New Books in African Studies

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Africa about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
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Episodes
  • Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)

    Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)
    Jul 31 2024
    Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method. 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 hr and 3 mins
  • Will Urban Youth Fundamentally Change African Politics?

    Will Urban Youth Fundamentally Change African Politics?
    Jul 31 2024
    Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Africa are contesting marginalization and claiming citizenship, and set out the broader context that led to Kenya’s youth-led protests of June/July 2024. They also push back against simple binaries that depict the youth as either a problem or a solution – the reality, they point out, is both more nuanced and more interesting. Amy Patterson is Professor of Politics and the Director of the Office of Civic Engagement at the University of the South and Megan Hershey is a Professor of Political Science at Whitworth University in Spokane Washington. Along with Professor Tracy Kuperus, Professors Patterson and Hershey have published an important new book on Africa’s Urban Youth: Challenging Marginalization, Claiming Citizenship (Cambridge UP, 2023). Their work breaks new ground based on in-depth research in a number of African countries, and is sure to be a touchstone for the emerging literature on youth politics for years to come. Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! 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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    39 mins
  • Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

    Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
    Jul 24 2024
    Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable. In Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net research—to reveal how the development of this intervention was deeply enmeshed with the emergence of the contemporary global health enterprise. While public health workers initially conceived of nets as a stopgap measure that could be tailored to impoverished, rural health systems in the early 1980s, nets became standardised market goods with the potential to save lives and promote economic development globally. This shift attracted donor resources for malaria control amid the rise of neoliberal regimes in international development, but it also perpetuated a paradigm of fighting malaria and poverty at the level of individual consumers. Africans' experiences with insecticide-treated nets illustrate the limitations of this paradigm and provide a warning for the precariousness of malaria control efforts today. Drawing on archival, published, and oral historical evidence from three continents, Dr. Moore-Sheeley reveals the important role Africans have played in shaping global health science and technology. In placing both insecticide-treated nets and Africa at the center of global health history, this book sheds new light on how and why commodity-based health interventions have become so entrenched as solutions to global disease control as well as the challenges these interventions pose for at-risk populations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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 hr and 2 mins
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