New Books in African Studies Podcast
1) Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerus...Show More
2) Charles G. Thomas, "Ujamaa's Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964-1979" (Ohio UP, 2024)
The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent Cold War caught up t...Show More
3) Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Politica...Show More
Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)
53:55 | Dec 31st, 2025
4) Riley Linebaugh, "Curating the Colonial Past: The 'Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in ...Show More
5) Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal rol...Show More
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
48:17 | Dec 20th, 2025
6) Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands o...Show More
7) Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery, "Fela: Music Is the Weapon" (Amistad Press, 2025)
A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat. In Fela: Music Is t...Show More
Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery, "Fela: Music Is the Weapon" (Amistad Press, 2025)
1:25:00 | Dec 9th, 2025
8) Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation of international norms by examining how an...Show More
9) Philip Janzen, "An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean" (Duke UP, 2025)
In An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025), Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French...Show More
10) Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egy...Show More