We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Exploring issues of disability culture, activism, and policy across the African continent, this volume argues for the recognition of African disability studies as an important and emerging interdisciplinary field.
A captivating account of an interracial jazz opera that took apartheid South Africa by storm and marked a turning point in the nation's cultural history.
In a disruptive media landscape characterized by the relentless death of legacy newspapers, Nigeria's Digital Diaspora shows that a country's transnational elite can shake its media ecosystem through distant online citizen journalism.
Reframes the story of modern Ethiopia around the contributions of the Oromo people and the culturally fluid union of communities that shaped the nation's politics and society.
Interrogates the development of the world's first international courts of humanitarian justice and the subsequent "liberation" of nearly two hundred thousand Africans in the nineteenth century.
Offers a radical political interpretation of history that generates fresh insights into the emancipatory potential of ordinary Nigerians and their precolonial cultural institutions
Examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media, with an eye to the stylistic features of these works as well as their contributions to debates on migration.
A work of synthesis on plantation slavery in nineteenth century Sokoto caliphate, engaging with major debates on internal African slavery, on the meaning of the term plantation and on comparative slavery
Examines the importance of South Africa's peaceful transition to democracy, especially in light of Nelson Mandela's belief that cosmopolitan dreams are not only desirable but a binding duty.
Offers a new approach to the study of labor on the subcontinent and globally, questioning the relevance of the predominant wage labor paradigm for Africa and the Global South.
An innovative study of labor relations, particularly the interactions of recruitment agents and migrant workers, in the mining concessions of Wassa, Gold Coast Colony, 1879 to 1909.
Islam, Power, and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin draws on new sources to offer an original approach to the study of land in African history. Documenting the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the institution of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River, the book shows how these waves of changes sweeping the region after 1850 altered local political and social arrangements, with important implications for the ability of elites to control land. Author Assan Sarr argues for a nuanced understanding of land and its historic value in Africa. Moving beyond a recognition of the material value of land, Sarr's analysis highlights its cultural and social worth, pointing out the spiritual associations the land generated and the ways that certain people gained privileged access to those spiritual powers. By emphasizing that the land around the Gambia River both inspired and gave form to a cosmology of ritual and belief, the book points to what might be considered an indigenous tradition of ecological preservation and protection. Assan Sarr is assistant professor of history at Ohio University.
Opens a fresh conversation on the study of the Mau Mau rebellion and Kenyan history by arguing that Mau Mau was a nationalist movement rather than a Kikuyu war.
'Nation as Grand Narrative' offers a methodical analysis of how relations of domination and subordination are conveyed through media narratives of nationhood. Using the typical postcolonial state of Nigeria as a template and engaging with disciplines ranging from media studies, political science, and social theory to historical sociology and hermeneutics, Wale Adebanwi examines how the nation as grand narrative provides a critical interpretive lens through which competition among ethnic, ethnoregional, and ethnoreligious groups can be analyzed. Adebanwi illustrates how meaning is connected to power through ideology in the struggles enacted on the pages of the print media over diverse issues including federalism, democracy and democratization, religion, majority-minority ethnic relations, space and territoriality, self-determination, and threat of secession. Nation as Grand Narrative will trigger further critical reflections on the articulation of relations of domination in the context of postcolonial grand narratives. Wale Adebanwi is associate professor of African American and African studies, University of California-Davis, and a visiting professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
In Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria, Ebenezer Obadare offers an innovative perspective on the idea and reality of civil society. Mobilizing a wide range of concepts and insights from political science, African studies, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, communications theory, and international development, Obadare develops a notion of civil society that radically departs from the literature's axiomatic focus on voluntary civic associations and focuses instead on more informal strategies of resistance, such as humor and silence. Compellingly argued, Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria raises provocative questions on a topic of keen importance for students, scholars, and policymakers.
Ebenezer Obadare is associate professorof sociology at the University of Kansas. He is coeditor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century (James Currey, 2014).
Drawing from accounts of colonial experience in western Kenya, Population, Tradition, and Environmental Control in Colonial Kenya examines the government's efforts to enforce certain land management programs in relation to its initiatives to revive and co-opt African "traditions" in soil conservation and land consolidation programs. Martin Shanguhyia analyzes how these programs were negotiated or contested by the local community; further, he argues that their legacy continues to define the everyday experiences of the rural population in Vihiga County, Western Province, notably in termsof high population densities and diminishing returns from the land. Relying on a rich collection of archival sources as well as oral interviews, the book explores the intersection between government policies, demography, and community traditions within a rapidly declining natural environment and adds significantly to our understanding of Africa's environmental history.
Martin Shanguhyiais assistant professor of history at Syracuse University.