Search results for ""Ohio University Press""

This inaugural volume in the Ohio University Press Series in Ecology and History is the paperback edition of Conrad Totman’s widely acclaimed study of Japan’s environmental policies over the centuries. Professor Totman raises the critical question of how Japan’s steeply mountainous woodland has remained biologically healthy despite centuries of intensive exploitation by a dense human population that has always been dependent on wood and other forest products. Mindful that in global terms this has been a rare outcome, and one that bears directly on Japan’s recent experience as an affluent, industrial society, Totman examines the causes, forms, and effects of forest use and management in Japan during the millennium to 1870. He focuses mainly on the centuries after 1600 when the Japanese found themselves driven by their own excesses into programs of woodland protection and regenerative forestry.

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Not Out of Hate—published in Burmese in 1955 and set in 1939–42—was Ma Ma Lay’s fifth novel and one that further cemented her status as one of twentieth-century Burma’s foremost writers and voices for change. A journalist by trade, Lay applied her straightforward observational style with compassion and purpose to the story of Way Way, a teenage village girl whose quiet life assisting her father in his rice-brokerage business is disrupted by the arrival of U Saw Han, the cosmopolitan Burmese rice trader twenty years her senior. When she first encounters him, Way Way is entranced by his Western furnishings, servants, and mannerisms. The two marry, but before long, it becomes clear that U Saw Han’s love is a stifling one that seeks to obliterate her traditional ways. Not Out of Hate was enormously popular in Burma and went through several editions in the 1950s and 1960s. When Ohio University Press published its English translation, in 1991, it became the first significant fictional account of prewar Burma available in English since George Orwell’s Burmese Days, and provided a Burmese counterpoint to Orwell’s novel. Translated into English here for the first time, the novel is an engaging drama, finely observed work of social realism, and stirring rejection of Western cultural dominance.

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During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life. With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.

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An exploration of Francophone African literary imaginations and expressions through the lens of Afrofuturism Generally attributed to the Western imagination, science fiction is a literary genre that has expressed projected technological progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, certain fantastical elements in African literary expressions lend themselves to science fiction interpretations, both utopian and dystopian. When the concept of science is divorced from its Western, rationalist, materialist, positivist underpinnings, science fiction represents a broad imaginative space that supersedes the limits of this world. Whether it be on the moon, under the sea, or elsewhere within the imaginative universe, Afrofuturist readings of select films, novels, short stories, plays, and poems reveal a similarly emancipatory African future that is firmly rooted in its own cultural mythologies, cosmologies, and philosophies. Isaac Joslin identifies the contours and modalities of a speculative, futurist science fiction rooted in the sociocultural and geopolitical context of continental African imaginaries. Constructing an arc that begins with gender identity and cultural plurality as the bases for an inherently multicultural society, this project traces the essential role of language and narrativity in processing traumas that stem from the violence of colonial and neocolonial interventions in African societies. Joslin then outlines the influential role of discursive media that construct divisions and create illusions about societal success, belonging, and exclusion, while also identifying alternative critical existential mythologies that promote commonality and social solidarity. The trajectory proceeds with a critical analysis of the role of education in affirming collective identity in the era of globalization; the book also assesses the market-driven violence that undermines efforts to instill and promote cultural and social autonomy. Last, this work proposes an egalitarian and ecological ethos of communal engagement with and respect for the diversity of the human and natural worlds.

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Wangari Muta Maathai was a scholar-activist known for founding the Green Belt Movement, an environmental campaign that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. While many studies of Maathai highlight her activism, few examine Maathai as a scholar whose contributions to various disciplines and causes spanned more than three decades. In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Besi Brillian Muhonja presents the words and works of Maathai as theoretical concepts attesting to her contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges. Muhonja’s well-rounded portrait of Maathai’s ideas offers a corrective to the one-dimensional characterization of Maathai typical of other works.

