Project MUSE®: African Studies Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in African Studies Review.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 48 (2005) through current issueLatest Articles: African Studies ReviewTWOProject MUSE®African Studies Review1555-24620002-0206Latest articles in African Studies Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa ed. by Dallen J. Timothy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982023
<p></p>
Cultural heritage tourism is recognized as one of the fastest-growing tourism sectors (1). This type of tourism is a branch of cultural, ethnic, and educational special interest tourism, covering various elements of tourist behavior that range from exploring the physical remnants of the past to engaging with contemporary cultural traditions. Therefore, the book Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa, edited by Dallen J. Timothy, is a timely publication that presents an interesting and illuminating discussion on the history, status, and contemporary challenges of cultural heritage tourism in Africa. As the introductory chapter highlights, this form of tourism is among the fastest-growing segments. However, most
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallCultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa ed. by Dallen J. Timothy (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USCultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa ed. by Dallen J. Timothy (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®78032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Deceptive Allure of Luxury Tourism: The Political Economy of Tourism Strategies in Mauritius, Botswana, and Rwanda
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982024
<p></p>
Domestic populations in mass tourist destinations—from Spain to South Africa—regularly protest the negative effects of overtourism. Overtourism, associated with mass tourism strategies, often results in environmental degradation, poor working conditions for local workers, and detrimental effects on the housing market. Mass tourism also results in the over-commodification of local culture and natural resources. To avert the challenges associated with mass tourism, for several decades, multilateral organizations (such as the World Bank) have advised African countries to adopt luxury tourism strategies, which encourage governments to prioritize attracting tourists that may spend more per day (Cattaneo 2009).
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Deceptive Allure of Luxury Tourism: The Political Economy of Tourism Strategies in Mauritius, Botswana, and Rwanda2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Deceptive Allure of Luxury Tourism: The Political Economy of Tourism Strategies in Mauritius, Botswana, and Rwanda2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1588192026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The 32nd New York African Film Festival (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982025
<p></p>
For the past thirty-two years, the New York African Film Festival (NYAFF) has engaged communities locally and internationally, and this year, 2025, the festival was a wonderful fulfillment of that mission. The annual festival has been a space of dialogue, a platform for African and African diasporic voices representing a diversity of experiences. But it has become more than that, as was evident from this year's festival. For many filmmakers and film fans, the festival is also a home.The main festival is held in several spaces, stretching across the entire month of May. It begins in the middle of Manhattan, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Every year, its opening night promises a gorgeous occasion with
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe 32nd New York African Film Festival (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe 32nd New York African Film Festival (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®101152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Working Peoples for Political Change: The 2018/2019 Sudanese Uprising
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982026
<p></p>
In December 2018, demonstrations broke out in multiple cities and rural areas in Sudan, echoing calls for "Freedom, Peace, and Justice." The 2018/19 Sudanese uprising intensified and caught the world's attention as we saw women at the forefront (Figure 1). The world was fascinated by the role of Sudanese women (Bearak 2019; Read 2019), but very little was said about how Sudanese working
Figure 1
Alaa Salah leading revolutionary chants. Photo taken by @lana_hago.
[AI Generated Alt Text] Large crowd holding smartphones and recording a person wearing a white robe standing on a vehicle platform in an urban setting at dusk
peoples collectively overthrew Omar al-Bashir and subverted the militarized Islamist state. How
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallWorking Peoples for Political Change: The 2018/2019 Sudanese Uprising2026-02-05text/htmlen-USWorking Peoples for Political Change: The 2018/2019 Sudanese Uprising2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1776632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone by Marc Sommers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982027
<p></p>
The peacebuilding nongovernmental organization, Conciliation Resources, publishes an excellent series, named Accord. Each issue dissects an armed conflict. Paying the Price—the title of the 2000 issue focusing on Sierra Leone—provides a chronology of the war and presents verbatim (the multiple) peace agreements. It also includes a section with profiles of the key players in the conflict: politicians, warlords, and other protagonists. In We the Young Fighters, Marc Sommers makes a strong case for Bob Marley, John Rambo, and Tupac Shakur to be listed among the conflict's key players.Based on extensive interview material with ex-combatants and civilians in Sierra Leone and among Sierra Leonean refugee populations in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallWe the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone by Marc Sommers (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USWe the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone by Marc Sommers (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®73042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Copper King in Central Africa: Corporate Organization, Labor Relations, and Profitability of Zambia's Rokhana Corporation by Hyden Munene (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982028
<p></p>
Zambia's Copperbelt suffers from no lack of scholarly attention. Situated astride the rich ore deposits of the Katanga Basin, the region has been a reliable source of mineral wealth and social and political developments for at least a millennium. Copper production lubricated Indian Ocean trade networks and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Lunda kingdoms constructed networks of affiliation based on control of extractive rights and technological expertise. When the region attracted European and American investment in the 1930s, the Copperbelt became the focal point for new forms of capitalist production in (then) Northern Rhodesia and emerged as its most important urban center. Throughout the decade
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallCopper King in Central Africa: Corporate Organization, Labor Relations, and Profitability of Zambia's Rokhana Corporation by Hyden Munene (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USCopper King in Central Africa: Corporate Organization, Labor Relations, and Profitability of Zambia's Rokhana Corporation by Hyden Munene (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®81292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Ethnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart ed. by Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter, and Melanie Samson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982029
<p></p>
