and dissident movements in neighboring countries and fought for control of their neighbors’ resources. The global war on terror, like the Cold War, increased the foreign military presence on the African continent and generated external for repressive governments. In each of these cases, external interests altered the dynamics of internal struggles, escalating local conflicts into larger conflagrations, with devastating effects on African populations. Schmidt’s book is an excellent synthesis of the past 70 years of African history and politics. Her book is provocative, thoughtful and ionate. It is a superb book for students, general readers as well as scholars.

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] 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, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions of people caught up in the trade who ended up toiling on plantations in the New World (or who never made it) were victims, but the figures Sparks details were hardly that. Instead, they skillfully parlayed their superior numbers, knowledge of local conditions, and control of a crucial commodity — people — to establish themselves as major players in this bloody commerce.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Technology] 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. Ask most people what they think of when they hear these words, and most often they will respond pictures of computers, the Internet, and mobile systems. But these pictures fail to encapsulate the true meanings of technology and innovation because they are narrow, and reflect bias toward the idea of the digital or information society. What's needed is a broad view of technology and innovation that encomes a wide variety of the ways that different communities solve problems. In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT 2014), Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, asserts that technological innovations are ways in which regular people solve the problems that they face in everyday life. Focusing on communities in Zimbabwe, Mavhunga demonstrates how innovation happens not only in laboratories or studios, but also in the spaces where individuals encounter obstacles. To do so, Mavhunga details how creativity can be found in the mobilities of African people. In addition, he makes evident the folly in ignoring and sometimes criminalizing traditional knowledge when that technology has, time and again, proven indispensable.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] 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. Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read.

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 the askari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the violence and disruptions the askari caused in their service to the colonial state. Moyd questions the starkness of these characterizations. By linking askari micro-histories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, she shows how the askari, as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, not only helped to build the colonial state but also sought to carve out paths to respectability and influence within their own local African contexts. Moyd offers a truly fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature and contexts of colonial violence, notions of masculinity and respectability.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Alcohol, Drugs, and Intoxicants] 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.  During the early part of the twentieth century, Yemeni dockworkers brought khat to Madagascar, where  other of the Malagasy population have adopted its use. In her excellent book Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective (Left Coast Press, 2012), Lisa L. Gezon, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology, University of West Georgia, analyzes the production and consumption of Khat on the island nation of Madagascar.  Taking a cultural, medical, and anthropological approach, Gezon looks at the use of khat in pharmacological, cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts.  As a student of plant drugs/medicines/intoxicants, her summary of the manner in which khat’s effects have been mischaracterized by many so called experts has echoes of reefer madness inspired characterizations of cannabis and its s.  Like so many drugs, khat is a powerful force in the local economy, and the factors that have allowed khat to provide income for small hold farmers rather than becoming part of a centralized and commercial monoculture are worthy of further analysis. In addition to teaching me about the specifics of khat consumption in Madagascar, the background material provided a great primer on CMA approaches to substance use, as well as on the history, pharmacology and policy surrounding Catha edulis. I have been thinking a great deal about the economic forces that influence the consumption and availability of drugs.  There are similarities and differences between poppy production in Afghanistan or the Golden Triangle, cannabis production in the Emerald Triangle, and khat production in Madagascar.  The peaceful and widely distributed economic benefits of smallholder farming on Madagascar make this study particularly fascinating. Lisa Gezon was a pleasure to interview, and was very patient with my still developing interviewing skills.  Her research included extensive field work as well as research, and the book is almost encyclopedic in its synthesis of the literature, the findings of her studies as well as her excellent and insightful analysis.

[Cross-posted from New Books in French Studies] "History doesn't repeat itself," so the saying goes, "but it does rhyme."  This is particularly true in the recent history of the Middle East. As James D. Le Seuer, author of Algeria Since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy (Zed Books, 2010), explains in this interview, much of what we are seeing in, say, Egypt today played out in Algeria two decades ago. Is Algeria an augur of things to come in the Middle East? Listen in.