African Studies - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Americans Are Coming!

Sun, 15 Jan 2012

The Americans Are Coming! (2012)
Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

By Robert Trent Vinson

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and “American Negroes”—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.

Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as “honorary whites” exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish “Africa for Africans,” liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle.

The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Americans+Are+Coming%21.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

A Practical Guide to HIV/AIDS in Africa

Sun, 01 Jan 2012

A Practical Guide to HIV/AIDS in Africa (2012)
The Disease, Its Prevention, and Basic Home Care

By Darrell E. Ward

A Practical Guide to HIV/AIDS in Africa: The Disease, Its Prevention, and Basic Home Care is a comprehensive primer about HIV/AIDS tailored for Africans. It draws on Darrell E. Ward's experience in southern and West Africa working with Africans fighting the AIDS epidemic and conducting HIV education. Ward describes the virus and the evidence concerning its origins, and explains HIV infection and its possible prevention and treatment. In addition, he suggests ways to overcome stigma and to educate young people about human sexuality and the threat of HIV.

Written with support from the American Foundation for AIDS Research, this guide provides comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention information and explains how vaccines work and how they are tested. A chapter on antiretroviral therapy describes the drugs that can control HIV/AIDS and that are becoming available in Africa through the World Health Organization. Another chapter describes the clinical trials process.

Filled with practical information about living with HIV and about caring for people with AIDS in resource-limited settings, A Practical Guide to HIV/AIDS in Africa is an indispensable reference for African medical students, nurses, social and health workers, journalists, and secondary-school science teachers, as well as HIV/AIDS-related nongovernmental organizations, school principals, workers for governments that conduct national AIDS programs, and people living with HIV/AIDS and their caregivers.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/082141657X.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Our New Husbands Are Here

Mon, 10 Oct 2011

Our New Husbands Are Here (2011)
Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

By Emily Lynn Osborn

In Our New Husbands Are Here, Emily Lynn Osborn investigates a central puzzle of power and politics in West African history: Why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with colonization? Osborn addresses this question by exploring the relationship of the household to the state. By analyzing the history of statecraft in the interior savannas of West Africa (in present-day Guinea-Conakry), Osborn shows that the household, and women within it, played a critical role in the pacifist Islamic state of Kankan-Baté, enabling it to endure the predations of the transatlantic slave trade and become a major trading center in the nineteenth century. But French colonization introduced a radical new method of statecraft to the region, one that separated the household from the state and depoliticized women’s domestic roles. This book will be of interest to scholars of politics, gender, the household, slavery, and Islam in African history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Our+New+Husbands+Are+Here.
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The Anatomy of a South African Genocide

Fri, 16 Sep 2011

The Anatomy of a South African Genocide (2011)
The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples

By Mohamed Adhikari

In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the ‡Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, “We have been made into nothing.” His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter-gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism. Until relatively recently, the extermination of the Cape San peoples has been treated as little more than a footnote to South African narratives of colonial conquest.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dutch-speaking pastoralists who infiltrated the Cape interior dispossessed its aboriginal inhabitants. In response to indigenous resistance, colonists formed mounted militia units known as commandos with the express purpose of destroying San bands. This ensured the virtual extinction of the Cape San peoples. In The Anatomy of a South African Genocide, Mohamed Adhikari examines the history of the San and persuasively presents the annihilation of Cape San society as genocide.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Anatomy+of+a+South+African+Genocide.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

We Are All Zimbabweans Now

Mon, 12 Sep 2011

We Are All Zimbabweans Now (2011)

By James Kilgore

We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a political thriller set in Zimbabwe in the hopeful, early days of Robert Mugabe’s rise to power in the late 1980s. When Ben Dabney, a Wisconsin graduate student, arrives in the country, he is enamored with Mugabe and the promises of his government’s model of racial reconciliation. But as Ben begins his research and delves more deeply into his hero’s life, he finds fatal flaws. Ultimately Ben reconsiders not only his understanding of Mugabe, but his own professional and personal life.