Gillian Hart is a geographer renowned for critical ethnography with a view towards social change. The edited volume Ethnographies of Power, honoring her legacy in South Africa and elsewhere, celebrates her critical conceptualization of the socio-spatial complexity of economic and political processes. One of the contributing authors, Sharad Chari, writes that Hart "brought to her work lived and scholarly understandings of Asian and South African capitalisms" (55). Chari explains that Hart is capable of offering "powerful" critiques (55), testifying to Hart's ability to engage other paradigms of thought and frameworks of interpretation ever since her earliest writings. Melanie Samson highlights how Hart's research is
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallEthnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart ed. by Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter, and Melanie Samson (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USEthnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart ed. by Sharad Chari, Mark Hunter, and Melanie Samson (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®89582026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982030
<p></p>
Amanda Lock Swarr's Envisioning African Intersex is a groundbreaking contribution not only to intersex studies, but to scholarship on the history of sex, race, and medicine. Among its central themes, the book scrutinizes the trope, uncritically repeated over centuries in medical texts and popular narratives, that intersex is disproportionately common among Black South Africans. Debunking this assertion and critically tracing how it has been repeated and amplified as historical truth alone makes Envisioning African Intersex an incisive and invaluable work of scholarship. But more broadly, the text deftly deconstructs the myriad ways that racial stereotypes and colonial legacies continue to shape the regulation of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallEnvisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USEnvisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine by Amanda Lock Swarr (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®71762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters ed. by Wale Adebanwi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982031
<p></p>
The seminal work of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard focused on "simpler societies." In doing so, they and the anthropologists who followed them intentionally averted their gaze from the modern political institutions of the state, thus ceding the topic to political scientists who were at times purveyors of abstract "macroanalysis" (7). But by the 1990s, some anthropologists had begun to train their eyes on the modern African state, and this volume deepens this line of inquiry by reporting data from contributors' ethnographic fieldwork, mostly conducted between 2000 and 2019. Contributors want to understand the everyday experience of modern democracy and the state through qualitative descriptions of African
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallEveryday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters ed. by Wale Adebanwi (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USEveryday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters ed. by Wale Adebanwi (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®80872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora ed. by Simon Gikandi and R.N. Sandberg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982032
<p></p>
Anthologies of African theatre and performance conventionally assemble a range of dramatic texts from across the expansive geography known as "Africa," however broadly or narrowly defined. Simon Gikandi and R.N. Sandberg further extend the purview of such an anthology by offering "an introduction to the dramas of Africa and the African diaspora" (1). As the inaugural entry in Methuen Drama's "Global Theatre Anthologies" series, this collection provides readers with access to overlooked and often out-of-reach playscripts ranging from an Ancient Egyptian religious pageant (The Triumph of Horus) to the first published African drama (Tekle Hawariat's Fabula: Yawreoch Commedia) to a Guyanese dramatization of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallGlobal Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora ed. by Simon Gikandi and R.N. Sandberg (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USGlobal Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora ed. by Simon Gikandi and R.N. Sandberg (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®82842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Politics, Economy, and Society in Twentieth-Century Nigeria ed. by Ayodeji Olukoju and Tokunbo A. Ayoola (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982033
<p></p>
The contents of this book do not reflect, capture, or represent the title and essence of the book. From the contents, there is a critical misconception of what the twentieth century entails. The twentieth century refers to the years from 1901 to 2000. Therefore, the book should contain events that explain Nigeria's politics, economy, and society from 1901 to 2000. Rather, some chapters, such as Chapters Fourteen and Five, focuses on events outside the twentieth century. For example, Chapter Fourteen—titled "E-voting System and Democratization in Nigeria" by Olamide Samson Adelana—dwell on the E-voting system, the 1999 constitution and the 2010 Electoral Act. The contents of the chapter are ongoing issues in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallPolitics, Economy, and Society in Twentieth-Century Nigeria ed. by Ayodeji Olukoju and Tokunbo A. Ayoola (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USPolitics, Economy, and Society in Twentieth-Century Nigeria ed. by Ayodeji Olukoju and Tokunbo A. Ayoola (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®64732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Countering Violent Extremism in Kenya: Community, State and Security Perspectives by John Mwangi Githigaro (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982034
<p></p>
Countering violent extremism (CVE) has become an increasingly prominent approach to combating the threats of extremism, especially in the years following 9/11. Unlike interventions that rely on military force or "hard power," CVE employs "soft power" strategies that include education and deradicalization programs, as well as a focus on counternarratives and development. CVE tools are often anchored at the community level, as communities are crucially positioned to respond to threats of radicalisation and recruitment. While CVE aims to build "community resilience" to violent extremism (VE), scholarship also highlights how it can inadvertently contribute to the marginalization and securitization of vulnerable
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallCountering Violent Extremism in Kenya: Community, State and Security Perspectives by John Mwangi Githigaro (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USCountering Violent Extremism in Kenya: Community, State and Security Perspectives by John Mwangi Githigaro (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®76072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Rose A. Sackeyfio (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982035
<p></p>
The book cover of African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century presents a powerful visual metaphor by integrating a black woman's profile with an urban skyline. The design skillfully symbolizes the intersection of homeland memories and new diasporic experiences, with the cityscape emerging from the woman's head representing this duality. The smiling portrait's expression conveys optimism, a thoughtfulness that aligns with the book's intellectual focus.This collection examines African migrants' experiences as they face racism, economic hardship, and cultural alienation abroad, which exposes the stark contrast between expectations and reality. Sackeyfio's introduction