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Africa Every Day presents an exuberant, thoughtful, and necessary counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis in introductory African studies classes on war, poverty, corruption, disease, and human rights violations on the continent. These challenges are real and deserve sustained attention, but this volume shows that adverse conditions do not prevent people from making music, falling in love, playing sports, participating in festivals, writing blogs, telling jokes, making videos, playing games, eating delicious food, and finding pleasure in their daily lives. Across seven sections—Celebrations and Rites of Passage; Socializing and Friendship; Love, Sex, and Marriage; Sports and Recreation; Performance, Language, and Creativity; Technology and Media; and Labor and Livelihoods—the accessible, multidisciplinary essays in Africa Every Day address these creative and dynamic elements of daily life, without romanticizing them. Ultimately, the book shows that forms of leisure and popular culture in Africa are best discussed in terms of indigenization, adaptation, and appropriation rather than the static binary of European/foreign/global and African. Most of all, it invites readers to reflect on the crucial similarities, rather than the differences, between their lives and those of their African counterparts. Contributors: Hadeer Aboelnagah, Issahaku Adam, Joseph Osuolale Ayodokun, Victoria Abiola Ayodokun, Omotoyosi Babalola, Martha Bannikov, Mokaya Bosire, Emily Callaci, Deborah Durham, Birgit Englert, Laura Fair, John Fenn, Lara Rosenoff Gauvin, Michael Gennaro, Lisa Gilman, Charlotte Grabli, Joshua Grace, Dorothy L. Hodgson, Akwasi Kumi-Kyereme, Prince F. M. Lamba, Cheikh Tidiane Lo, Bill McCoy, Nginjai Paul Moreto, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, James Nindi, Erin Nourse, Eric Debrah Otchere, Alex Perullo, Daniel Jordan Smith, Maya Smith, Steven Van Wolputte, and Scott M. Youngstedt.

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The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present. Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya’s decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces that took to the forests to fight colonial rule in the 1950s. Kimathi personified many of the contradictions that the Mau Mau Rebellion represented: rebel statesman, literate peasant, modern traditionalist. His capture and trial in 1956, and subsequent execution, for many marked the end of the rebellion and turned Kimathi into a patriotic martyr. Here, the entire trial transcript is available for the first time. This critical edition also includes provocative contributions from leading Mau Mau scholars reflecting on the meaning of the rich documents offered here and the figure of Kimathi in a much wider field of historical and contemporary concerns. These include the nature of colonial justice; the moral arguments over rebellion, nationalism, and the end of empire; and the complexities of memory and memorialization in contemporary Kenya. Contributors: David Anderson, Simon Gikandi, Nicholas Githuku, Lotte Hughes, and John Lonsdale. Introductory note by Willy Mutunga.

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Throughout Africa, artists use hip-hop both to describe their lives and to create shared spaces for uncensored social commentary, feminist challenges to patriarchy, and resistance against state institutions, while at the same time engaging with the global hip-hop community. In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities. Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa following its emergence in the United States, assessing the impact of urbanization and demographics on the spread of hip-hop culture. Hip-Hop in Africa is a tribute to a genre and its artists as well as a timely examination that pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions. Accessibly written by one of the foremost experts on African hip-hop, this book will easily find its place in the classroom.

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A story with the power to change how people view the last years of colonialism in East Africa, The Boy Is Gone portrays the struggle for Kenyan independence in the words of a freedom fighter whose life spanned the twentieth century’s most dramatic transformations. Born into an impoverished farm family in the Meru Highlands, Japhlet Thambu grew up wearing goatskins and lived to stand before his community dressed for business in a pressed suit, crisp tie, and freshly polished shoes. For most of the last four decades, however, he dressed for work in the primary school classroom and on his lush tea farm. The General, as he came to be called from his leadership of the Mau Mau uprising sixty years ago, narrates his life story in conversation with Laura Lee Huttenbach, a young American who met him while backpacking in Kenya in 2006. A gifted storyteller with a keen appreciation for language and a sense of responsibility as a repository of his people’s history, the General talks of his childhood in the voice of a young boy, his fight against the British in the voice of a soldier, and his long life in the voice of shrewd elder. While his life experiences are his alone, his story adds immeasurably to the long history of decolonization as it played out across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

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A new era in world history began when Atlantic maritime trade among Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas opened up in the fifteenth century, setting the stage for massive economic and cultural change. In Making Money, Colleen Kriger examines the influence of the global trade on the Upper Guinea Coast two hundred years later—a place and time whose study, in her hands, imparts profound insights into Anglo-African commerce and its wider milieu. A stunning variety of people lived in this coastal society, struggling to work together across deep cultural divides and in the process creating a dynamic creole culture. Kriger digs further than any previous historian of Africa into the records of England’s Royal African Company to illuminate global trade patterns, the interconnectedness of Asian, African, and European markets, and—most remarkably—the individual lives that give Making Money its human scale. By inviting readers into the day-to-day workings of early modern trade in the Atlantic basin, Kriger masterfully reveals the rich social relations at its core. Ultimately, this accessible book affirms Africa’s crucial place in world history during a transitional period, the early modern era.

