Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — History, Geography & Area Studies — Africa

This well-researched and written book surveys the pursuit and practice of sovereignty in the Sahel, notably Soudan/Mali.  Starting from the mid-1940s, Mann (Columbia) studies the evolving exercise and influence of Sahelian political power as he attempts to answer the question What is government?  In particular, the author explores new forms of governmental rationality that he calls nongovernmentality.  Before neoliberalism, new networks, alliances, and NGOs would quickly come to govern alongside the new states, not over them, but sometimes in their place.  Among topics discussed are imperial reforms before independence (the end of the indigénat, enfranchisement of women), migration to Sudan besides France (regulation of transnational mobility, a developing sense of belonging), famine and humanitarian aid (the role of NGOs sustaining states while exercis[ing] a peculiar and ever more pervasive form of nongovernmental rationality), and human rights activism (notably, the effectiveness of Amnesty International).  Bookending the narrative is the emblematic life of Madeira Keita, an anticolonial Malian social scientist and later government minister.  This innovative and insightful book includes maps and deserves inclusion in research university libraries.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

South Africas 1913 Natives Land Act is widely and justly seen as a fulcrum of intensified national segregation, but few have probed its deeper origins, course, and impact, or how some Africans transcended its harsh strictures.  In a highly original book sure to spark debate, Feinberg (emer., Southern Connecticut State Univ.) presents copious data from archival sources and builds a fine revisionist argument to force a rethink by historians.  He does a good job excavating statistics and stories of long-ignored land purchases by blacks and places them in detailed political context to contradict established notions.  This well-balanced history reveals both African agency (including individuals skillfully defending their land, neglected by historians) and complexity and limits on state power, as well as legal exceptions managing transactions and accumulation necessary to capitalist functioning.  It could be argued that only about 3,300 approved land purchases between 1913 and 1936 represent more adaptive African perspicacity than any successful challenge, and future work could plumb vernacular columns and memories sometimes missing here.  Nevertheless, this is an important, insightful book sure to have wide interdisciplinary appeal.  The Natives Land Act continues to have enormous symbolic (and legal) significance, and Feinberg nicely connects segregation with apartheid eras, past with present.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

A groundbreaking study of state formation along the West African coast during the period of European contact, this book makes effective use of a landscape perspective to study the ways in which early African states imposed power over their subjects through control over space, both within towns and villages and in the countryside between communities.  Monroe (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) begins with an introduction to the environmental and cultural milieu of southern Benin during the period before European contact, which provides essential background for understanding the political world early European explorers and traders encountered.  In later chapters, he then systematically moves through the historical trajectory of the Dahomey state, from its emergence from client status to the Allada polity early in the 18th century through the period of greatest prosperity and centralization under the ruler Gezo a century later and to its ultimate decline under both internal and external pressures later in the 19th century.  The book's primary strengths are its fine-grained archaeological fieldwork and analysis in modern Benin and its sophisticated integration of historical and anthropological data to understand the operation of the Dahomean state.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.