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1019 results in African studies

Page 1 of 51

African Literature in Transition
  • The Archive of African Literature, 1800–2000
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by James Ogude, Neil ten Kortenaar
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025

African Literature in Transition
  • Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960–2015
  • Volume 4
  • Edited by Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Cajetan Iheka
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    01 November 2026

African Literature in Transition
  • Print Cultures and African Literature, 1860–1960
  • Volume 3
  • Edited by Stephanie Newell, Karin Barber
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea  and Arabic languages, it explores their interactions as well as their divergent audiences. It is grounded in the material world of local presses, printers, publishers, writers and readers, but also traces wider networks of exchange as some texts travelled to distant places. African print culture is an emerging field of great vitality, and contributors to this volume are among those who have inspired its development. This volume moves the subject forward onto new ground, and invites literary scholars, historians and anthropologists to contribute to the on-going collaborative effort to explore it.

Commodities and Literature
  • Edited by Sudesh Mishra, Caitlin Vandertop
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2025
    Print publication:
    31 October 2025
  • Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?

Photography and Film in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee
  • Hermann Wittenberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Speaking about his early experiments with the camera, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee acknowledged the seminal influence of images on his writing: 'The marks of photography and of the cinema are all over my work, from the beginning.' This book presents an archivally grounded examination of the influence of the camera on Coetzee's creative practice, providing insights that can help us read the novels in new ways. In this comprehensive examination of the formative role that photographic images play in Coetzee's oeuvre, Wittenberg offers evidence from biographical and archival sources, Coetzee's own critical writings, and the whole range of fictions themselves to gauge the extent of Coetzee's visual imagination. This book argues that the images that Coetzee writes into his fictions are charged with an affective and ethical force that connects them to larger questions relating to the truth, a relationship in which the autobiographical self is implicated.

Curating the Colonial Past
  • The ‘Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History
  • Riley Linebaugh
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 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 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 presents the first full length exploration of these 'migrated archives', chronicling the struggle between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past. Neither displayed nor destroyed, Riley Linebaugh explores how these records formed an archival limbo in which the British government delayed moral and legal judgement of empire. Yet, these practices did not go unchallenged. Linebaugh demonstrates how disputes over the 'migrated archives' facilitated the continuation of anticolonial sovereignty struggles beyond independence, struggles which persist into the present.

Liquid Languages
  • Constructing Languages in Late Modern Cultures of Diffusion
  • Britta Schneider
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Which ideas about language are prevalent in cultures that are not framed in Western nationalist and literate traditions? How do people conceptualise language if speakers of the same community are multilingual, have access to different language resources and only partially share ideas about what is right and wrong in language? This book explores the 'liquid' properties of language, highlighting how languages, as discursive-material assemblages, can differ in their degree of fixity. It provides a linguistic anthropological study of the language ideologies in Belize, where ethnic belonging and language practice do not necessarily match and where stable language norms are not always considered a value. Scrutinising ethnographic data and examinations of local performances of English, it shows that languages emerge in relation to belonging, prestige and material culture. Bringing to the fore liquid language cultures, it provides important additions to our understanding of late modern language assemblages in a globalising world.

Minority Identities in Nigeria
  • Contesting and Claiming Citizenship in the Twentieth Century
  • Oghenetoja Okoh
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Ethnic majorities and minorities are produced over time by the same processes that define national borders and create national institutions. Minority Identities in Nigeria traces how western Niger Delta communities became political minorities first, through colonial administrative policies in the 1930s; and second, by embracing their minority status to make claims for resources and representation from the British government in the 1940s and 50s. This minority consciousness has deepened in the post-independence era, especially under the pressures of the crude oil economy. Blending discussion of local and regional politics in the Niger Delta with the wider literature on developmental colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism, Oghenetoja Okoh offers a detailed historical analysis of these communities. This study moves beyond a singular focus on the experience of crude oil extraction, exploring a longer history of state manipulation and exploitation in which minorities are construed as governable citizens.

The Autocratic Voter
  • Partisanship and Political Socialization under Dictatorship
  • Natalie Wenzell Letsa
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 August 2025
  • In The Autocratic Voter, Natalie Wenzell Letsa explores the motivations behind why citizens in electoral autocracies choose to participate in politics and support political parties. With electoral autocracies becoming the most common type of regime in the modern world, Letsa challenges the dominant materialist framework for understanding political behavior and presents an alternative view of partisanship as a social identity. Her book argues that despite the irrationality and obstacles to participating in autocratic politics, people are socialized into becoming partisans by their partisan friends and family. This socialization process has a cascading effect that can either facilitate support for regime change and democracy or sustain the status quo. By delving into the social identity of partisanship, The Autocratic Voter offers a new perspective on political behavior in electoral autocracies that has the potential to shape the future of these regimes.

