Podcasts · Society & Culture

New Books in African Studies

Marshall Poe

300 episodes

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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Episodes page 2 of 6

  1. Stephen Onyango Ouma, "Africa Unbound: Decolonial Pathways to Sovereignty and Liberation" (Brill, 2026)

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 865

    I had a substantive conversation with Dr. Stephen Onyango Ouma, author of Africa Unbound: Decolonial Pathways to Sovereignty and Liberation (Brill, 2026). He explained that, despite achieving political independence,…

  2. Hilary Matfess, "After Liberation: Women and the Politics of Expectations in Rebel-to-Party Transitions" (Stanford UP, 2026)

    · 49 min · Episode 864

    War offers opportunities for women to liberate their communities and build a better life for themselves. When women join rebel groups, they often take on new roles, cultivate new social networks, and develop new…

  3. Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 863

    The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In The Letter of…

  4. Emmanuel Ofuasia, "Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics" (Springer, 2024)

    · 1 h 35 min · Episode 862

    Correction: In the interview, the host mistakenly mentioned that Prof. Ofuasia is teaching the University of Pretoria. In reality, Prof Ofuasia is currently a decoloniality research associate at the University of…

  5. Michael Allan, "Cinema before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers" (Fordham UP, 2026)

    · 33 min · Episode 861

    Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham UP, 2026) investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the…

  6. Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)

    · 1 h 02 min · Episode 860

    Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures.…

  7. Nana Osei-Opare, "Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    · 45 min · Episode 166

    Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black…

  8. Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    · 50 min · Episode 858

    What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the…

  9. Maria A. Sanchez, "Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts" (Cornell UP, 2026)

    · 48 min · Episode 857

    In Deference and Divergence in Regional Human Rights Courts (Cornell UP, 2026), Dr. Maria A. Sanchez tackles a central tension in global governance: how international human rights courts balance their mandates with the…

  10. Lauren M. MacLean, "Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026)

    · 1 h 24 min · Episode 856

    In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly changing climate, many…

  11. Jessica Ann Levy, "Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 855

    Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics, (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), traces the rise of Black empowerment politics in the United States and Africa. On a cold January…

  12. Selina Nwulu, "Black Climates: Notes on Race, Our Environment, and Visions for Equitable Futures" (Chatto & Windus, 2025)

    · 49 min · Episode 854

    Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis, despite contributing very little to it. For a long time, the crisis…

  13. Sandra E. Greene, “Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition” (Indiana UP, 2017)

    · 45 min · Episode 852

    In today’s podcast we talked to Dr. Sandra Greene about her book Slave Owners of West Africa. Decision Making in the Age of Abolition published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. In this book Dr. Greene presents us…

  14. Alice Wiemers, "Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2021)

    · 58 min · Episode 102

    Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a different starting point? In Village Work: Development and Rural…

  15. Why Senegal’s Democracy Survived

    · 41 min · Episode 851

    In 2024, Senegal faced a severe constitutional and electoral crisis. The presidential vote was postponed, tensions escalated, and fears of democratic breakdown intensified. Yet democracy held. Why? In this episode of…

  16. Wendy Wolford, "The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique" (U California Press, 2025)

    · 1 h 10 min · Episode 850

    Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive…

  17. Carl Death, "African Climate Futures" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    · 1 h 04 min · Episode 849

    This episode is brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. African Climate Futures (Oxford UP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how…

  18. Nadine Gordimer: “Living in South Africa’s Interregnum” James Lecture, October 14, 1982

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 848

    In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit Nadine Gordimer’s James Lecture on the political landscape of South Africa, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982. In 1982, resistance…

  19. Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

    · 54 min · Episode 847

    Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté…

  20. Florian Wagner, "Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    · 54 min · Episode 1229

    Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the…

  21. Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    · 53 min · Episode 134

    Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000…

  22. Todd Cleveland, "Africa and the Olympics: Winning Away from the Podium" (Ohio UP, 2024)

    · 34 min · Trailer

    At the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (held in 2021 due to COVID-19), the fifty-four African countries that participated finished the tournament with the lowest medal haul for any continent, continuing a historic trend since…

  23. Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    · 58 min · Episode 843

    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…

  24. Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    · 1 h 22 min · Episode 842

    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…

  25. Nathan Munier, "Zimbabwe's Diamond Trade: The State, Resource Politics and Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    · 38 min · Episode 841

    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…

  26. Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    · 38 min · Episode 840

    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…

  27. Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)

    · 46 min · Episode 839

    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.…

  28. Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    · 47 min · Episode 838

    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…

  29. Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 837

    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…

  30. Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)

    · 59 min · Episode 836

    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.…

  31. Jeffrey Ahlman, "Ghana: A Political and Social History" (Zed Books, 2023)

    · 43 min · Episode 185

    Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing longue durée national histories. Especially in the wake of the global history wave, national histories can seem decidedly 20th century. But…

  32. Charles G. Thomas, "Ujamaa's Army: The Creation and Evolution of the Tanzania People's Defence Force, 1964-1979" (Ohio UP, 2024)

    · 58 min · Episode 318

    The immediate postcolonial moment brought both promise and peril for the states of Africa and their security. The process of decolonization generated instability, and the emergent Cold War caught up the still-fragile…

  33. Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

    · 47 min · Episode 172

    Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of…

  34. Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    · 51 min · Episode 181

    What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization…

  35. Sara Byala, "Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 174

    Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became ubiquitous across the continent, and what this reveals about the…

  36. Riley Linebaugh, "Curating the Colonial Past: The 'Migrated Archives' and the Struggle for Kenya's History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    · 48 min · Episode 235

    In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged…

  37. Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French

    · 48 min · Episode 829

    The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa's pivotal role in shaping world…

  38. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, "Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    · 53 min · Episode 828

    Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These…

  39. Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery, "Fela: Music Is the Weapon" (Amistad Press, 2025)

    · 1 h 25 min · Episode 827

    A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat. In Fela: Music Is the Weapon…

  40. Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)

    · 59 min · Episode 625

    In Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford UP, 2020), Peace A. Medie studies the domestic implementation of international norms by examining how and why two…

  41. Philip Janzen, "An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean" (Duke UP, 2025)

    · 59 min · Episode 825

    In An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025), Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French colonial…

  42. Ali Anooshahr, "Slavery in the Early Mughal World: The Life and Thoughts of Jawhar Aftabachi (1520s–1580s)" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    · 55 min · Episode 824

    Jawhar Aftabachi was enslaved as a child by the Ottomans in the Black Sea region in the early sixteenth century. He was then sold to the Ottoman admiral Selman Reis, who took him with his fleet to Egypt and Yemen…

  43. Anny Gaul, "Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato" (U California Press, 2025)

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 823

    By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers,…

  44. Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

    · 1 h 04 min · Episode 326

    Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted?…

  45. Marc Sommers, "We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 821

    We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone (U Georgia Press, 2023) by Dr. Marc Sommers is at once a history of a nation, the story of a war, and the saga of downtrodden young people and three…

  46. Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    · 49 min · Episode 820

    The Sahel has become a focal point of international security interventions, with external actors providing extensive security force assistance (SFA) to local military, police, and paramilitary forces. Securitizing the…

  47. Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré, "African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996)" (Leuven UP, 2025)

    · 46 min · Episode 819

    Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio…

  48. Killian Clarke, "Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 818

    Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? Marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal…

  49. Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami

    · 34 min · Episode 817

    Transcript of the interview Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior…

  50. Jessica Catherine Reuther, "The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940" (Indiana UP, 2025)

    · 1 h 11 min · Episode 816

    From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters…

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