Books in the African Histories and Modernities series

This book celebrates Chinua Achebe, one of the most profound and famous African writers of our time, and his widely read masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. The novel remains a "must read" literary text for reasons the many contributors to this book make clear in their astute readings.

African cultures and politics remain significantly affected by precolonial and postcolonial configurations of modernity, as well as hegemonic global systems. This project explores Africa's conversation with itself and the rest of the world, critiquing universalist notions of democratization.

This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making.

This book examines Ghana's Pan-African foreign policy during Nkrumah's rule, investigating how Ghanaians sought to influence the ideologies of African liberation movements through the Bureau of African Affairs, the African Affairs Centre and the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute.

This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient ¿nationalist-military¿ alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled ¿Chimurenga aristocracy.¿ However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe¿s ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the ¿first family¿:Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.

As a study of the history and techniques of African literary texts, this book advances a theory of reciprocity of effects - what it terms 'auto-heteronomy' - to describe the dynamic of formalist activism by which texts anticipate and shape the forces of literary production in advance.

The book examines popular fiction columns, a dominant feature in Kenyan newspapers, published in the twentieth century and examines their historical and cultural impact on Kenyan politics.

As the epicenter of Christianity has shifted towards Africa in recent decades, Pentecostalism has emerged as a particularly vibrant presence on the continent. how Pentecostalism intervenes in key social and political issues, such as citizenship, party politics, development challenges, and identity;

This book offers new perspectives on the history of exploitation in Africa by examining postcolonial misrule as a product of colonial exploitation. It then moves to case studies, drawing lines between colonial subjugation and present-day challenges through essays on Mobutu's Zaire, Nigerian politics, the Italian colonial fascist system, and more.

This book examines Ghana's Pan-African foreign policy during Nkrumah's rule, investigating how Ghanaians sought to influence the ideologies of African liberation movements through the Bureau of African Affairs, the African Affairs Centre and the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute.

60 years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to face a number of challenges, from establishing meaningful democratic institutions to establish social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality. This volume approaches these contemporary African challenges while combating a reflexive and facile Afro-Pessimism.

This book explores the journey that Kenya has travelled as a nation since its independence on December 12, 1963. It seeks to advance understanding of the country's major milestones in the postcolonial period, the challenges and the lessons that can be learned from this experience, and the future prospects.

This book explores the key milestones in education, gender, and policy that Kenya has achieved since independence, the challenges of this experience, and the future prospects.

60 years after independence, African nations still find it difficult to face a number of challenges, from establishing meaningful democratic institutions to establish social structures centered on the advancement of gender equality. This volume approaches these contemporary African challenges while combating a reflexive and facile Afro-Pessimism.

This book offers a thematic study of key debates in the history of the ethnic politics, democratic governance, and minority rights in Nigeria.

During the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, the settler regime imprisoned numerous activists and others it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. This book is the first to look closely at the histories and lived experiences of these political detainees and prisoners, showing how they challenged and negotiated their incarceration.

As the epicenter of Christianity has shifted towards Africa in recent decades, Pentecostalism has emerged as a particularly vibrant presence on the continent. how Pentecostalism intervenes in key social and political issues, such as citizenship, party politics, development challenges, and identity;

This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. There were also profound shifts in the financing and economic role of higher education reflected in the processes of privatization of universities and curricula realignments to meet the shifting demands of the economy.

Ghana has always held a position of primacy in the African political and historical imagination, due in no small part to the indelible impression left president Kwame Nkrumah. This study examines the symbolic strategies he used to construct the Ghanaian state through currency, stamps, museums, flags, and other public icons.

What is distinctive about this book is its interdisciplinary approach towards deciphering the complex meanings of President Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe making it possible to evaluate Mugabe from a historical, political, philosophical, gender, literal and decolonial perspectives. It is concerned with capturing various meanings of Mugabeism.

This volume advances the discussions of leadership in Africa's specific history, culture, economy, and politics. The book promotes an understanding of leadership and its paradoxes and illuminates the conditions under which political leadership has been produced, and how those conditions have shaped leaders.

Set within one of the main objectives of the Economic Partnership Agreements, he also interrogates the prospects and challenges of regional integration in Africa under the regime of transnational accumulation, which the Economic Partnership Agreements represents.

Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Tanure Ojaide's Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics.

Thisbook maintains that South Africa, despite the official end of apartheid in1994, remains steeped in the interstices of coloniality. Tafira explores a range of topicsincluding youth political movement, the social construction of blackness inAzania, and conceptualizations from the Black Liberation Movement.

This book is a historical narrative covering various periods in Sierra Leone's history from the fifteenth century to the end of its civil war in 2002. It entails the history of Sierra Leone from its days as a slave harbor through to its founding as a home for free slaves, and toward its political independence and civil war.

This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people's affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a 'deviant' hairstyle.

Ile Aiye's unifying identity politics through Afro-Carnival performance, is embedded in its dialectical relationship with the rest of Brazil as it takes ownership of its oppressed status by striving for racial equality and economic empowerment.

This book examines the historical and current state of health and the health of the African people, including the Arab North, impacted by such factors as geography and natural elements, cultural and colonial traditions, and competing biomedical and traditional systems.

This book demonstrates that societies experiencing prolonged and severe crises of legitimacy are prone to intense and persistent political violence.