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  • Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
    2026/02/09
    Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist project, members of the ICI mobilized progressive ideas in ways that built broad political consensus across Europe while also furthering inequality, exploitation, and segregation in the Global South, even beyond the end of formal empire. Tracing the long history of the ICI reveals fundamental continuities, argues Florian Wagner, that colonialist narratives of change obscure. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    57 分
  • Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
    2026/02/08
    Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making, or unmaking, of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Schouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non-conventional logistical capacity, to reframe how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors, to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over mineral, territory or people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Peer Schouten’s groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics. At the end of the interview, Schouten recommends two books: Mintz’s (1986) Sweetness of Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Labatut’s (2021) When We Cease to Understand the World. Thomson recommends the CBC podcast Nothing is Foreign. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    54 分
  • Todd Cleveland, "Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium" (Ohio UP, 2024)

    Todd Cleveland, "Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium" (Ohio UP, 2024)
    2026/02/07
    At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since the inception of the modern Games in 1896. Reflecting this relative lack of sporting success, African Olympians—aside from elite Kenyan distance runners—rarely register in the minds of even the most dedicated followers of the Games. Yet for all their seeming invisibility on the Olympic landscape, African states, athletes, and officials have long been “winning” at the Olympics, albeit often far removed from the medal podium.Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium (Ohio University Press, 2024) by Dr. Todd Cleveland shows how African actors have achieved these nonsporting victories and examines how they have used the Olympics to engage in transformative political activity, realize social mobility, and enhance the quality of life for individuals, communities, and entire nations. In tracing these historical and contemporary processes and the motivations that underlie them, the book complicates reductive notions of the Olympics as solely a sporting competition and instead considers Africa’s engagement with the Games as a series of opportunities to improve personal, communal, ethnic, national, and even continental plights.If few sports fans have thought extensively about Africa and the Olympics, scholars have been only slightly more engaged with the subject. Most of this scholarship focuses on the International Olympic Committee’s ban of apartheid South Africa from 1964 to 1988. Other works that consider the Olympics more broadly tend to deal with Africa only summarily, further reducing its already low profile. As a result, the academic literature resembles a patchwork of circumscribed studies dispersed in a range of fields and disciplines. Not since the publication of Africa at the Olympics almost fifty years ago has a single volume featured a comprehensive history of the continent and the Games. This book both updates and expands previous work and, most importantly, reframes the analytical engagement with this topic. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    37 分
  • Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    2026/02/06
    In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people. Seeing themselves as “the Fourth and Only Estate,” the sole democratic institution available to a colonized population, early press contributors experimented with the form and function of the newspaper itself. They advanced anticolonial goals through clipping and reprinting articles from a variety of sources; drawing on local ways of speaking; and manipulating photography, comics, and advertising. Such unruly content, James shows, served as a strategic assertion of autonomy against colonial bureaucracy. Yet in the 1950s, this landscape changed as press professionalism became a proxy for a colony’s capacity to govern itself. Analyzing a key moment in the history of Black Atlantic political thought, The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960 (Harvard UP, 2025) highlights the boundless, shapeshifting power of experimental media. During the era of decolonization, as independence loomed on the horizon, West African and Caribbean newspapers creatively engineered and reinvented debates about imperialism, racial capitalism, and Black freedom dreams and realities. Leslie James is Reader and Sinor Lecturer in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 1939–1959. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    55 分
  • Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    2026/02/03
    Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.Dr. Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Dr. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    1 時間 20 分
  • Nathan Munier, "Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    Nathan Munier, "Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    2026/01/31
    What happens when states experience a rapid increase in resource wealth? This book examines the significant diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, possibly the largest in over 100 years, and its influence on the institutional trajectory of the country. In Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development (Cambridge UP, 2025) Dr. Nathan Munier examines how this rapid increase in resource production shaped the policies available to political actors, providing a fresh understanding of the perpetuation of ZANU-PF rule and the variation in the trajectory of institutions in Zimbabwe compared to other Southern African states. This study places Zimbabwe amongst the overall population of resource-wealthy countries such as Angola, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, especially those that experience a significant increase in production. In doing so, Dr. Munier contributes to the understanding of resource politics, political economy, and comparative African politics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    36 分
  • Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)

    Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)
    2026/01/28
    Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (U California Press, 2025) traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent ideas of deserts across the globe. The book argues that Saharanism—a globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous—has been at the center of all desert-focused enterprises. Encompassing spiritual practices, military thinking, sexual fantasies, experiential quests, extractive economies, and experimental schemes, among other projects, Saharanism has shaped the way deserts not only are constructed intellectually but are acted upon. From nuclear testing to border walls, and much more, Brahim El Guabli articulates some of Saharanism’s consequential manifestations across different deserts. Desert Imaginations draws on the abundant historical literature and cultural output in multiple languages and across disciplines to delineate the parameters of Saharanism. Against Saharanism’s powerful and reductive vision of deserts, the book rehabilitates a tradition of desert eco-care that has been at work in desert Indigenous people’s literary, artistic, scholarly, and ritualistic practices. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Brahim El Guabli to talk about Saharanism, energy extraction, borders, and the ways deserts have been imagined as zones of sacrifice and permission. Brahim El Guabli also reflected on how these imaginaries shape migration, war, and ecological futures—from North Africa to Gaza. Brahim El Guabli is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    50 分
  • Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    2026/01/28
    Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (Bloomsbury, 2025) pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence. From the imperial Royal Niger Company’s charter in the 1890s through to commercial developments in the 1960s, the United Africa Company – a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation – became the largest firm in West Africa, involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector, and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and urban real-estate across a vast region. Drawing on the UAC’s archive, the book reproduces an array of visual material – from photographs of streetscapes and everyday life to civic reports and city plans – and presents these alongside critical discussions to reveal an alternative account of the architecture of the region in contrast to more state-focused histories. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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    41 分