News Article

Celebrating Africa Day: 25 Resources that Promote Humanistic Studies in Africa

Published: May 20, 2021
In celebration of Africa Day on May 25, ACLS is sharing a list that African Humanities Program Community Coordinators Grace A. Musila F’11 and Eric D. Otchere F’15 put together featuring 25 resources, including event recordings, podcasts, books, and websites, that advance humanistic studies in and of Africa. 

Event recordings and podcasts:

  1. Ato Quayson on “Tragedy in Postcolonial Literature,” December 14, 2020
  2. WISER Podcast: “8 Ways to Think About Unsettlement,” March 25, 2021
  3. “The Art of Resistance,” A Resistance Bureau conversation with African artists, April 6, 2021
  4. “Cover to Cover Episode 8,” a conversation with Adekeye Adebajo on his new book The Trial of Cecil  John Rhodes (Jacana, 2021), April 8, 2021
  5. Governing Intimacies Webinar: “Rethinking Gender in African Studies,”  April 15, 2021
  6. New Africa-France Summit: Conversation on Restitution of Cultural Heritage in Kenya, April 17, 2021
  7. Virtual book launch: Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South by Abdoumaliq Simone (Polity, 2020), HUMA webinar recording, May 3, 2021
  8. Lecture: Mamadou Diawara: “What the Master did not Tell us: Living Copyright in Sub-Saharan Africa,” HUMA webinar recording, May 4, 2021
  9. Annual Nadine Gordimer Lecture: “The Audacity to Speak an Inconvenient Truth,” by Thuli Madonsela, May 5, 2021
  10. “The Decolonial Moments” by Toyin Falola, HUMA webinar recording, May 12, 2021

#NewBooksAlert:

  1. Amilcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist by Antonio Tomas (Hurst Publishers, 2021)

  2. Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, edited by Desiree Lewis and Gabeeba Baderoon (WITS Press, 2021)
  3. Writing Freedom: Miriam Tlali by Pumla Dineo Gqola (HSRC Press, 2021) [Reviewed by AHP fellow Barbara Boswell at this link]
  4. The Scandalous Times of a Book Louse by Robert Muponde (Penguin, 2021)
  5. Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature by Ato Quayson (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
  6. Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture by Simidele Dosekun (University of Illinois Press, 2020)
  7. Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation by Oluwakemi M Balogun (Stanford University Press, 2020)
  8. Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon by Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué (University of Michigan Press, 2019)
  9. Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War by Howard W French (Norton 2021)

Websites, articles, and other resources:

  1. Project3541: Digital Photographic Archive of the 1935-41 Italo-Ethiopian War by Maaza Mengiste

  2. “What Will Be The Cure?: A Conversation With Sylvia Wynter” covering the pandemic, Black Studiesm and the current moment in global politics in offshoot, January 7, 2021.
  3. “Apartheid’s Paper Trail,” a thoughtful review essay on historian Jacob Dlamini’s book The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators and the Security Police
  4. Free Download of Africanfuturism: An Anthology, edited by Wole Talabi
  5. Free download of the latest issue of the journal Feminisit Africa, themed “Extractivism, Resistance, Alternatives” edited by Charmaine Pereira and Dzodzi Tsikata
  6. “We Should Also Translate the Spirit”: Kiswahili Literature in Translation – conference report from the Swahili Literary Festival, held March 5-8, 2021