BiblioVault - Books about West

The Paradox of Protection

The Making of Indirect Rule in Southern Sierra Leone, 1850–1915

Trina Leah Hogg

Michigan State University Press, 2025

The Paradox of Protection: The Making of Indirect Rule in Southern Sierra Leone, 1850–1915 charts the history of protection to tell a new story about indirect rule in West Africa. Protection emerged as one of the central concepts through which Africans and Britons negotiated over law and economy in decades spanning informal and formal rule. Hogg shows how British protection schemes, an assemblage of written and unwritten legal strategies to safeguard British subjects and trade routes, created an unexpected legacy of insecurity by limiting and criminalizing traditional security measures. Tracing the history of the politics of protection reveals how African leaders who sought British alliances in their own long-standing disputes became increasingly vulnerable to physical and juridical violence. In the Protectorate, new forums like chieftaincy elections and criminal courts—common features of indirect rule—became spaces for Africans to assert claims to land and construct legitimacy. This book reveals how long-standing negotiations over protection shaped an unstable framework of colonial law and rule well into the twentieth century.

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Patterns in Circulation

Cloth, Gender, and Materiality in West Africa

Nina Sylvanus

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production.

Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.

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People in Motion

Flexible States and Porous Boundaries in the History of Coastal West Africa

Sandra T. Barnes

University of Wisconsin Press, 2026

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World. While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the transatlantic slave trade’s ruling elites and overseas merchants, the practices that shaped the region’s political and cultural dynamics, especially those that dealt with other kinds of trade, have yet to be thoroughly examined.

Sandra T. Barnes offers a history focused on the Benin Region’s patchwork of small states and ports that saw a constant movement of people and goods for centuries. As such, this book widens the lens of scholarship to include people of all social levels behind the political rivalries and dynamic changes that marked the period. Barnes concentrates on protective relationships and the violence people were forced to endure during a fast-moving, tumultuous period of history, examining how they organized their lives and why this mattered. The result is a refreshingly original work that challenges long-held assumptions about West Africa’s past, explaining what life was like for people on the coast during the transatlantic slave trade.

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Petrified Forest National Park

A Wilderness Bound in Time

George M. Lubick

University of Arizona Press, 1996

Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—a few American national parks enjoy amusement-park status, eclipsing many other beautiful and significant parks due to their heavy political support and spectacular sights. Visitors to Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona can escape from the litter, snack bars, and crowds of the recreational parks to a 200-million-year-old ecosystem locked in stone. Enhanced by the unrivaled, colorful beauty of the adjacent Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park has captivated visitors since the area was discovered by early explorers. The history of the huge fossilized forest parallels that of Arizona. It was discovered and looted by adventurers and largely ignored by the government until President Theodore Roosevelt made it a national monument in 1906. The forest's location along Route 66 brought a large number of visitors during the time it enjoyed only monument status, but lack of funding for protection allowed much damage and theft of fossilized wood.

Petrified Forest National Park: A Wilderness Bound in Time speeds the reader on an ancient ecological journey, from the time of dinosaurs to the discovery of their Triassic fossils and on through a century of political maneuvering to create a place for the forest in American history. George Lubick describes how a dedicated few understood the environmental importance as well as the unique beauty of the park's Triassic Chinle Formation and the Painted Desert. Nearly a million people "visit the Triassic" annually; this environmental history of the ancient forest is important for those who know the park as well as those interested in natural America. Petrified Forest National Park is one of the few complete histories of any national park, a well-told, balanced treatment of the environmental, political, and historical factors that shape America's natural history.

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Picturing Sabino

A Photographic History of a Southwestern Canyon

David Wentworth Lazaroff

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

The story is vividly told through numerous historical photographs, lively anecdotes, and an engaging text, informed by decades of research by David Wentworth Lazaroff. Along the way the reader makes the acquaintance of ordinary picnickers as well as influential citizens who helped to reshape the canyon, while witnessing the canyon’s evolving relationship with its growing urban neighbor. The book will fascinate readers who are already familiar with Sabino Canyon, as well as anyone with an interest in local or regional history, or in historical photography.