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Half of Indonesia’s massive population still lives on farms, and for these tens of millions of people the revolutionary promise of land reform remains largely unfulfilled. The Basic Agrarian Law, enacted in the wake of the Indonesian revolution, was supposed to provide access to land and equitable returns for peasant farmers. But fifty years later, the law’s objectives of social justice have not been achieved. Land for the People provides a comprehensive look at land conflict and agrarian reform throughout Indonesia’s recent history, from the roots of land conflicts in the prerevolutionary period and the Sukarno and Suharto regimes, to the present day, in which democratization is creating new contexts for people’s claims to the land. Drawing on studies from across Indonesia’s diverse landscape, the contributors examine some of the most significant issues and events affecting land rights, including shifts in policy from the early postrevolutionary period to the New Order; the Land Administration Project that formed the core of land policy during the late New Order period; a long-running and representative dispute over a golf course in West Java that pitted numerous local farmers against the government and local elites; Suharto’s notorious “million hectare” project that resulted in loss of access to land and resources for numerous indigenous farmers in Kalimantan; and the struggle by Bandung’s urban poor to be treated equitably in the context of commercial land development. Together, these essays provide a critical resource for understanding one of Indonesia’s most pressing and most influential issues. Contributors: Afrizal, Dianto Bachriadi, Anton Lucas, John McCarthy, John Mansford Prior, Gustaaf Reerink, Carol Warren, and Gunawan Wiradi.

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From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity. African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa, where stadiums and clubhouses became arenas in which Africans challenged colonial power and expressed a commitment to racial equality and self-determination. New nations staged matches as part of their independence celexadbrations and joined the world body, FIFA. The Confédération africaine de football democratized the global game through antiapartheid sanctions and increased the number of African teams in the World Cup finals. In this compact, highly readable book Alegi shows that the result of this success has been the departure of huge numbers of players to overseas clubs and the growing influence of private commercial interests on the African game. But the growth of women’s soccer and South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup also challenge the one-dimensional notion of Africa as a backward, “tribal” continent populated by victims of war, corruption, famine, and disease.

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Resistance on the National Stage analyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater pracxadtitioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto. It examines the work of an array of theater groups and networks from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta that pioneered new forms of theater-making and new themes that were often presented more directly and critically than previous groups had dared to do. Michael H. Bodden looks at a wide range of case studies to show how theater contributed to and helped build the opposition. He also looks at how specific combinations of social groups created tensions and gave modern theater a special role in bridging social gaps and creating social networks that expanded the reach of the prodemocracy movement. Theater workers constructed new social networks by involving peasants, Muslim youth, industrial workers, and lower-middle-class slum dwellers in theater productions about their own lives. Such networking and resistance established theater as one significant arena in which the groundwork for the ouster of Suharto in May 1998, and the succeeding Reform era, was laid. Resistance on the National Stage will have broad appeal, not only for scholars of contemporary Indonesian culture and theater, but also for those interested in Indonesian history and politics, as well as scholars of postcolonial theater and culture.

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In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history. Considered an imposter by the British, a hero by nationalists, and a prophet-king by area-studies specialists, Saya San came to embody traditional Southeast Asia’s encounter with European colonialism in his attempt to resurrect the lost throne of Burma. The Return of the Galon King analyzes the legal origins of the Saya San story and reconsiders the facts upon which the basic narrative and interpretations of the rebellion are based. Aung-Thwin reveals how counter-insurgency law produced and criminalized Burmese culture, contributing to the way peasant resistance was recorded in the archives and understood by Southeast Asian scholars. This interdisciplinary study reveals how colonial anthropologists, lawyers, and scholar-administrators produced interpretations of Burmese culture that influenced contemporary notions of Southeast Asian resistance and protest. It provides a fascinating case study of how history is treated by the law, how history emerges in legal decisions, and how the authority of the past is used to validate legal findings.

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Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied. In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities. Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history. Contributors: Richard B. Allen David Arnold A. L. Beier Andrew Burton Vincent DiGirolamo Andrew A. Gentes Robert Gordon Frank Tobias Higbie Thomas H. Holloway Abby Margolis Paul Ocobock Aminda M. Smith Linda Woodbridge

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As news accounts report almost daily, the social, political, and economic atmosphere of Southeast Asia makes it one of the most dynamic and quickly developing regions of the world. Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience presents extraordinary life stories of ordinary people in a rapidly changing Southeast Asia. The narratives provide illustration of the richness of life histories by revealing what it was like to live through the wrenching social changes that have accompanied successive political transformations in Southeast Asia, from the period of European colonialism, through the wartime occupation of Southeast Asia by the Japanese, to the emergence of new nation states. By pushing the boundaries of analysis of individual narratives, the authors, all anthropologists, demonstrate what a rich source such accounts can be for an anthropology that seeks to do justice to personal experience. Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience will be of cross-disciplinary interest and importance to researchers in the fields of literature, history, anthropology, and sociology working on biography, autobiography, personal narratives, and oral history.

