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72662 results in African studies

Page 1 of 3634

A Man of the World
  • Tom Mboya, the Cold War and Decolonization in Kenya
  • Daniel Branch
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026

Aiding Autocrats
  • Migration Management, Governance, and Repression in Africa
  • Kelsey P. Norman, Nicholas R. Micinski
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Migration management aid has increased exponentially since 2016, often funding repression in the process. Drawing on global datasets and in-depth country case studies of Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan, Kelsey P. Norman and Nicholas R. Micinski present a theoretical framework for this form of foreign assistance. This study traces the historical roots and evolution of migration management aid, explaining its politics, its impact on governance, and its long-lasting, deleterious effects on migrants, refugees, and citizens alike. While wealthy countries tout migration management aid as a way of increasing development and stopping emigration from the Global South, Aiding Autocrats exposes how this type of assistance funds authoritarianism by perpetuating colonial systems of extraction and repression and allowing local elites to leverage aid for their own purposes. Aiding Autocrats is an essential contribution to scholarship on migration management, foreign aid, development, and democratization as well as Middle Eastern, African, and European politics.

Seeds of Solidarity
  • African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana
  • Nicole A. Burrowes
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Seeds of Solidarity is a study of British Guiana amid a wave of Caribbean uprisings that brought modern politics to colonial spaces during the 1930s. It explores the historical power of a movement forged by people at the edges of empire during economic, political, and environmental crises. African- and Indian-Guianese youth, women, and men who worked on sugar plantations led a series of labor uprisings, despite attempts to turn these racialized communities against each other. Rather than erasing identities, their 'overlapping diasporas' signify how solidary can emerge without sameness, and how this process challenged the British Empire and reshaped Caribbean politics. This important work unites Caribbean history, African Diaspora and South Asian Diaspora studies, histories of racial capitalism and labor movements, gender studies, and the politics of colonialism and empire in the post-indenture period. It offers a model of resistance in today's era of deepening racial and economic inequality, fascism, and climate emergency.

Adjudicating African Women's Rights
  • The Jurisprudence of the ECOWAS Court
  • Maame Efua Addadzi-Koom
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The book provides valuable insights into the landscape of women's rights in West Africa through the transformative decisions made by the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice (ECOWAS Court). Originally established to foster socio-economic integration, the ECOWAS Court has evolved into Africa's premier regional human rights court. With nearly 90% of its decisions addressing human rights issues, the ECOWAS Court now surpasses the African Commission – the continent's longest-standing human rights body – in the number of human rights cases it handles. It offers a compelling analysis of the ECOWAS Court's women's rights jurisprudence, an often-overlooked but essential aspect of the Court's human rights mandate. Grounded in the due diligence principle and the Maputo Protocol, the book sheds light on how adjudicating women's rights cases promotes the global gender equality agenda and challenges state actions that undermine human rights.

An Anticolonial Development
  • Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa
  • Elisa Prosperetti
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • In what measure could education be an agent of African freedom? Combining histories of race, economics, and education, Elisa Prosperetti examines this question in two West African contexts, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, from the 1890s to the 1980s. She argues that a Black Atlantic perspective changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling's essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. Rejecting colonial exploitation of the African body, proponents of anticolonial development instead claimed the mind as the site of economic productivity for African people. An Anticolonial Development shows how, in the middle of the twentieth century, Africans proposed an original understanding of development that fused antiracism to economic theory, and human dignity to material productivity.

Competing for Soft Power
  • China’s Image Making in Africa
  • Maria Repnikova
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Through the critical case study of Ethiopia, Maria Repnikova examines the ambitious but disjointed display of Chinese diplomatic influence in Africa. In doing so, she develops a new theoretical approach to understanding China's practice of soft power, identifying the core mechanisms as tangible enticement with material and experiential offerings, ideational promotion of values, visions, and governance practices, and censorial power over the production and dissemination of China narratives. Through in-depth field work, including interviews and focus groups, Repnikova builds a clear picture of the uneven implementation and reception of this image-making, in which Chinese messengers can improvise official agendas, and Ethiopian recipients can strategically appropriate and negotiate Chinese power. Contrary to popular claims about China replacing the West in the Global South, this innovative research reveals the successes, but also the inconsistencies and limitations of Chinese influence, as well as the ever-present shadow of the West in mediating soft-power encounters.

The Cambridge History of African American Poetry
  • Edited by Keith D. Leonard
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The Cambridge History of African American Poetry provides an authoritative chronicle of the unifying world-building practices of community and artistry of African American poets in the United States since the arrival of Africans on these shores. It traces the evolution and cohesion of the tradition from the religious songs and written publications of enslaved poets who have come to be some of the most important figures in American literary culture. It conveys the stories of individual well-known figures in new ways and introduces less-well known writers and movements to clarify what makes African American poetry a cohesive tradition. It also presents a comprehensive and unique account of literary communities and artistic movements. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of African American Poetry offers an ambitious history of the full artistic range and social reach of the tradition.

