Dress Cultures in Zambia: Interwoven Histories, Global Exchanges, and Everyday Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Emerita Karen Tranberg Hansen (anthropology) distills five decades of research in Zambia and East Africa in this history of the evolution of dress practices from late colonialism to the present. She argues that the dressed body serves as the point of contact between personal, local, and global experience, and shows how dress illuminates political power as well as personal style. Hansen shows Zambia’s contribution to global fashions, particularly the vibrant Chitenge fabric that spread across colonial trading networks. Replete with color illustrations and personal anecdotes, this volume highlights dress as an important medium for negotiating Zambian identities and an important driver of history.
Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023)
Former PAS Visiting Scholar Matthew Rarey follows the history of the African-associated amulets (mandingas) that enslaved and other marginalized people carried in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. He draws on myriad sources, including Arabic-language narratives from the West African Sahel, the archives of the Portuguese Inquisition, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel and merchant accounts of the West African coast, and early nineteenth-century Brazilian police records; Rarey argues that mandingas represented portable archives of their makers’ experiences of enslavement, displacement, and diaspora. They serve as examples of the visual culture of enslavement and are critical to conceptualizing Black Atlantic art history. leaders move from rebels to rulers.
The Yoruba: A New History
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020)
Akinwumi Ogundiran (history) presents the first transdisciplinary study of the evolution of the Yoruba people from ca. 300 BC to 1840, from their origins on the Niger-Benue confluence in present-day Nigeria to their current situation as one of Africa’s most populous cultural groups. Using diverse sources—archaeology, linguistics, environmental science, oral traditions, material culture, and mythology—Ogundiran examines local, regional, and global aspects of Yoruba history. It covers the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience through time. Lameese Badr, Sara Elkamel, Edil Hassan, Jeremy Teddy Karn, Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, Selina Nwulu, Ayan M. Omar, Saradha Soobrayen, Ajibola Tolase, and Qutouf Yahia.