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PODCAST

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

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61:26

Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between...

New Books in African Studies ·

2026/01/12

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, Jerusalem, and Livorno. By examining cultural centers and tracing the journey of these texts, Sienna provides depth to our understanding of a remarkably global and worldly book culture, and its evolving role in the growth of Jewish modernity.While the content of Jewish books has long fascinated

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57:11

Charles G. Thomas, "Ujamaa's Army: The Creation and...

New Books in African Studies ·

2026/01/08

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 the still-fragile independent states in a global ideological struggle between superpowers. While the political story of these states has been written in detail, the story of their militaries has been largely inaccessible, leaving only sketches of the coups, mutinies, and overall failures of security that

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53:55

Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/31

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 Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial

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50:44

Riley Linebaugh, "Curating the Colonial Past: The...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/23

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 London arranged the deposit of these documents in high security facilities, where they remained inaccessible until 2011 following a compensation suit by Kenyan survivors of British colonial rule against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.Curating the Colonial Past: The ‘Migrated Archives' and the

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48:17

Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/20

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 role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild's contention that French is a "modern-day Copernicus." The title--referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom--positions this liberation at the center of a "movement of global Blackness," with

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56:43

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/10

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 of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.'Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo,

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85:00

Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery, "Fela: Music Is...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/09

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 the Weapon (Amistad, 2025), artist Jibola Fagbamiye and writer Conor McCreery team up to tell the remarkable origin story of one of Nigeria’s most famous sons, the King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, who rose to superstardom with his band Africa 70 in the 1970s, during a charged political period for his

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62:06

Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/08

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 and why two post-conflict states in Africa, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, have differed in their responses to rape and domestic violence. Specifically, she looks at the roles of the United Nations and women's movements in the establishment of specialized criminal justice sector agencies, and the referral of

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55:50

Philip Janzen, "An Unformed Map: Geographies of...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/06

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 colonial administrations in Africa between 1890 and 1930. Caribbean administrators grew up in colonial societies, saw themselves as British and French, and tended to look down on Africans. Once in Africa, however, they were doubly marginalized—excluded by Europeans and unwelcome among Africans. This

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54:05

Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World:...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/05

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 Egypt and Yemen during his wars with the Portuguese; carried, after the admiral's death, by the admiral's nephew Mustafa Bayram to Gujarat on the western coast of India; and finally, when the Mughal army invaded Gujarat in 1534, taken into imperial service along with thousands of Eurasian and Abyssinian

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57:57

Anny Gaul, "Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/04

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them.In Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (U California Press, 2025), Dr. Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians'

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64:09

Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/12/01

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Derbew dexterously disentangles the

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78:50

Marc Sommers, "We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture,...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/30

We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone (U Georgia Press, 2023) by Dr. Marc Sommers is at once a history of a nation, the story of a war, and the saga of downtrodden young people and three pop culture superstars. Reggae idol Bob Marley, rap legend Tupac Shakur, and the John Rambo movie character all portrayed an upside-down world, where those in the right are blamed while the powerful attack them. Their collective example found fertile ground in the West African nation of

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52:01

Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/25

The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) to local military, police, and paramilitary forces. Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Nina Wilen critically examines the rationale, implementation, and consequences of these efforts (2012-2024). With unique access to both military operations and strategy-making in European capitals,

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44:01

Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, "African Women’s Histories in...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/24

Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational, transcontinental and Afropolitan community that lived between Africa and Europe from the late 19th century onwards. African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora

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65:01

Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/21

Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule?Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution, in Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Killian Clarke explains both why counterrevolutions emerge and when they are likely to succeed. He forwards a movement-centric argument that emphasizes the strategies

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34:01

Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/20

Transcript of the interview Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative

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74:01

Jessica Catherine Reuther, "The Bonds of Kinship in...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/15

From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers. Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective

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67:05

Eric H. Cline, "Love, War, and Diplomacy: The...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/12

From the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C., a spellbinding account of the archaeological find that opened a window onto the vibrant diplomatic world of the ancient Near East In 1887, an Egyptian woman made an astonishing discovery among the ruins of the heretic king Akhenaten’s capital city, a site now known as Amarna. She found a cache of cuneiform tablets, nearly four hundred in all, that included correspondence between the pharaohs and the mightiest powers of the day, such as the Hittites,

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36:38

Two Decades On: The African Union, Power, and...

New Books in African Studies ·

2025/11/10

When the African Union was founded in 2002, it promised to deliver a more united, prosperous, and people-centred continent. Two decades later, Africa’s political landscape tells a more complex story: one of ambition and frustration, democratic progress and reversal, renewed activism, and enduring inequality. How far has the AU come in shaping “The Africa We Want”, and what does its evolving role reveal about power, governance, and the continent’s place in a rapidly changing world?In this episode,

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