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The dark years of European fascism left their indelible mark on Africa. As late as the 1970s, Angola was still ruled by white autocrats, whose dictatorship was eventually overthrown by black nationalists who had never experienced either the rule of law or participatory democracy. Empire in Africa takes the long view of history and asks whether the colonizing ventures of the Portuguese can bear comparison with those of the Mediterranean Ottomans or those experienced by Angola’s neighbors in the Belgian Congo, French Equatorial Africa, or the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope and in the Transvaal. David Birmingham takes the reader through Angola’s troubled past, which included endemic warfare for the first twenty-five years of independence, and examines the fact that in the absence of a viable neocolonial referee such as Britain or France, the warring parties turned to Cold War superpowers for a supply of guns. For a decade Angola replaced Vietnam as a field in which an international war by proxy was conducted. Empire in Africa explains how this African nation went from colony to independence, how in the 1990s the Cold War legacy turned to civil war, and how peace finally dawned in 2002.

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The last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts. Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States, 1990—2001 is a contribution to our understanding of the web of relationships that existed at the intersection of immigration, race, ethnicity, and broadcasting in America during this period. Professor Vibert C. Cambridge investigates and questions how broadcasting in the United States responded to the changing racial and ethnic composition of the society. What patterns could be drawn from these responses? What roles were served? What roles are currently being served? What stimulated the changing of roles? Ultimately, Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States evaluates the performance of the American broadcasting industry. The answers to this book’s core questions provide insights into how the American broadcasting industry responded to freedom, equality, diversity, information quality, social order, and solidarity at century’s end.

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In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself. Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland. Written in response to the Nigerian Civil War, known on the Igbo side as Ogu Biafra—the Biafran War—this collection focuses on the everyday conditions of the local people and how their personal situations became entangled in national crises. The stories capture a diversity of issues, from the implications of self-rule and the presence of soldiers among civilians, to masquerades, air raids, and rape. Through her riveting narratives, Kalu draws the reader into the depths of some of Africa’s most troubling issues, such as the concern for safety during the frequent outbreaks of hostilities, which can range from civil unrest to armed combat. How do young people, women, and the elderly cope during those crises? Are the struggles for national political power greater than the everyday struggle for decent living by the person on the street? While conveying the vitality and joy of Africa’s women and youth, Broken Lives and Other Stories also examines the impact of the brain drain caused by wars and instability within the continent itself. Both the war against women and women’s constant war to survive in contemporary Africa are brought into sharp focus throughout these stories. For readers interested in the last thirty-five years of unrest across Africa, this collection is essential reading.

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The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups. The apparent inability of the international community to respond firmly and purposefully to violent conflicts can be attributed partially to a general confusion and misunderstanding of the root causes of such conflicts. In some cases, the international community argued that violent conflicts could be attributed to irreconcilable ethnic differences, which, like earthquakes, are impossible to prevent or control. At other times, the argument was that such conflicts were the results of evil leaders capable of engineering mass violent acts. Ethnic Conflict presents an interdisciplinary and comparative effort to explain the root causes of ethnic conflicts in terms of political, economic, and social common denominators that characterize all such conflicts. It seeks to dispel misplaced assumptions about violent domestic conflicts and, by providing a clearer picture of the mechanics of such conflicts, it hopes to assist in the process of conflict resolution and prevention.

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Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the “occult.” It brings together anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, to engage the metaphysical properties of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” and to explore their manifestations in people’s lived experiences. While many Africanist scholars shun the analysis of “witchcraft” as an appropriate domain of investigation, the experiences, thoughts, activities, and powers that “witchcraft” encompasses have become increasingly the source of interest and debate. Concepts of witchcraft and the phenomena to which they are applied express something fundamental to the human condition and have their equation in the logic of other human practices such as racism and its various crafts. Thus, the focus on “witchcraft” is not just a concern with the occult, but a manifestation of the convergence of interest in mediating and transcending disciplinary domains. The contributors to this volume embrace the challenge of exploring “witchcraft” as a mode of experiencing and explaining human circumstances as well as confronting the limitations of their own intellectual traditions and paradigms. The range of their explorations takes us in new directions, making use not only of their academic training but also of their personal experiences, to reframe the conceptual terrain of the “occult” and the epistemological orientations of their various academic fields of inquiry.