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallAfrican Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Rose A. Sackeyfio (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USAfrican Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Rose A. Sackeyfio (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®89292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Beauty in African Thought: Critical Perspectives on the Western Idea of Development ed. by Bolaji Bateye et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982036
<p></p>
In a neoliberal world, Beauty in African Thought: Critical Perspectives on the Western Idea of Development introduces African thought and philosophy as a distinct paradigm that not only deserves to be seriously considered but could also offer a real alternative developmental framework to counter the inequality and injustice created by the dominant paradigm. The book showcases how African thought and philosophy could be integrated through genuine intercultural exchange to address the exclusivity, weaknesses, and exploitation inherent in Western-centric approaches. The book is organized into three main parts.The first part addresses the notion of beauty in African thought and its implications. It begins by critiquing
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallBeauty in African Thought: Critical Perspectives on the Western Idea of Development ed. by Bolaji Bateye et al. (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USBeauty in African Thought: Critical Perspectives on the Western Idea of Development ed. by Bolaji Bateye et al. (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®84472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Post-Colonial Nations in Historical and Cultural Context by Dmitri M. Bondarenko (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982037
<p></p>
Bondarenko delves into the concept of post-colonialism, proposing a redefinition that widens beyond political and socioeconomic frameworks to embrace cultural dimensions. In Chapter One, "The Nation and Modernity," he criticizes traditional classification, challenging established scholarly perspectives from figures like J.G. Herder and Benedict Anderson. The narrative navigates historical epochs, investigating nation-building from Europe's nineteenth-century transformations to post-colonial African and Asian struggles. Bondarenko juxtaposes secularism, modernity, and globalization, discussing that non-Western societies agree on modernization without disowning indigenous cultures. His study emphasizes that
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallPost-Colonial Nations in Historical and Cultural Context by Dmitri M. Bondarenko (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USPost-Colonial Nations in Historical and Cultural Context by Dmitri M. Bondarenko (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®110422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony after the Cold War by George S. MacLeod (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982038
<p></p>
In Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony after the Cold War, George S. MacLeod offers a critical and thought-provoking examination of how contemporary francophone African writers and filmmakers represent political violence. Through four carefully constructed chapters, MacLeod analyzes the ethical and representational complexities surrounding key icons such as child soldiers, Islamist terrorists, genocide survivors, and celebrity humanitarianism. He provides a rigorous and self-reflective account of the "double-bind" that African cultural producers face leveraging globally recognizable symbols to capture attention while risking the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. From the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallMediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony after the Cold War by George S. MacLeod (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USMediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony after the Cold War by George S. MacLeod (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®90762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Forest Politics in Kenya's Tugen Hills: Conservation beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest by Léa Lacan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982039
<p></p>
Léa Lacan's Forest Politics in Kenya's Tugen Hills: Conservation beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest is a groundbreaking exploration of the dynamic relationship between humans and forests in the context of Kenya's colonial and postcolonial forestry policies. Lacan reframes forests not as static resources but as evolving entities, shaped by the interactions between people, history, and politics. She provocatively asserts, "forests are not, they become; and sometimes, they become with people" (227), laying the foundation for her compelling analysis of Katimok Forest as both a material and symbolic landscape.Through a blend of environmental history, political ecology, and multispecies studies, Lacan
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallForest Politics in Kenya's Tugen Hills: Conservation beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest by Léa Lacan (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USForest Politics in Kenya's Tugen Hills: Conservation beyond Natural Resources in the Katimok Forest by Léa Lacan (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®71982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda by Jens Meierhenrich (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982040
<p></p>
"Rwanda was filled with corpses, with survivors, with perpetrators … with violence—and with law" (293). This quote perhaps sums up the arguments portrayed in this six-part, twelve-chapter book. Meierhenrich delineates "lawfare" by tracing pre-formation legal conditions to the deformation of Gacaca courts in postapartheid Rwanda. This book is a page turner that challenges certain views pertaining to the transitional justice mechanism inherent in Inkiko Gacaca courts which Meierhenrich describes as "an example of lawfare" (42).Part One fills the gap in literature by carrying out a comprehensive analysis of the institutional development of Gacaca courts and provides a worthy introduction to the formation of the Inkiko
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda by Jens Meierhenrich (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda by Jens Meierhenrich (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®79072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Peacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa: The National Peace Accord, 1991–1994 by Liz Carmichael (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982041
<p></p>
There is, as Liz Carmichael points out, a dearth of literature on South Africa's transition era. Save for some firsthand accounts, as well as Allister Sparks's Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change (1994) and Patti Waldmeier's Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (1997), few resources examine the transition itself. The two aforementioned works were published quite soon after the end of apartheid, and as Carmichael points out, they largely elide the National Peace Accord (NPA) as they march from apartheid to Mandela's prison release to elections and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). On those, scholars have spilled
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallPeacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa: The National Peace Accord, 1991–1994 by Liz Carmichael (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USPeacemaking and Peacebuilding in South Africa: The National Peace Accord, 1991–1994 by Liz Carmichael (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®71532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Navigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana by Stephanie S. Starling (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982042
<p></p>