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Postcards from the Baja California Border

Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s

Daniel D. Arreola

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.

This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.

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Prairie Spirit

Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West

Dennis L. Butcher

University of Manitoba Press, 1985

The Predicament of Blackness

Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race

Jemima Pierre

University of Chicago Press, 2012

What is the meaning of blackness in Africa? While much has been written on Africa’s complex ethnic and tribal relationships, Jemima Pierre’s groundbreaking The Predicament of Blackness is the first book to tackle the question of race in West Africa through its postcolonial manifestations. Challenging the view of the African continent as a nonracialized space—as a fixed historic source for the African diaspora—she envisions Africa, and in particular the nation of Ghana, as a place whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics.

Against the backdrop of Ghana’s history as a major port in the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent and disruptive forces of colonialism and postcolonialism, Pierre examines key facets of contemporary Ghanaian society, from the pervasive significance of “whiteness” to the practice of chemical skin-bleaching to the government’s active promotion of Pan-African “heritage tourism.” Drawing these and other examples together, she shows that race and racism have not only persisted in Ghana after colonialism, but also that the beliefs and practices of this modern society all occur within a global racial hierarchy. In doing so, she provides a powerful articulation of race on the continent and a new way of understanding contemporary Africa—and the modern African diaspora.

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Preserving The Glory Days

Ghost Towns And Mining Camps Of Nye County, Nevada

Shawn Hall

University of Nevada Press, 1999

Nye County is Nevada’s largest and least populated county, but it is also the site of many of the state’s most colorful ghost towns and mining camps. The county’s economy throughout its history has been largely based on its mines--first, exploiting veins of gold and silver, and more recently deposits of raw materials for modern industry, such as molybdenum and barite. It was here that famous boomtowns like Tonopah and Rhyolite sprang up after the discovery of nearby lodes brought in rushes of prospectors and the merchants who supported them. But the county includes many smaller, shorter-lived camps and numerous abandoned stagecoach and railroad stops associated with defunct mining operations.This book offers a lively, informative record of Nevada’s isolated interior. Hall first published a guide to Nye County’s ghost towns in 1981. Since then, he has continued his research into the county’s past and has uncovered much new information and corrected some errors. To prepare this revised and greatly expanded edition, he revisited all 175 sites recorded earlier and has added more than 20 previously unlisted sites.

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Prevention

Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d'Ivoire

Christine Cynn

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Approximately 70% of the global total of people living with HIV/AIDS in 2016 were in sub-Saharan Africa. After delayed governmental responses, the media has been consistently deployed as an essential tool for prevention. But HIV prevention campaigns reflect multiple conflicting and shifting agendas that encompass far more than the imparting of information about how to limit the spread of the virus. In Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d’Ivoire, Christine Cynn draws from postcolonial, queer, and feminist film and media studies to critique global HIV prevention efforts and how they attempt to reshape gendered sexualities and notions of family in line with the rationality of neoliberalism.
More specifically, Cynn argues that through the bolstering of normative conceptions of gendered sexualities and families, HIV prevention media campaigns seek to actively create proper subjects, a goal corresponding with nation-building projects and reproducing their terms of belonging. During periods of increasingly virulent political and economic struggles in Côte d’Ivoire, such HIV prevention messages have lent support to lender- and state-mandated structural adjustment policies and to the exclusionary logic that casts some—such as those suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, those labeled as “homosexual,” sex workers, intravenous drug users, and the HIV-positive child—as implicitly unassimilable to the community and nation. Deeply interdisciplinary, Prevention brings to light new forms of exclusion and expands scholarship on gender and sexual normativities as it intersects with that on public health, neoliberalism, and film and media.