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How do economic weakness and dependence influence foreign policy decisions and behavior in third world countries? Theories in Dependent Foreign Policy examines six foreign policy theories: compliance, consensus, counterdependence, realism, leader preferences and domestic politics, and each is applied to a series of case studies of Ecuador’s foreign policy during the 1980s under two regimes: Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984) and his successor León Febres Cordero (1984-1988). Hey shows that Ecuador during this period represented the third world in many ways. It was a new democracy, having just emerged from years of military rule, extremely indebted to the West, and dependent on primary product export economy that relied heavily on importers, especially the United States. Jeanne Hey finds that some of the most popular and enduring theories in western research, such as realism and compliance, poorly account for Ecuadorian foreign policy. She explains that poor countries like Ecuador have substantial foreign policy latitude in the diplomatic area. Drawing on archival research and interviews with policy makers including Presidents Hurtado and Febres Cordero, Dr. Hey convincingly argues that many of the traditional foreign policy theories do not “fit” dependent states, and inadequately account for the complexity of foreign policy in the third world.

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This exceptional study of the Mongo people of the upper Congo River basin focuses on the evolution of Mongo work patterns from the period of the late nineteenth century to 1940, the high-water mark of the colonial period. It brings new evidence from oral histories, anthropological research, and archival records to build on or to correct colonial ethnographic accounts. From this fresh vantage point, Nelson reassesses colonial labor policies and relates them to today’s rural poverty and underdevelopment.

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This book presents a broad analytical framework for the history of southeastern Ghana within the context of a representative study of one of the country’s most important political and economic forces. The 150,000 Krobo are the most numerous of the Adangme-speaking peoples. They are located in the mountains just inland from the coast and are the fourth largest ethnic group in the country. During the nineteenth century they were one of the small states of the Gold Coast in the formative stages of political and cultural development. After the middle of the nineteenth century they became economically and politically one of the most important groups in the country because of their dominant role in commercial production of export crops. Historical research on Ghana has produced mostly case studies of the large, centralized Akan states. Wilson’s study is an account of one of the smaller societies without which a history of Ghana would be incomplete.

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During the Ayutthaya period in Thailand (1350-1767), a group of meters based upon specific types and arrangements of syllables became a significant part of the Thai literary corpus. Known as chan in Thai literature, these meters, and the stanzas created from them, were adapted and transformed so that they corresponded in structure to other Thai verse forms. Although still used in compositions today, these meters reached their greatest popularity during the mid and late Ayutthaya period and the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This study of the Thai chan meters contends that Thai linguistic constraints and poetic principles determined the transformation of the Pali meters and stanzas into their Thai counterparts. Disproving the frequent claims that the old chan compositions ignored the sequencing of the particular syllable types required by the meters, the author determines why the meters became popular only during certain eras and just what the aesthetic conditions were that nurtured the use of the meters.

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Consequent upon the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884–1885), the Africanische Gesellschaft in Deutschland launched the Niger-Benue expedition to investigate possible riverine communications throughout the Niger-Benue river system. Responsibility for the expedition ultimately fell to Paul Staudinger, a young entomologist with no experience of inner Africa. This translation of Staudinger’s Im Herzen der Haussalander opens up an invaluable source book of interest not only to the historian but to specialists in many disciplines. It deals with every aspect of the life of the Hausa-Fulani people: their history, environment, flora and fauna, culture, economy, and social structure as observed by a patriotic young German scientist of a century ago. The chronological narrative of the journey is followed by a series of appendices, each providing a systematic summary of a particular branch of knowledge.

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Twice in this century popular revolts against colonial rule have occured in the Banten district of West Java. These revolts, conducted largely under an Islamic leadership, also proclaimed themselves Communist. Islamic Communism is seemingly a paradox. This is especially the case when one considers that probably no religion has proved more resistant to Communist ideology than Islam. Michael Williams here details the complicated history of the Bantenese revolts in the twentieth century and probes the ideological riddle of Islamic Communism. Modern history is replete with examples of regions with a long history of organizing themselves politically to resist intrusion on their territory, resources, and people. This book establishes that in Indonesia, the Bantenese were among the most practiced exponents of resistance.

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This translation of Ibrahim Syukri’s Sejarah Kerajaan Melayu Patani (SKMP) makes available a little known but important manuscript published privately ca. 1950 and printed in jawi (Malay written in a modified Arabic script). Shortly after its publication, the book was banned in both Thailand and Malaysia. It appears that a few copies of the original printing survived. The SKMP represents a valuable contribution to the limited literature available on the Malay population of present-day southern Thailand. While the account of Patani’s history is based on a distinctively Malay interpretation of the record, the SKMP is more important as a political statement of the strong sense of ethnic identity shared by Patani’s Malay population. The SKMP will be of particular interest to those seeking to understand the persistence of conflict in southern Thailand.

