Episodes

  • 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)
    Feb 6 2026
    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
    Show More Show Less
    55 mins
  • 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)
    Feb 3 2026
    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
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 20 mins
  • 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)
    Jan 31 2026
    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
    Show More Show Less
    36 mins
  • 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)
    Jan 28 2026
    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
    Show More Show Less
    50 mins
  • 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)
    Jan 28 2026
    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
    Show More Show Less
    41 mins
  • Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Jan 27 2026
    Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conceptual framework of the “Atlantic Crescent” to capture the overlapping encounters between Black, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian Muslims in the United States and the Caribbean. Using rich archival material, such as the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, we learn about 20th century Black Muslim movements such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam as they encounter and engage with South Asian Muslim communities, like the Ahmadiyya movement in the US, as their discourses of global anti-imperial and decolonial struggles shaped or overlapped with each other. The second half of the book takes us to Bermuda to trace the translation of these Black Muslim liberation movements into the Caribbean. By focusing on the flow and encounters of these overlapping diasporas, we learn how anti-imperial and ant-colonial discourses were inhabited by varied South Asian, Black, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, and how organizing, be it around labour and education, framed Islam through Black and Afro-diasporic liberatory registers. Morgan’s sharp analysis of these rich diasporic flows charts new imagined geographies of freedom struggles and resistance. This study will be of interest to scholars who think and write on Islam in the global west and the Caribbean, diaspora studies, anti-colonial and anti-imperial Muslim organizing and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jan 27 2026
    The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (U Chicago Press, 2025) by Professor Toby Green tells the extraordinary story of seventeenth-century West African slave trader Crispina Peres to explore the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived. In 1665, Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave-trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers, the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? In The Heretic of Cacheu, award-winning historian Dr. Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, immersing us in the atmosphere of an otherwise distant setting. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses; styled their clothes; healed themselves from illness; and worshipped, worked, and played. Green renders the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationships between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were already old and tangled, with slaving ports, colonies, and military bases having intermingled over many generations. But Cacheu also profoundly troubled this dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women such as Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. For the first time, through surviving documents recording Peres’s case, The Heretic of Cacheu lets readers experience the reality of this unique place and time through a remarkable act of historical recovery. 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
    Show More Show Less
    44 mins
  • Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)

    Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
    Jan 12 2026
    Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. By examining cultural centers and tracing the journey of these texts, Sienna provides depth to our understanding of a remarkably global and worldly book culture, and its evolving role in the growth of Jewish modernity.While the content of Jewish books has long fascinated scholars, Jewish Books in North Africa shifts our focus to the physical context. These books were not isolated artifacts; they were embedded in cultural networks during a period of religious, political, and cultural transformation. Sienna's work sheds light on the intricate interplay between books and the dynamic world in which they existed. Noam Sienna is the Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar in Jewish Book Arts at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers-New Brunswick. He received his PhD in History and Museum Studies from the University of Minnesota and is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His monograph received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 1 min