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Prisoners of Shangri-La

Tibetan Buddhism and the West

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 2018

To the Western imagination, Tibet evokes exoticism, mysticism, and wonder: a fabled land removed from the grinding onslaught of modernity, spiritually endowed with all that the West has lost. Originally published in 1998, Prisoners of Shangri-La provided the first cultural history of the strange encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Donald Lopez reveals here fanciful misconceptions of Tibetan life and religion. He examines, among much else, the politics of the term “Lamaism,” a pejorative synonym for Tibetan Buddhism; the various theosophical, psychedelic, and New Age purposes served by the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead; and the unexpected history of the most famous of all Tibetan mantras, om mani padme hum. More than pop-culture anomalies, these versions of Tibet are often embedded in scholarly sources, constituting an odd union of the popular and the academic, of fancy and fact.

Upon its original publication, Prisoners of Shangri-La sent shockwaves through the field of Tibetan studies—hailed as a timely, provocative, and courageous critique. Twenty years hence, the situation in Tibet has only grown more troubled and complex—with the unrest of 2008, the demolition of the dwellings of thousands of monks and nuns at Larung Gar in 2016, and the scores of self-immolations committed by Tibetans to protest the Dalai Lama’s exile.

In his new preface to this anniversary edition, Lopez returns to the metaphors of prison and paradise to illuminate the state of Tibetan Buddhism—both in exile and in Tibet—as monks and nuns still seek to find a way home. Prisoners of Shangri-La remains a timely and vital inquiry into Western fantasies of Tibet.

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Prisoners of Shangri-La

Tibetan Buddhism and the West

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Prisoners of Shangri-La is a provocative analysis of the romance of Tibet, a romance that, even as it is invoked by Tibetan lamas living in exile, ultimately imprisons those who seek the goal of Tibetan independence from Chinese occupation.

"Lopez lifts the veil on America's romantic vision of Tibet to reveal a country and a spiritual history more complex and less ideal than popular perceptions allow. . . . Lively and engaging, Lopez's book raises important questions about how Eastern religions are often co-opted, assimilated and misunderstood by Western culture."—Publishers Weekly

"Proceeding with care and precision, Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like intellectual colonialists. . . . Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could have done it as resoundingly as Lopez."—Booklist

"Fascinating. . . [A] provocative exploration. Lopez conveys the full dizziness of the Western encounter with Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism."—Fred Pheil, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

"A timely and courageous exploration. . . . [Lopez's] book will sharpen the terms of the debate over what the Tibetans and their observers can or should be doing about the place and the idea of Tibet. And that alone is what will give us all back our Shambhala."—Jonathan Spence, Lingua Franca Book Review

"Lopez's most important theme is that we should be wary of the idea . . . that Tibet has what the West lacks, that if we were only to look there we would find the answers to our problems. Lopez's book shows that, on the contrary, when the West has looked at Tibet, all that it has seen is a distorted reflection of itself."—Ben Jackson, Times Higher Education Supplement

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The Proper Edge of the Sky

High Plateau Country of Utah

Edward A Geary

University of Utah Press, 1992

Edward Geary’s collection of writings on the High Plateau country of central and southern Utah, a combination guidebook, travel narrative, personal essays, and natural, social, and literary history, encompasses each of those forms with a sweep as broad as the landscape it describes.

It traces the progress of travelers to the region, including the historic Dominguez-Escalante party in 1776, and trappers and explorers such as Jedediah Smith, John C. Freemont, and Kit Carson. Scandinavian and English descendants of the early Mormon pioneers, sent to settle Manti and surrounding areas by Brigham Young in 1849, populate many of the pages and dominate the agrarian villages described by the author. The book also describes the multiethnic society of French Basque, Greeks, Slavs, Italians, Chinese, Welsh, and Finnish laborers and coal miners that developed in the region.

Geary writes of all these people with affection and a deep sense of place, of belonging to a distinctive landscape and its history. It is a book that will bring a rush of understanding to those who have lived in the High Plateaus and greater depth of appreciation to visitors.

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Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change

Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders

Ousseina D. Alidou

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina Alidou examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences.

While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.

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