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Original oral and ethnographic sources inform this conceptual history of power in central Africa, imagined through the lens of Kitawala religious practices. Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo recounts the multifaceted history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala from its colonial beginnings in the 1920s through its continued practice in some of the most conflict-riven parts of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today. Drawing on a rich body of original oral, ethnographic, and archival research, Nicole Eggers uses Kitawala as a lens through which to address the complex relationship between politics, religion, healing, and violence in Central African history. Kitawala, which has roots in the African Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witness) movement, has long been viewed both by scholars and by popular historians as a form of male-dominated, anticolonial insurgency. But just as Kitawalists were never exclusively male, their teachings and activities were never directed solely at the Belgian colonial state, and their yearnings for self-rule were never entirely about the secular realms of authority. A more comprehensive look at the oral and archival evidence reveals they were and are concerned with the morality of power more broadly: on state, communal, and individual levels. Moreover, Kitawalist doctrine is itself unruly, and its preachers, prophets, and practitioners have articulated innumerable interpretations—most quite different from Watchtower Christianity—across space and time. More than a case study of a particular religious movement, Unruly Ideas is a conceptual history of power that investigates how communities and individuals in the region have historically imagined power, sought to access it, wielded it, and policed the morality of its uses. By focusing on power and its intellectual and social history in Congo, Unruly Ideas creates an analytical space in which readers can understand the differing manifestations of Kitawala—from its overtly political and sometimes violent moments to those more aptly characterized as individual quests for spiritual and physical therapy—as varying themes in the same story: the pursuit of wellness in the context of malady. On a more practical level, the book raises important questions about the project of writing histories of places like eastern Congo: a region where the repercussions of decades of political neglect, upheaval, and violence force us to reconsider how we can think about and use oral and archival sources. Finally, the book investigates the embodied and gendered nature of field research and interrogates the intersubjective and reciprocal nature of knowledge production.

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A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal. This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of counter-mapping below that of the separatist leaders like Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor and Mamadou “Nkrumah” Sané. The Casamance conflict began on December 26, 1982. After an oath-taking ceremony in a sacred forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, hundreds of separatists from the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) marched into the town to remove the Senegalese flag in front of the regional governor’s office and replace it with a white flag. The marchers were met by gendarmes who quickly found themselves outnumbered. Government surveillance, arrests, and interrogations followed into the next year, when gendarmes went to the sacred forest to stop another MFDC meeting. This time, the separatists greeted the gendarmes with a burst of violence that left four dead, their bodies mutilated. Senegalese security responded with force, driving the separatists—armed only with improvised rifles, bows and arrows, and machetes—into the forest. The Casamance conflict continues to the present day, so far having left more than five thousand dead, four hundred killed or maimed by land mines, and another eight hundred thousand living in a state of insecurity, with limited possibility for economic development. Ordinary Casamançais—on the Casamance River, in the rice fields, in the forests, in the schools, and in the sports stadiums—have demonstrated a diversity of opinions about the separatist project. Whether by the Senegalese state or by the separatists, these ordinary Casamançais have refused to be mapped. They have made the Casamance “a country of defiance.”

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Available Light tells the story of an activist, an artist, a uniquely South African individual, and his community and family across the second half of the twentieth century. Omar Badsha was born in Durban, on the country’s southeastern coast in 1945. His was the third generation of his Gujarati family to call South Africa home. Before he turned five, the country’s white electorate had voted to institute apartheid to strip the rights and privileges of citizenship from most of the population, including Badsha’s Indian community and especially the country’s Black majority. By the time he turned fifteen, nonviolent protest against apartheid had been quashed; by the time he turned twenty, so too had the armed struggle to dislodge white supremacy within the country. The ongoing, resilient, and oft-rebuffed struggle against apartheid was a definitive factor in Badsha’s life.Furthermore, Badsha was raised in a community where art—painting, ca

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As part of our Biographies for Young Readers series for middle-grade readers, this book explains who Jane Addams was and why she caused such a stir in the United States and worldwide. The story follows Addams from her first realization of the unfairness that limited the lives, livelihoods, and health of disadvantaged people in the late 1800s to her becoming one of the most beloved—and most disliked—women of her day. She worked to create a more peaceful, fair world for all people, no matter their race, color, nationality, or gender.Along her journey, Addams cofounded Hull-House, the most celebrated settlement house in the United States, and she became a motivating author, speaker, and women’s rights and peace advocate. She worked tirelessly on community, state, and national levels to promote women’s, workers’, and children’s rights, and she spoke passionately against the evils of war. Addams devoted her activities and writings to championing

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Scholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overview of the first people who inhabited the region, who built civilizations that moved massive amounts of earth and left an archaeological record that drew the interest of subsequent settlers and continues to intrigue scholars. It highlights how, in the eighteenth century, Native Americans who migrated from the East and North interacted with Europeans to develop impressive trading networks and how they navigated complicated wars and sought to preserve national identities in the face of violent attempts to remove them from their lands. The book situates the traditional story of Ohio settlement, including the Northwest Ordinance, the dealings of the Ohio Company of Associates, and early road building, into a far richer story of contested spaces, competing visions of nationhood, and complicated relations with Indian peoples. By so doing, the contributors provide valuable new insights into how chaotic and contingent early national politics and frontier development truly were. Chapters highlighting the role of apple-growing culture, education, African American settlers, and the diverse migration flows into Ohio from the East and Europe further demonstrate the complex multiethnic composition of Ohio’s early settlements and the tensions that resulted. A final theme of this volume is the desirability of working to recover the often-forgotten history of non-White peoples displaced by the processes of settler colonialism that has been, until recently, undervalued in the scholarship.