British Black and Asian Poetry
  • Race, Aesthetics and Politics 1970–2023
  • Omaar Hena
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • This book examines a wide sweep of prominent Black and Asian British poets, from Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean 'Binta' Breeze through David Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, and Jason Allen-Paisant. Throughout, Omaar Hena demonstrates how these poets engage with urgent crises surrounding race and social inequality over the past fifty years, spanning policing and racial violence in the 1970s and 1980s, through poetry's cultural recognition in the 1990s and 2000s by museums, the 2012 London Olympics, the publishing scene, and awards and prizes, as well as continuing social realities of riots and uprisings. In dub poetry, dramatic monologues, ekphrasis, and lyric, Hena argues that British Black and Asian poets perform racial politics in conditions of spiraling crisis. Engaged and insightful, this book argues that poetry remains a vital art form in twenty-first-century global Britain. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Protective Clubs
  • How Leaders Cooperate in African Regional Organizations
  • Christina Cottiero
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • How do African leaders cooperate through regional intergovernmental organizations (RIOs) to manage political and security threats? Do the particular interests of heads of state really matter for explaining how these organizations address crises and intervene in their members' domestic affairs? Protective Clubs reveals how presidents across Africa cooperate in RIOs to protect themselves from threats, such as military coups. Cottiero argues that heads of state concerned with their personal survival often treat RIOs as bases for organizing, in essence, mutual protection clubs based on reciprocity. Leaders who cooperate and maintain 'good standing' with co-members are more likely to receive back-up during crises, while leaders who destabilized co-members are more likely to be abandoned or punished. Employing original datasets on security interventions and leader exile, interviews, and Nigerian presidential archive records, Protective Clubs shows how collusion among leaders matters not just for particular leaders, but for regional stability and democracy.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context
  • Edited by James Ogude
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Context offers a compelling and comprehensive reading of the various contexts pivotal to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's practice as a writer. Ngugi drew a complex link between his role as a writer and the contexts within which his works are produced. The desire to come to terms with the past and the shifting historical process in his country is evident throughout his work. The volume shows that, for a writer whose work is steeped in biographical life experiences and historical events, context is even more special. It must be recovered through imagination and re-imagined as part of Ngugi's self-writing. One of the aims of this volume is to displace the notion of context as a reified site of retrieval and self-evident knowledge, and also to see how this sense of context offers readers of his vital writings new and disruptive ways of re-reading Ngugi's texts.

The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise
  • Pritish Behuria
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Drawing on a decade of research and more than 580 interviews, this innovative political economy case study explores Rwanda's bold attempt to transform its economy after the 1994 genocide into one of the most rapidly growing countries in Africa. Pritish Behuria offers a multi-sector analysis of how globalisation and domestic politics shape contemporary development challenges. This study critically analyses the Rwandan Patriotic Front's ambitions to reshape Rwanda into a regional services hub while grappling with foreign dependency, elite vulnerability and limited financial resources. Through extensive analysis of the political economy of multiple sectors and the macro-economy, Behuria uses the Rwandan case as a window into answering why structural transformation remains so elusive on the continent. The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise provides fresh insights into highlighting the contemporary challenges facing African countries as they integrate into the global economy. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Disability and Distribution
  • Becoming a Valuable Person in Kinshasa
  • Clara Devlieger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Set in the postcolonial city of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnography explores how people with disabilities navigate debates about the just distribution of resources where there is little state organised welfare, and public perception of disability swings between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Tracing a historic increase of disability due to polio and its long-term effects, this book examines two controversial livelihood activities that serve as informal alternatives to state support: a specialized form of international border brokerage across the Congo River, and a unique practice of bureaucratized begging that imitates state tax collection and humanitarian fundraising. Clara Devlieger examines how such activities shape ways that disabled people conceive the idea of becoming 'valuable people' in local terms: by supporting loved ones, many achieve high esteem against expectations, while adapting exclusionary models of urban personhood to include disability. Devlieger offers a new understanding of the complex dynamic between the imagined role of the state, international discourses of rights, and local experiences of disability.

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Empire
  • Edited by Anna Brickhouse, Susan Gillman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • The story of American literature and empire goes beyond the broad historical periodization of empire to reimagine that history. The central terms American and literature have always been tied up in US empire as well as other empires in the Americas. The word 'America,' itself the product of inter-imperial intellectual rivalry, claims the name of an entire hemisphere for one country therein. To understand the full history of American literature and empire is to recognize its deep, strategically obscure, and often disavowed imperial contexts that in turn require differentially transatlantic, hemispheric, and global frameworks of analysis. This collection thus takes a sceptical stance toward its own geographical referent. Literature has a long and continuing imperial history as empire's proxy. These essays cover canonical authors such as Cooper, Melville, Whitman, and Baldwin as well as lesser-known writers, including emergent artists focused on world-making with a reparative, speculative attention to the future.