Building the African Nation
  • The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa
  • Ethan R. Sanders
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • How did people in East Africa come to see themselves as 'Africans,' and where did these concepts originate from? Utilizing a global intellectual history lens, Ethan Sanders traces how ideas stemming from global black intellectuals of the Atlantic and others shaped the imaginations of East Africans in the early twentieth century. This study centers on the African Association, a trans-territorial pan-Africanist organization that promoted global visions of African unity. No mere precursor to anti-colonial territorial nationalism, the organization eschewed territorial thinking and sought to build a continental African nation from the 1920s to the 1940s, at odds with later forms of nationalism in Africa. Sanders explores in depth the thought of James Aggrey, Paul Sindi Seme, and Julius Nyerere, three major twentieth-century pan-Africanists. This book rethinks definitions of pan-Africanism, demonstrating how expressions of both practical and redemptive pan-Africanism inspired those who joined the African Association and embraced an African identity.

Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu’s Borderlands
  • Conflicts, Connections and Mobility in Central Africa
  • Gillian Mathys
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • The Lake Kivu region, which borders Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has often been defined by scholars in terms of conflict, violence, and separation. In contrast, this innovative study explores histories of continuities and connections across the borderland. Gillian Mathys utilises an integrated historical perspective to trace long-term processes in the region, starting from the second half of the nineteenth century and reaching to the present day. Fractured Pasts in Lake Kivu's Borderlands powerfully reshapes historical understandings of mobility, conflict, identity formation and historical narration in and across state and ecological borders. In doing so, Mathys deconstructs reductive historical myths that have continued to underpin justifications for violence in the region. Drawing on cross-border oral history research and a wealth of archival material, Fractured Pasts embraces a new and powerful perspective of the region's history.

Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992–2020
  • Volume 3
  • Edited by William Orchard
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • This book chronicles important formal and theoretical innovations in Latinx literature during a period when Latinx writers received increasing acclaim while their communities became targets of rising hostility. The essays in this collection show how Latinx writers confront this contradiction by cultivating an understanding of Latinx experience in its transnational dimensions, by recovering histories that were suppressed or erased, by engaging in burgeoning decolonial projects that resist Western epistemologies, and by forming coalitions and solidarities within Latinx groups as well as with other minoritized racial and ethnic communities to challenge state violence and US imperial projects. The book highlights the increasingly important role of genre, form, and media in the contemporary Latinx literature and provides an account of how the shifting demographics and new migrations of Latinx people have not only resulted in new narratives and art but also altered and expanded how we imagine the category 'Latinx.'

The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince
  • Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe
  • Published online:
    24 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • The History of Mary Prince was the first account of the life of a Black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Part of the avalanche of print culture that accompanied the transatlantic abolitionist movement, it has in recent years become an increasingly central text within pedagogy and research on Black history and literature, thanks to its vivid testimonies of Prince's thoughts and feelings about her gendered experience of Caribbean slavery. Embracing and celebrating a growing international scholarly and general interest in African diasporic voices, texts, histories, and literary traditions, this Companion weds contributions from Romanticists, Caribbeanists, and Americanists to showcase the diversity of disciplinary encounters that Prince's narrative invites, as well as its rich and troubled contexts. The first published collection on a single slave narrative or author, the volume is not only an authoritative, highly focused resource for students but also a model for future research.

Kielezo cha Insha
  • Shaaban Robert
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 December 2024
  • The definitive Kiswahili guide to essay writing with pertinent examples.

    Kielezo cha Insha is the earliest guide to essay writing in Kiswahili, published by Wits University Press in 1954.

    After Tanzania's independence in 1961 the book was not available for several decades because of the political and economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

    The book covers pertinent issues in composition writing, including the purpose and types of composition, preparation, structure, language and style, cohesion, objectivity and punctuation. It includes 60 model essays together with Robert's thoughts and perspectives on the issues he addresses. The topics include some of the issues current at the time, such as 'secret marriages', culture, the environment, language and nationhood, patriotism, women's oppression, health, and the meaning of life and death.

    After being out of print for more than sixty years, Wits University Press has reissued the text as a testament to its enduring historical value. Kielezo cha Insha is an example of Robert's educational and pedagogical writing at its best.

Inzuzo
  • Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi
  • Introduction by Athambile Masola
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    16 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 September 2024
  • This classic anthology includes poems about religion, nature, life and praise poems about historical events and prominent figures in the history of Africans.

    Inzuzo is a classic collection of poems, first published in 1943, about religion, nature, life and historical events and prominent figures in the history of Africans. It has five sections: Izabelo (Distributions), Izibongo ezingokufa nokuthwasa komnyaka (Poems about death and the beginning of the year), Izibongo ezingabafi bethu (Poems about the dead), Izibongo ngabawele iilwandle (Poems about people who have travelled overseas) and Ingqokelela (Collection). In each section, Mqhayi proved himself to be a literary author with the ability and skill to transform from a traditional poet to a modern poet. Mqhayi was able to combine modern versification with the diction and artistic form of izibongo (praise poems).