Stephanie Starling engaged in extensive interviews and discussions with thirty Tswana women about their understanding of what womanhood means to them, and how they experience their current situation. She drew on contacts she had made over several years of residence and work in Botswana to reach women who consented to discuss the details of their personal lives. The results are both informative and discouraging and corroborate similar reports about women's lives around the world. Starling frequently compares her findings with Isaac Schapera's early work in Botswana to demonstrate the continuing restrictions on women (A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom [LIT Verlag, 1938], and Married Life in an African Tribe
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallNavigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana by Stephanie S. Starling (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USNavigating Womanhood in Contemporary Botswana by Stephanie S. Starling (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®71652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda's Capital City by China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982043
<p></p>
Higher Powers: Alcoholism and After in Uganda's Capital City presents a trenchant, moving critique of the Western biomedical model for alcohol addiction referred to as "chronic relapsing brain disease" (CRBD). CRBD frames alcoholism as a diagnosable affliction that must be managed for a lifetime, as if a chronic disease. Adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the CRBD model is so widespread that it has become common knowledge for many North Americans. Through careful, detailed ethnography of four different approaches to alcoholism treatment in Kampala, Higher Powers offers another possibility—the idea that alcoholism is curable, something from which one may be released. Presented in stark contrast to the CRBD model
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHigher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda's Capital City by China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHigher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda's Capital City by China Scherz, George Mpanga, and Sarah Namirembe (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®74072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05State Fragility, Governance, and Security Concerns in Nigeria and Ghana: A Review of Three Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982044
<p></p>
The three books under review converge around state fragility, security concerns, and governance deficits as their organizing theme. This theme, which can be deployed to describe the current cadence of politics in several sub-Saharan African countries, proceeds from the nature of African states and the dynamics of political power as exemplified in the cases of Ghana and Nigeria in the three books. The first, edited by Usman Tar and Bashir Bala is a twelve-chapter anthology on rural violence in Nigeria. The second, which is edited by David Ehrhardt, David Alao, and Sani Umar, is also composed of twelve chapters and explores traditional authority and security in contemporary Nigeria. The first two works illuminate the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallState Fragility, Governance, and Security Concerns in Nigeria and Ghana: A Review of Three Studies2026-02-05text/htmlen-USState Fragility, Governance, and Security Concerns in Nigeria and Ghana: A Review of Three Studies2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®470832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Dahomey by Mati Diop (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982045
<p></p>
With Dahomey, Mati Diop affirms her place as an emblematic filmmaker deeply engaged with the existential theme of return. This haunting, poetic documentary archives the long-overdue restitution of twenty-six royal treasures looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey by French colonizers over two centuries ago. Premiering at the 17th Berlinale, where it won the Golden Bear, the film has resonated globally.Diop, who made history with her debut feature, Atlantique/Atlantics (2019), awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, returned to her roots for Dahomey's public première in Senegal, followed by Benin—present-day Dahomey—where most of the film was shot. By the time the UK première was announced for the BFI London Film Festival
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallDahomey by Mati Diop (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USDahomey by Mati Diop (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®81042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982046
<p></p>
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery is intended to make three interventions. First, the book centers Brazil in the history of slavery in the Americas. Second, it emphasizes the continuous role of West Africa and West Central Africa in the tragic history of the trade in enslaved Africans. Third, it focuses on enslaved women in the long history of slavery in the Americas. Whereas most slavery scholars acknowledge that Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans to the Americas, while West Central Africa exported the highest number of captive Africans to the Americas, many students and academics still believe that the greatest number of African captives arrived in the United States during
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®83872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982047
<p></p>
More than ever, we need histories about the catastrophic effects of the transatlantic slave trade. As it becomes easier to deny the past and its legacy, we need documentation and a narrative of the past that we can digest and share. Ana Lucia Araujo's Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery does much of this crucial work through meticulous research and sweeping coverage of both sides of the Atlantic. Eschewing the Anglo-centric and US focus of many overview texts, Araujo's tome highlights Brazil and Latin America. She covers the entire span of transatlantic slave trade from enslavement in Africa through to the afterlives of slavery and the implications in the present. Yet, she manages to personalize many
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®80522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982048
<p></p>
Ana Lucia Araujo's Humans in Shackles has a prominent place beside the very best longue durée histories of Atlantic slavery. The volume begins in the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese first violently removed people from Africa's coast, and it takes the reader through to the present. It explores how people were enslaved in Africa, the Atlantic crossing, and slavery, abolition, and slavery's aftermath across the Americas and Europe. Araujo does all of this with primary and secondary sources, oral history, and observations about public memory in a host of languages—English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish.Among the things I found refreshing in the book was Araujo's decision to center the lives of named enslaved
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®73672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982049
<p></p>
Humans in Shackles is a massive, important study, covering more than five centuries of history that recognizes the central role that Brazil and West Central Africa played during the transatlantic slave trade. Ana Lucia Araujo covers the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, its operation and legacies, linking Nantes, Lisbon, Liver-pool, Ouidah, Luanda, Saint-Louis, Charleston, Port-au-Prince, and Salvador. These cities tend to be studied separately or grouped by European empires. Rarely does a single volume give attention to all of them. Humans in Shackles does this, stressing similarities and examining the different roles slavery and enslaved individuals had in these locations. Araujo reminds readers that slavery
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®83832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982050
<p></p>