James Kilgore brings an authentic voice to a work of youthful hope, disillusionment, and unsettling resolution.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/We+Are+All+Zimbabweans+Now.
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After Tears

Thu, 01 Sep 2011

After Tears (2011)

By Niq Mhlongo

Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/After+Tears.
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Child Slaves in the Modern World

Mon, 22 Aug 2011

Child Slaves in the Modern World (2011)

Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century. It contributes to the growing recognition that the stereotypical bonded male slave was in fact a rarity.

Nine of the studies are historical, with five located in Africa and three covering Latin America from the British Caribbean to Chile. One study follows the children liberated in the famous Amistad incident (1843). The remaining essays cover contemporary forms of child slavery, from prostitution to labor to forced soldiering.

Child Slaves in the Modern World adds historical depth to the current literature on contemporary slavery, emphasizing the distinctive vulnerabilities of children, or effective equivalents, that made them particularly valuable to those who could acquire and control them. The studies also make clear the complexities of attempting to legislate or decree regulations limiting practices that appear to have been—and continue to be —ubiquitous around the world.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Child+Slaves+in+the+Modern+World.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Environment at the Margins

Sat, 20 Aug 2011

Environment at the Margins (2011)
Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa. 

Contributors:
Jane Carruthers
Mara Goldman
Amanda Hammar
Jonathan Highfield
David McDermott Hughes
Roderick P. Neumann
Rob Nixon
Anthony Vital
Laura Wright

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Environment+at+the+Margins.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Screening Morocco

Thu, 05 May 2011

Screening Morocco (2011)
Contemporary Film in a Changing Society

By Valérie K. Orlando

Since 1999 and the death of King Hassan II, Morocco has experienced a dramatic social transformation. Encouraged by the more openly democratic climate fostered by young King Mohammed VI, filmmakers have begun to explore the sociocultural and political debates of their country while also seeking to document the untold stories of a dark past. Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society focuses on Moroccan films produced and distributed from 1999 to the present.

Moroccan cinema serves as an all-inclusive medium that provides a sounding board for a society that is remaking itself. Male and female directors present the face of an engaged, multiethnic and multilingual society. Their cinematography promotes a country that is dynamic and connected to the global sociocultural economy of the twenty-first century. At the same time, they seek to represent the closed, obscure past of a nation’s history that has rarely been told, drawing on themes such as human rights abuse, the former incarceration of thousands during the Lead Years, women’s emancipation, poverty, and claims for social justice.

Screening Morocco will introduce American readers to the richness in theme and scope of the cinematic production of Morocco.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Screening+Morocco.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

Fri, 15 Apr 2011

Christianity and Public Culture in Africa (2011)

Edited by Harri Englund

Christianity and Public Culture in Africa takes readers beyond familiar images of religious politicians and populations steeped in spirituality. It shows how critical reason and Christian convictions have combined in surprising ways as African Christians confront issues such as national constitutions, gender relations, and the continuing struggle with HIV/AIDS.

The wide-ranging essays included here explore rural Africa and the continent’s major cities, colonial and missionary legacies, and mass media images in the twenty-first century. They also reveal the diversity of Pentecostalism in Africa and highlight the region’s remarkable denominational diversity. Scholars and students alike will find these essays timely and impressive.

The contributors demonstrate how the public significance of Christianity varies across time and place. They explore rural Africa and the continent’s major cities, and colonial and missionary situations, as well as mass-mediated ideas and images in the twenty-first century. They also reveal the plurality of Pentecostalism in Africa and keep in view the continent’s continuing denominational diversity. Students and scholars will find these topical studies to be impressive in scope.

Contributors: Barbara M. Cooper, Harri Englund, Marja Hinfelaar, Nicholas Kamau-Goro, Birgit Meyer, Michael Perry Kweku Okyerefo, Damaris Parsitau, Ruth Prince, James A. Pritchett, Ilana van Wyk

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Christianity+and+Public+Culture+in+Africa.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.