    Mqhayi's poetry is also a storehouse of historical events as in poems like 'Umnyaka omtsha, 1915' ('New Year, 1915'), 'Aa! Zweliyazuza!' ('Hail Great Britain on whom the sun never sets!'), and 'Umfikazi u Charlotte Manyhi Maxeke', a tribute to Charlotte Manyhi Maxeke. In these poems, his style as a praise poet is distinct.

    The poems portray Mqhayi as a religious and social poet. He took an interest in the welfare of his people and embraced African culture. Known as the father of isiXhosa contemporary and traditional poetry, Mqhayi was a well-known imbongi (praise poet) who was revered as Imbongi yeSizwe Jikelele (National Poet).

The Umayyad Empire
  • Andrew Marsham
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    15 March 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2024
  • The Umayyad Empire (644-750 CE) was the first Islamic empire and one of the largest empires of ancient and medieval times, extending over 5,000 miles between the Atlantic Ocean in the West and the Indian Ocean in the East. This book traces the empire's origins to the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Steppe in the centuries before Islam. It explores the dynamics that shaped this formative era for the history of the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The century of Umayyad rule witnessed war with the Eastern Roman Empire, against whom the Umayyads defined their claims to rule as God's deputies on Earth. This was the period in which the Qur'an was compiled, monuments such as the Dome of the Rock were built, and new Islamic and Arab identities developed.

Mission, Race and Colonialism in Malawi
  • Alexander Hetherwick of Blantyre
  • Kenneth R. Ross
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2023
  • Mission, race and colonialism were three forces shaping Malawi's history during the early years of the twentieth century. These three found a concentrated meeting point in the life of Scottish missionary Alexander Hetherwick, who led Blantyre Mission from 1898 to 1928. This book presents a fresh assessment of this towering figure in Malawi's history, contesting the scholarly consensus that Hetherwick betrayed the early ideals of Blantyre Mission by compromising too much with the colonial system that was in force during his leadership. The book assesses the pervasive influence of colonialism, from which Hetherwick was not exempt, and traces the ways in which he resisted such influence through his relentless commitment to the interests of the African community and the inspiration he found in the emergence of the African church.

Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands
  • Daniel K. Thompson
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
  • For a century, the Ethiopian city Jigjiga was known as a dusty hub of cross-border smuggling and a hotbed of rebellion on Ethiopia's eastern frontier. After 2010, it transformed into a post-conflict boomtown, becoming one of Africa's fastest-growing cities and attracting Somali return-migrants from across the globe. This study examines Jigjiga's astonishing transformation through the eyes of its cross-border traders, urban businesspeople, and officials. Daniel K. Thompson follows traders and return-migrants across borders to where their lives collide in the city. Analysing their strategies of mobility and exchange, this study reveals how Ethiopia's federal politics, Euro-American concerns about terrorism, and local business aspirations have intertwined to reshape links between border-making and city-making in the Horn of Africa. To understand this distinctive brand of urbanism, Thompson follows globalized connections and reveals how urbanites in Africa and beyond participate in the “urban borderwork” of constructing, as well as contesting, today's border management regimes.

Bus Station Hustle
  • Transport Work in Urban Ghana
  • Michael Stasik
  • Published online:
    09 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • Bus stations are among the most prominent sites of social and economic activity in Africa. Integral to transport, trade, and exchange over distance, they provide livelihoods for large numbers of people. Through a detailed ethnography of one of Ghana's busiest long-distance bus stations, Michael Stasik explores the dialectical relationship between the ways in which people make the station work and how the station shapes popular economic engagement and social life. Drawing on a dual understanding of 'hustle' as a distinct mode of economic activity and organisation, as well as a marker of complex and sometimes bewildering situations, Stasik challenges dominant views of transport work in urban Africa, especially those wedded to generic notions of 'informality'. Bus Station Hustle offers a nuanced anthropological perspective on the hands-on work in and the institutional workings of an infrastructural hub of mobility and exchange. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

New Sudans
  • Wartime Intellectual Histories in Khartoum
  • Nicki Kindersley
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • Over a million southern Sudanese people fled to Sudan's capital Khartoum during the wars and famines of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This book is an intellectual history of these war-displaced working people's political organising and critical theory during a long conflict. It explores how these men and women thought through their circumstances, tried to build potential political communities, and imagined possible futures. Based on ten years of research in South Sudan, using personal stories, private archives, songs, poetry, photograph albums, self-written histories, jokes and new handmade textbooks, New Sudans follows its idealists' and pragmatists' variously radical, conservative, and creative projects across two decades on the peripheries of a hostile city. Through everyday theories of Blackness, freedom and education in a long civil war, Nicki Kindersley opens up new possibilities in postcolonial intellectual histories of the working class in Africa.

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