Humans in Shackles is a magisterial and encyclopedic history of transatlantic slavery—the largest human trafficking in history—and its implications for understanding the history of the modern world. Ana Lucia Araujo benefitted from nearly a century of scholarship, but she also transcends those studies. In Humans in Shackles, Araujo seeks to achieve three goals. First, to redress the distortions and imbalances in Atlantic history with its over-privilege of the British North Atlantic world. By bringing the full vigor of a South Atlanticist to the study of slavery, she places Brazil, not the thirteen American Colonies, at the core of the history of Atlantic history in the English-speaking world. Second, she embraces
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®80262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982051
<p></p>
I am grateful for Ana Lucia Araujo's invitation to take part in this review forum. Araujo has been bringing scholars of early Africa and the African diaspora together at conferences, in edited volumes, and online for nearly twenty years. She has written extensively across broad methodological and disciplinary fields, including art history, memory studies, and women and gender. Humans in Shackles is the culmination of Araujo's years of study on the topic of Atlantic slavery, highlighting her considerable interdisciplinary and methodological strengths.The virtues of the book are many, but I want to highlight three: First, Araujo does not begin her study of Atlantic slavery in the Americas; rather, her story begins in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHumans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®79212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05A Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church by Lauren V. Jarvis (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982052
<p></p>
A Prophet of the People offers a compelling exploration of the life and legacy of Isaiah Shembe, the founder of the Nazaretha Church in the mid-1910s. This work significantly contributes to the historiography of African religious movements by contextualizing the emergence and influence of African white-garment churches in twentieth-century South Africa. The author employs a "history from below" methodology, portraying Shembe not as a distant religious icon but as an ordinary African man who rose to prominence despite systemic oppression and limited formal education under successive racist regimes (xxiii). Unlike traditional studies that focus on colonial missionary efforts and mainline denominations such as the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallA Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church by Lauren V. Jarvis (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USA Prophet of the People: Isaiah Shembe and the Making of a South African Church by Lauren V. Jarvis (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®80702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982053
<p></p>
I have been extraordinarily lucky to have the opportunity to engage with three generous scholars whose work I not only deeply admire, but who have been instrumental in developing and deepening the thematics of urbanism, race, and aesthetics that are central to the book. As Rachel Jean-Baptiste notes, the last two decades have been witness to "one of the most consequential transformations taking place across the African continent," namely, the unprecedented demographic and physical expansion of urban centers. The book argues for a need to appreciate the aesthetic politics of contemporary city making in Africa as it explores, again as Jean-Baptiste notes: "Who belongs in the city? What forms of built environments
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®81592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982054
<p></p>
Claudia Gastrow's The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda explores one of the most consequential transformations taking place across the African continent in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the significant increase in people moving to and residing in cities, and the expansion of cities. Following the cessation of decades of civil conflict, Luanda experienced tremendous growth and circulation of wealth amidst an oil boom. Increased urbanization has shaped contestations around access to land, housing, money, and other economic resources, as well as governance, belonging, and environmental sustainability. The Aesthetics of Belonging touches upon all
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®73732026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982055
<p></p>
When I read Claudia Gastrow's The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda, music played in my head. This is not surprising for anyone who knows Luanda where music is constitutive of the experience of urban space. Security guards outside homes and businesses listen to radios that play everything from kizomba to gospel. Music is played inside homes, in the quintais (backyards), and it fills the halls of apartment buildings. Kuduro dance battles sometimes break out on street corners. Blue-and-white kandongueiros offer transport across the city and vibrate with loud music. Best known as the circulatory system that distributed the sounds of electronic dance music kuduro, Angolan
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®79702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982056
<p></p>
Claudia Gastrow's illuminating book on post-oil-boom Luanda, The Aesthetics of Belonging, calls attention to the role of indigenous urban desires in examining "how Africa's cities and citizens engage in worlding practices" from popular neighborhoods in the city (178). Such engagement from Luanda's musseques contests visible urban growth with a form of ambivalent critique where the city stands "as an object of desire and scorn" (178). At the core of the book is an argument for understanding what Gastrow terms "aesthetic dissent" as a popular critique of the program of postwar national reconstruction. The Angolan government packages large-scale urban redevelopment facilitated through oil-boom liquidity through a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda by Claudia Gastrow (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®87962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Historical Memory Matters: Mobilizing the Past in the Boko Haram and Katiba Macina Conflicts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982057
<p></p>
Throughout many of their sermons, Muhammad Yusuf, the original leader of the group commonly known as Boko Haram, and his successor, Abubakar Shekau, both evoked the memory of the nineteenth-century leader, 'Uthmān b. Fodiye, who established the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903) in modern-day northwest Nigeria. On numerous occasions they stated and implied that they were the ones fulfilling his mission and re-establishing an Islamic State (e.g., Kassim and Nwankpa 2018, 153). Similarly, Hamadoun Kouffa of Katiba Macina (also known as the Macina Liberation Front [FLM]) in contemporary Mali also often evokes the memory of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (1818–53), the state founded in the Masina region by Aḥmad Lobbo, as well
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallHistorical Memory Matters: Mobilizing the Past in the Boko Haram and Katiba Macina Conflicts2026-02-05text/htmlen-USHistorical Memory Matters: Mobilizing the Past in the Boko Haram and Katiba Macina Conflicts2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1171942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Deep Listening: Podcast Audiences and Affective Resonance in Urban Ghana
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982058
<p></p>
Sound is a multidimensional force. Often depicted as a linear wave with peaks and valleys, its resonances are experienced in a space as vibrations.1 Sound is often interpreted as ephemeral—fleeting, if unrecorded, and therefore relying on the memory of the receiver. It is subject to the interpretation of listener(s) and thus socioculturally constructed as much as it is acoustically interpreted. In this article, podcasting, as a technology of sound, is examined for the way its content resonates with listeners in Africa, with and beyond the physical aspects of hearing. In 2022, the authors queried listeners in focus groups to better understand podcast consumption and attitudes towards podcasting in urban Ghana.
