New Books in African Studies Marshall Poe

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks to Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech, about her work on the history and ethnography of mobility and infrastructure in Ghana. Hart’s newest book, Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, 2024), examines how technocrats enforced restrictions around public health, housing, mobility, and other domains in Ghana in the name of modernization. Vinsel and Hart also discuss how humanistic and technical inquiry can be brought together to improve outcomes around everyday human problems around the world.
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Polo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces.
Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.
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On May 29, South Africans voted in the seventh election since the end of political apartheid in the early 1990s. This is the first election in which the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is polling below 50 percent, which could force them into a coalition with one or more other parties to govern the country after the election.
To learn more, we speak with Carolyn Holmes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is an expert on South African politics and the author of The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa (U Michigan Press, 2020).
Find the books, links, and articles we mentioned in this episode on our website, ufahamuafrica.com.
Books, Links, & Articles:


The Black and White Rainbow by Carolyn E. Holmes


“Family of American caught up in Congo failed coup says their son went to Africa on vacation.” by Hannah Schoenbaum and Jessica Donati


“The Politics of “Non-Political” Activism in Democratic South Africa.” by Carolyn E. Holmes


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Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan.
Books, Links and Articles


“Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots.” Analysis by Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly

Darfur Diaspora Association

Keep Eyes On Sudan

Dabanga Sudan

Sudan Tribune


“Tanzania’s Threat to Expel Burundians Sets a Dangerous Precedent.” by Clayton Boeyink and Stephanie Schwartz


“Home, Again: Refugee Return and Post-Conflict Violence in Burundi.” by Stephanie Schwartz


Find out more about the Ufahamu Africa podcast, cohosted by Kim Yi Dionne, associate professor of political science at UC Riverside, and Rachel Beatty Riedl, professor of government at Cornell University.
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Senegalese President Macky Sall has postponed the country’s presidential elections originally scheduled for February 25. It's part of a series of concerning moves by Sall to extend his stay in power. The Ufahamu Africa podcast talks with experts on the topic: Bamba Ndiaye and Michelle D. Gavin.
Bamba Ndiaye is an assistant professor of African studies at Emory University's Oxford College. He is also host of The Africanist podcast and a former Ufahamu Africa non-resident fellow.
Michelle D. Gavin is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has over twenty years of experience in international affairs in government and non-profit roles.
The Ufahamu Africa podcast is cohosted by Kim Yi Dionne, associate professor of political science at UC Riverside, and Rachel Beatty Riedl, professor of government at Cornell University.
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Today I talked to Stuart Reid about his new book The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Knopf, 2023).
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization’s biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help—an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo’s rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960–61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.
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