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Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation. The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

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Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. This new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women’s faith commitments tended to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry. Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism’s and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman’s readings highlight each poet’s innovative religious poetics. Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet’s denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry. Religious Imaginaries has appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper’s formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.

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This guide to moths, native plants, and their environmental roles is an indispensable resource for gardeners, conservationists, and nature enthusiasts across the midwestern United States. Gardening for Moths is the first book to show midwestern gardeners and naturalists why they should attract specific moth species to their properties and how to do it. The book’s stunning color photographs and intriguing facts reveal the fascinating world of these insects, inspiring readers to incorporate moth-loving native plants into their landscapes. The authors emphasize the importance of moths and their caterpillars to ecological food webs, widening the book’s appeal to birders and bat lovers as well. The book consists of three main sections, beginning with a thorough overview of moths, including their population decline and conservation, importance in ecosystems, relationship with native plants, and predators and defenses In addition, this first section features tips on how to attract and photograph moths at night. In the next section the authors profile about 140 plant species, providing brief background, natural history, habitat, and growing notes for each along with lists of potential moths the plants may attract. The third section highlights approximately 150 moth species, ordered taxonomically. These accounts include interesting facts about the life history of both the caterpillar and adult moth of each species. Each account also features a list of the species’ common host plants. Throughout the volume, inset text boxes provide additional fascinating moth facts. Beautiful photographs (most by the authors) illustrate every included plant and moth species. Select references, online resources, and quick reference tables round out this valuable resource.

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Written from a Zambian perspective, this leading study shows how the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) organized and deployed human, military, and natural resources during and after the Second World War. The Second World War brought unprecedented pressures to bear on Britain’s empire, which then included colonial Northern Rhodesia. Through new archival materials and oral histories, War and Society in Colonial Zambia tells—from an African perspective—the story of how the colony organized its human and natural resources on behalf of the imperial government. Alfred Tembo first examines government propaganda and recruitment of personnel for the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, which served in East Africa, Palestine, Ceylon, Burma, and India. Later, Zambia’s economic contribution to the Allied war effort would foreground the central importance of the colony’s mining industry as well as its role as supplier of rubber and beeswax following the fall of the Southeast Asian colonies to the Japanese in early 1942. Finally, Tembo presents archival and oral evidence about life on the home front, including the social impact of wartime commodity shortages, difficulties posed by incoming Polish refugees, and the more interventionist forms of colonial governance that these circumstances engendered.

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This new collection of essays on HIV viruses spans disciplines to topple popular narratives about the origins of the AIDS pandemic and the impact of the disease on public health policy. With a death toll in the tens of millions, the AIDS pandemic was one of the worst medical disasters of the past century. The disease was identified in 1981, at the height of miraculous postwar medical achievements, including effective antibiotics, breakthrough advances in heart surgery and transplantations, and cheap, safe vaccines—smallpox had been eradicated just a few years earlier. Arriving as they did during this era of confidence in modern medicine, the HIV epidemics shook the public’s faith in health science. Despite subsequent success in identifying, testing, and treating AIDS, the emergence of epidemics and outbreaks of Ebola, Zika, and the novel coronaviruses (SARS and COVID-19) are stark reminders that such confidence in modern medicine is not likely to be restored until the emergence of these viruses is better understood. This collection combines the work of major social science and humanities scholars with that of virologists and epidemiologists to provide a broader understanding of the historical, social, and cultural circumstances that produced the pandemic. The authors argue that the emergence of the HIV viruses and their epidemic spread were not the result of a random mutation but rather broader new influences whose impact depended upon a combination of specific circumstances at different places and times. The viruses emerged and were transmitted according to population movement and urbanization, changes in sexual relations, new medical procedures, and war. In this way, the AIDS pandemic was not a chance natural occurrence, but a human-made disaster. Essays by: Ernest M. Drucker, Tamara Giles-Vernick, Ch. Didier Gondola, Guillaume Lachenal, Amandine Lauro, Preston A. Marx, Stephanie Rupp, François Simon, Jorge Varanda