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallDeep Listening: Podcast Audiences and Affective Resonance in Urban Ghana2026-02-05text/htmlen-USDeep Listening: Podcast Audiences and Affective Resonance in Urban Ghana2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1290622026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Editorial: Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982059
<p></p>
The news of the death of Biyi Bandele, the director of the film adaptation of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975), sent shockwaves through the ranks of his admirers and followers. This tragic event was a profound loss not only for his family but also for the film industry and aficionados who had been captivated by his remarkable career as a novelist, theater director, and filmmaker. Bandele's meticulous approach to filmmaking was evident in his previous works, including Half of a Yellow Sun (2015), Fifty (2015) and more recently, the collaborative effort Blood Sisters with Ken Gyang (2022). It seemed almost fated that he would be the one to bring this adaptation to life. Cinema critics had long
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallEditorial: Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USEditorial: Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®110292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982060
<p></p>
Music in film typically serves to enhance narrative, contributing to the creation and sustenance of specific atmosphere, and evoking emotions in the audience. In Nollywood, music has been employed in multiple ways not limited to setting the atmosphere and establishing segments within a film. In Bandele's Elesin Oba (a cinematic adaptation of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman), music takes center stage, introduced to the audience before any other character through a memorable theme song—a harmonious blend of flute, drums, and oriki (oral praise poem) in honor of the Elesin, man of the moment. It fills space, serenading the audience, embodying Alexander Agordoh's(African Music: Traditional and Contemporary
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®74502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982061
<p></p>
Biyi Bandele's Elesin Oba is a cinematic adaptation of renowned Nobel laureate and playwright Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. It is a visually stunning and intellectually engaging film that delves into the intricate layers of cultural clashes and personal conflicts. Released in 2022, this adaptation skilfully captures the essence of Soyinka's celebrated play by captivating visuals, compelling performances, and thoughtful re-enactment. Set in Oyo kingdom during the 1940s, the story revolves around the tragic fate of Elesin Oba, a horseman who is tasked with committing ritual suicide to journey with the king into the spiritual realm.Bandele effectively captures the beauty of the Oyo landscape and Yoruba
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®88082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982062
<p></p>
Biyi Bandele's Ẹlẹ́ṣin Ọba (2022) illuminates the metaphysical, moral, and ritual foundations of death within Yoruba cosmology, where the passage to the afterlife is not an end but a vital transition to becoming an ancestor. The film's tragic unraveling—caused by colonial interference, moral weakness, and generational discord—underscores how the Yoruba concept of personhood is deeply tied to communal continuity, ancestral honor, and cosmic balance. In the traditional Yoruba worldview, death at an old age is viewed as a transition to the afterlife, a necessary passage to the ancestral world, where a deceased individual becomes a spiritualized body (ará-ọ̀run). This transition reaffirms the social, spiritual, and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallẸlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USẸlẹ́ṣin Ọba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®75672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982063
<p></p>
The name "Biyi Bandele" may evoke different things to different commentators across the world but most literary and film critics will agree that this name conjures up serial storytelling as well as the delicate "arts" of "excavating," scripting, and screening Nigeria rich history. The Yoruba name also conjures up the filmic adaptation of some of Nigeria's most evocative historical literature. In effect, the writer, film-director, and theater creator—who bore this name and died on August 7, 2022 in Lagos at the age of 54—has, before his demise, illustrated his brilliance and fine hand, through the adaptation of various classic books authored by some of Nigeria's most acclaimed novelists and dramatists (notably Wole
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USElesin Oba: The King's Horseman by Biyi Bandele (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®81842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982064
<p></p>
Although African women have often been described as lacking in agency due to perceived vulnerability and as a "weaker sex," they have a long history of social resistance in the face of various forms of oppression. But how effective is "genital cursing" as a strategy of resistance? Can the strategy be adapted outside its cultural contexts? What is behind the backlash to women who employ this strategy? These are some of the questions that form the gist of discussion in Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa authored by Naminata Diabate. Diabate interrogates African women's agency and how modern biopolitics influence the response to this resistance strategy. She introduces the term "Naked Agency" as a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallNaked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USNaked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®78702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Policy Reform After Structural Adjustment in Zambia: The Politics of Restoring a Statist Development Agenda, 2011–2014
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982065
<p></p>
In September 2011, Zambia held its fifth general elections since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1991. The 2011 electoral contest resulted in the election of President Michael Sata and his Patriotic Front (PF) party, which ended the twenty-year rule of the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). Before he was elected president, Sata garnered significant scholarly attention for adopting populist election strategies that incorporated the successful mobilization of urban voters and his rural co-ethnics in the north of Zambia (Larmer and Fraser 2007; Cheeseman and Hinfelaar 2010; Resnick 2014; Cheeseman and Larmer 2015; Sishuwa 2024). Hitherto, Sata's characterization as a populist—based on