The Cambridge Companion to Ignatius Sancho
  • Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe, Kristina Huang
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • One of the largest archives of writing by an eighteenth-century Black individual, this volume not only connects the letters of Ignatius Sancho to their social and historical contexts but also highlights their cultural and aesthetic significance. Offering an interdisciplinary range of perspectives on Sancho and his letters from across literary, historical, and cultural studies, and authored by scholars, archivists, and performers alike, it provides the first authoritative, accessible resource focused exclusively on Sancho's life and writing. Building on established connections to abolitionism and the aesthetics of sentiment, it breaks new ground by considering Sancho's continuing significance for Black British society specifically, and UK literature and history generally.

Alejo Carpentier in Context
  • Edited by Anke Birkenmaier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Alejo Carpentier in Context examines one of the greatest novelists of Latin American literature in the 20th century. The Cuban Carpentier was one of the regions firmest supporters of the Cuban Revolution yet was revealed later to have hidden important details of his biography. A polymath of encyclopedic knowledge, contributions to this book showcase his influence, not only as a novelist but also as a musicologist, writer of ballet scenarios, radio broadcaster, opera aficionado and expert in modernist architecture. This volume offers perspectives on Carpentier's concept of the marvelous real, which later morphed into magical realism, as well as on the baroque as a defining characteristic of Latin American culture. Debates focus on Carpentier's role as a public intellectual in Cuba and abroad, on new revelations about his biography and readings of his major novels, introducing ecocritical perspectives, theories of intermediality and recent philosophies of history.

Fashioning Futures
  • Uncertainty and Young Women's Livelihoods in Urban Nigeria
  • Juliet Gilbert
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Through vibrant ethnographic storytelling, this study reveals how young women capitalise on uncertainty in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria, to realise respectable futures. Exploring young women's daily activities across different sites from the house to church, sewing shops and beauty salons, Fashioning Futures examines the complex ways in which various forms of uncertainty permeate life in a city shaped by Pentecostal fervour and patriarchal conservatism. Juliet Gilbert demonstrates how young women actively engage with forms of uncertainty such as illusion, dissimulation and fakery to present themselves as respectable urbanites and work towards marriage. Revealing young women's centrality in the construction of urban lifeworlds in contemporary Nigeria, Gilbert re-casts youthhood in Africa, both as an analytical category and as a time of experience.

Nuer Messianic Judaism
  • Truth and Mediation in the Ethiopia-South Sudan Borderlands
  • Yotam Gidron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • The Messianic Jews of Ethiopia's Gambella region are Evangelical Christian Zionists who adhere to various Jewish practices and understand their faith as authentically emulating the faith of the first followers of Jesus Christ. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in this region, Yotam Gidron traces here the rise and evolution of Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish faiths amongst Nuer communities in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands. This study approaches processes of religious change from the perspective of believers, examining their pursuits of knowledge and transnational connectivity. In doing so, Gidron considers everyday dilemmas concerning spiritual mediation and truth, as they emerged in relation to church genealogies, Christian literacy, modes of prayer and praise, bloodlines, cattle, and the constitution of various human and divine relationships. As a result, he offers timely insights on spiritual and political life at the global margins, and on contemporary African attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.

  • 4 - Regional and Local Political Belonging

  • from Part I - The Colonial Encounter and the (Re)making of Political Communities
  • Nathalie Raunet, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    Political Belonging in the Ghana–Togo Borderlands
    Published online:
    20 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026, pp 82-124

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of political belonging and the making of political communities by looking at how validation but also contestation are framed at the local and regional levels. By tracing the competing definitions of the notion of ‘seniority’ across time and actors in chieftaincy disputes, I evidence that seniority is used as a central notion on which power depends. The competing criteria to establish seniority have been used to construct new political communities with alternative allegiances. The most recurring and enduring principles across time and scales to construct political communities appear to be those related to indigeneity, oral tradition and genealogy. In order to emphasize the scalar logic at play, the chapter emphasizes the similarities in the narratives appearing at the regional level (Ewe-speaking southeast Ghana) and the local level (in the dukɔ of Dzodze), and will trace this logic from the 1910s to the 2010s, based on the Commission of Enquiry chaired by Sir Francis G. Crowther in 1912. This chapter will therefore look at power dynamics and disputes between Anloga, Dzodze and other dukɔwo in southeast Ghana in the first half of the twentieth century.

Page 1 of 3634