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Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other. This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it. Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including bureaucratic machinery in South Sudan, Nigeria, and Kenya infrastructure and shortages in Chad and Nigeria disciplinarity, subjectivity, and violence in Rwanda, South Africa, and Nigeria the social life of democracy in the Congo, Cameroon, and Mozambique education, welfare, and health in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burkina Faso Everyday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens’ encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities. Contributors: Daniel Agbiboa Victoria Bernal Jean Comaroff John L. Comaroff E. Fouksman Fred Ikanda Lori Leonard Rose Løvgren Ferenc Dávid Markó Ebenezer Obadare Rogers Orock Justin Pearce Katrien Pype Edoardo Quaretta Jennifer Riggan Helle Samuelsen Nicholas Rush Smith Eric Trovalla Ulrika Trovalla

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Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific case studies analyze and engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic opportunity, agricultural policy, and food security, the chapters in this book explore a range of issues and ways of thinking about harm to people and their ecologies. Because environmental justice is often understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed around North American examples, these fresh case studies will enrich both southern African history and global environmental studies. Environment, Power, and Justice expands conceptions of environmental justice and reveals discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and social change. Contributors: Christopher Conz Marc Epprecht Mary Galvin Sarah Ives Admire Mseba Muchaparara Musemwa Matthew A. Schnurr Cherryl Walker

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Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda’s postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state’s violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement—both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment—remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison’s expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison’s enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.

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With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past.

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With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past.

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A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana. Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them. The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by emphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experiencedproviding new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourseunsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are madeexposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governedshowing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequitiesDespite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.

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Written from a Zambian perspective, this leading study shows how the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) organized and deployed human, military, and natural resources during and after the Second World War. The Second World War brought unprecedented pressures to bear on Britain’s empire, which then included colonial Northern Rhodesia. Through new archival materials and oral histories, War and Society in Colonial Zambia tells—from an African perspective—the story of how the colony organized its human and natural resources on behalf of the imperial government. Alfred Tembo first examines government propaganda and recruitment of personnel for the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, which served in East Africa, Palestine, Ceylon, Burma, and India. Later, Zambia’s economic contribution to the Allied war effort would foreground the central importance of the colony’s mining industry as well as its role as supplier of rubber and beeswax following the fall of the Southeast Asian colonies to the Japanese in early 1942. Finally, Tembo presents archival and oral evidence about life on the home front, including the social impact of wartime commodity shortages, difficulties posed by incoming Polish refugees, and the more interventionist forms of colonial governance that these circumstances engendered.

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State fragility is a much-debated yet underinvestigated concept in the development and international security worlds. Based on years of research as part of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project at Carleton University, Exiting the Fragility Trap marks a major step toward remedying the lack of research into the so-called fragility trap. In examining the nature and dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a special emphasis on states that are trapped in fragility, David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy ask three questions: Why do some states remain stuck in a fragility trap? What lessons can we learn from those states that have successfully transitioned from fragility to stability and resilience? And how can third-party interventions support fragile state transitions toward resilience? Carment and Samy consider fragility’s evolution in three state types: countries that are trapped, countries that move in and out of fragility, and countries that have exited fragility. Large-sample empirical analysis and six comparative case studies—Pakistan and Yemen (trapped countries), Mali and Laos (in-and-out countries), and Bangladesh and Mozambique (exited countries)—drive their investigation, which breaks ground toward a new understanding of why some countries fail to see sustained progress over time.

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A history of a political practice through which East Africans have sought to create calm, harmonious polities for five hundred years. “To speak and be heard” is a uniquely Ugandan approach to government that aligns power with groups of people that actively demonstrate their assent both through their physical presence and through essential gifts of goods and labor. In contrast to a parliamentary democracy, the Ugandan system requires a level of active engagement much higher than simply casting a vote in periodic elections. These political strategies—assembly, assent, and powerful gifts—can be traced from before the emergence of kingship in East Africa (ca. 1500) through enslavement, colonial intervention, and anticolonial protest. They appear in the violence of the Idi Amin years and are present, sometimes in dysfunctional ways, in postcolonial politics. Ugandans insisted on the necessity of multiple voices contributing to and affirming authority, and citizens continued to believe in those principles even when colonial interference made good governance through building relationships almost impossible. Through meticulous research, Holly Hanson tells a history of the region that differs from commonly accepted views. In contrast to the well-established perception that colonial manipulation of Uganda’s tribes made state failure inevitable, Hanson argues that postcolonial Ugandans had the capacity to launch a united, functional nation-state and could have done so if leaders in Buganda, Britain, and Uganda’s first governments had made different choices.

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An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition. But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

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