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallPolicy Reform After Structural Adjustment in Zambia: The Politics of Restoring a Statist Development Agenda, 2011–20142026-02-05text/htmlen-USPolicy Reform After Structural Adjustment in Zambia: The Politics of Restoring a Statist Development Agenda, 2011–20142026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1305102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Erratum: Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts by Peter Brett and Line Engbo Gissel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982066
<p></p>
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2025.10104, Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2025.The original manuscript was published with two errors.In the last sentence of the first paragraph, the published manuscript incorrectly reads 'The author pursues these aims, employing interpretive methods to understand the actions and justifications of political leaders.' The correct version of the sentence should be 'Employing interpretive methods to understand the actions and justifications of political leaders, the authors pursue these aims.'In the last sentence of the second paragraph, the sentence reads 'The author argued that this approach influenced Africa's backing of the ICC, the World Trade
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallErratum: Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts by Peter Brett and Line Engbo Gissel2026-02-05text/htmlen-USErratum: Africa and the Backlash Against International Courts by Peter Brett and Line Engbo Gissel2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®42392026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Legal Consciousness and the Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Societies: Emergent Hybrid Legality in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by Holly Dunn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982067
<p></p>
This book interrogates the transplantation of the rule of law (ROL) in postconflict societies, framing it as the problematic attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. The ROL, traditionally celebrated as a cornerstone of liberal democratic order, is reexamined as a Western legal construct that encounters severe difficulties when imposed on societies with long-standing local practices and cultural modes of justice. Focusing on the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Dunn traces how the circulation of international legal reforms has shaped local understandings of legality, justice, and harm. Deploying the Emergent Hybrid Legality (EHL) as a central analytic model, Dunn sheds light on the dynamic process
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallLegal Consciousness and the Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Societies: Emergent Hybrid Legality in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by Holly Dunn (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USLegal Consciousness and the Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Societies: Emergent Hybrid Legality in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by Holly Dunn (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®87232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The State, Ethnicity, and Gender in Africa: Intellectual Legacies of Crawford Young ed. by Scott Straus and Aili Mari Tripp (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982068
<p></p>
The challenge of evaluating an evolving intellectual legacy presents particular complexities in African political scholarship, where foundational theoretical frameworks must continuously adapt to rapidly changing empirical realities. This volume, dedicated to Crawford Young's five-decade contribution to understanding African politics, confronts this challenge by assembling twelve chapters from his former students and colleagues who both celebrate and critically examine his legacy.Straus and Tripp position Young as a transformative figure whose influence extended beyond scholarship to shape a generation of Africanist scholars through mentoring at Wisconsin-Madison. Their narrative constructs Young's intellectual
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallThe State, Ethnicity, and Gender in Africa: Intellectual Legacies of Crawford Young ed. by Scott Straus and Aili Mari Tripp (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe State, Ethnicity, and Gender in Africa: Intellectual Legacies of Crawford Young ed. by Scott Straus and Aili Mari Tripp (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®98942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road by Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982069
<p></p>
Intimate, humorous, insightful, informative, and engrossing, the memoir Playing the Changes (a jazz term for improvisation on an existing chord, creating a new, expanding sound that evolves into an ongoing conversation with musicians and the audience) recalls vividly the nearly quarter-century (1983–2006) that the Brubecks spent in Durban at the (now) University of KwaZulu-Natal. The narrative extends and counterpoints through the distinct voices of Darius (son of the legendary musician Dave Brubeck) and his wife Catherine. With prior visits to South Africa in 1976 and 1982, Darius accepted a teaching post in music theory for which he was barely qualified, but, mindful of honoring the jazz "ideals of freedom and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallPlaying the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road by Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USPlaying the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road by Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®67342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05A Tribute in Verse (Benediction and Translation)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982070
<p></p>
Poetry is the first language of ceremony, so I pay tribute to Valentin-Yves Mudimbe by composing my own poem (Benediction) and translating excerpts from one of his books of poems, Les Fuseaux, parfois (1974). Mudimbe authored several collections in the 1970s, which have received scant scholarly attention. I hope my (inexpert) translations will raise interest for his marvelous poetry. I am grateful to his family for permission to translate his work.In memoriam, Valentin-Yves MudimbeExcerpts from Valentine-Yves Mudimbe, Les Fuseaux, parfois (Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1974), translated by Tsitsi Jaji
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallA Tribute in Verse (Benediction and Translation)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USA Tribute in Verse (Benediction and Translation)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®141952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05V.Y. Mudimbe: On Invention, Odor, and Toxicity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982071
<p></p>
Linguistics constituted V.Y. Mudimbe's entry point into the world of scholarship. In Jean-Pierre Bekolo's documentary Les Choses et les mots de Mudimbe (2014), Mudimbe remarks that his doctoral dissertation, "Air: étude sémantique" (1970) submitted at the University of Louvain, was a useful exercise for his future academic career because it taught him to become a rigorous scholar. This PhD set out to trace the evolution of the semes "άήρ," "aer," and "air" in a large corpus of texts in ancient Greek, Latin, and old and modern French. The investigation was informed by Ferdinand de Saussure and mid-twentieth-century scholarship including figures such as Stephen Ullmann, Louis Hjelmslev, Pierre Guiraud, and Klaus
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallV.Y. Mudimbe: On Invention, Odor, and Toxicity2026-02-05text/htmlen-USV.Y. Mudimbe: On Invention, Odor, and Toxicity2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®374662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Mudimbe's Library
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982072
<p></p>
V.Y. Mudimbe has left us, and yet his work's life has hardly begun. At a recent memorial service in San Francisco, I addressed his grandchildren (aged 8 and 12), to suggest that we (a collective, admittedly vague and futuristic "we") would need the time it will take for them to get to college in order to prepare the type of broad courses that could more fully account for their grandfather's contributions to what we call "theory" at large. While Mudimbe is a giant in African studies, he has proven less visible in conversations on, say, decolonizing the curriculum—and indeed in the "decolonial" movement itself.1 This is curious, given the centrality of the concept of the "colonial library" (1988, 181, for example)
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallMudimbe's Library2026-02-05text/htmlen-USMudimbe's Library2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®241072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Fati's Choice by Fatimah Mustapha Dadzie (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982073
<p></p>
Fati's Choice captures the erroneous, yet popular, narrative that a worst life experience in Europe is better by far than the moderate life of a striver in Africa, underscoring the growing quest for migration overseas by whatever means among Africans. In essence, Hamid Yabuk, the producer, spotlights how migration abroad has become a status symbol among many Africans. The prologue of the movie is a glimpse into what lies ahead with the ambience condemning the course of action taken by the dramatis personae: "Fati, we have always been dreaming of going to Europe, yet you had the chance and wasted it," a neighbor remarks.The introductory part of the 42-minute movie depicts an indigenous African setting with an
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallFati's Choice by Fatimah Mustapha Dadzie (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USFati's Choice by Fatimah Mustapha Dadzie (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®64802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Tales of the Accidental City by Maimouna Jallow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982074
<p></p>
What happens when a court-ordered group anger management therapy session is forced to take place in a virtual space? Maimouna Jallow's 2021 film Tales of the Accidental City turns the very limitations of virtual meetings into fodder for the creative exploration of the entrenched inequalities and harsh realities of living in Nairobi.Tales of the Accidental City was initially written for stage but adapted for screen in response to Covid-19 restrictions on live performance. Written and directed by Maimouna Jallow, the film is based on four stories from a collection of short stories titled Humans of Nairobi. The story takes place in a Zoom meeting where Counsellor Rose, played by Wakio Mzenge, convenes a court-ordered
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallTales of the Accidental City by Maimouna Jallow (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USTales of the Accidental City by Maimouna Jallow (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®81032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Ahmed Nara's Fatal Mission
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982075
<p></p>
Though self-imposed, it is nonetheless a humbling task to attempt to encapsulate as towering a figure as V.Y. Mudimbe is, whose work is extremely complex and straddles many academic and creative fields. It is even more humbling to delve into that complexity on the pretense of trying to explain it. There is no disputing that he was and will remain an immense presence in African critical thought, and that his work is in conversation with other kinds of critical thinking in and beyond Africa, as he was translated and is studied in many places and languages. The legacy he has left behind equals or surpasses that of many other great thinkers of our times in terms of its impact. The word that comes to mind as I think of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallAhmed Nara's Fatal Mission2026-02-05text/htmlen-USAhmed Nara's Fatal Mission2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®259232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05A Field in Flux
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076
<p></p>
It should come as no surprise that ASA's 68th annual meeting was an intense, cathartic series of events. Arriving in Atlanta at the tail end of what has been a long and harrowing year for many members of our community, attendees greeted each other across the cavernous hotel foyer with excited waves and warm hugs. As I exchanged my own hellos and hugs with far-flung friends and colleagues, I was struck by the irony of meeting in a hotel that served as the set for several iconic Hunger Games scenes. I suspect I was not alone in this, at least among fellow millennials. Everywhere one looks, exploitation is dressed up as competition for the entertainment of oligarchs.The fact is that for many ASA attendees, 2025 was an
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982076">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/282/image/coversmallA Field in Flux2026-02-05text/htmlen-USA Field in Flux2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®209662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05