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Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. 

As in many other countries, the protection of human rights and other practices of constitutionalism remains uneven in Malawi and Kenya. In this book, Eunice N. Sahle argues that the adoption in 1994 and 2010 in Malawi and Kenya, respectively, of new constitutional frameworks, which have the markings of “critical constitutional events,” provided significant openings for the promotion of human rights. Nonetheless, the emergence of such opportunities does not mean that the protection of human rights is automatic. Sahle zeroes in on the tension between the possibilities of human rights promotion on one hand, and the historical and contemporary factors influencing that process on the other. In that regard, her analysis shows the importance and limits of transformative constitutional frameworks as tools for social change. Further, by focusing on the promotion of human rights by a diverse range of social actors—individuals, civil society, organizations, and public institutions—she demonstrates the need to broaden who “counts” as an agent of human rights and to go beyond a strictly state-centric approach.

Paulinus Ikechukwu Odozor is among the preeminent moral theologians of our time. He has reached the pinnacle of his profession after serving more than two decades as a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Among African theologians, he stands at the forefront of the generation that came of age in the early postconciliar period. Fr. Odozor’s work in Morality Truly Christian, Truly African: Foundational, Methodological, and Theological Considerations (2014) has become a classic in the field of Catholic moral theology. His contribution to reuniting moral theology to dogmatics is a key element to processing the contention in theological scholarship in the wake of Vatican II and the shifting of the socio-economic global landscape. Understanding the influence of theologians such as Richard McCormick, Charles Curran, and Edward Schillebeeckx, Fr. Odozor, he is unable to ignore the work of John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger, Joseph Boyle, and John Cavadini as essential to the age of renewal in the field of moral theology.

            The essays in this volume highlight the fruits of Fr. Odozor's ability to move between the spheres of moral and dogmatic theology, and his particular treatment of the nature of God, ecclesiology, and interreligious dialogue. He is a theologian who is rightly positioned within a postconciliar moral theological context, and his thought is critical as we enter a new era in the Church that no longer takes Vatican II as its reference point––that is, the Church is reorienting toward the future, in continuity but seeking to discern what lies ahead. Claiming postconciliar theologians shared basic agreement regarding the mission of the Church, within the foggy contention among pre- and postconciliar moral theologians Odozor sees a legitimate albeit complex connection. Fr. Odozor's appreciation for Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor is clear, and his fidelity to seeing issues like contraception as a "God question" and representing the concerns and voices of Africa make him an indispensable leader of the Church in this field of study. His mission to "bring Africa to the University of Notre Dame, and Notre Dame to Africa," has been more successful than former dean John Cavadini expected: African theology is no longer separated from the wider world thanks to this partnership and Fr. Odozor's acumen to establish moral theology's stature in the wider field. 

Finalist: Memory Studies Association 2025 First Book Award Shortlist | April 7, 2025 

In Continuous Pasts, author Sakiru Adebayo claims that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa depicts the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, and continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration. Adebayo argues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa invites critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity—that is to say, the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book also argues that post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa shows the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. It contends that, in most cases in Africa, the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors—and that it is precisely this despairing disposition toward the future that some writers of post-conflict fiction attempt to confront in their works. On the whole, Continuous Pasts shows how post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa recalibrate discourses of futurity, solidarity, responsibility, justice, survival, and reconciliation. It also contends that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory. Each text analyzed in the book provides, in very interesting ways, an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can ‘remember together’ using what the author describes as an African transnational memory framework.

War and its reverberations propel people across the Nigerian landscape in Hussain Ahmed’s third collection

In Crossroad Mirror many poems begin after sundown—in quiet moments when the bounds between the past and the present, the living and the dead, blur.  War and its aftershocks often form the backdrop for these scenes, though Ahmed’s verse rarely brings us to the battlefield itself. Instead, we hear the stories of refugees, civilian casualties, and ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of their circumstances. “There’s no vocabulary in the army—for grief, or death,” writes Ahmed. “Each door you exit, leads to another parade ground.” A group of soldiers wait out a rainstorm—and the war—together in a tent. Their families linger by the radio and listen for news. The “missing” loom as large as the dead.

Tracing the threads of migration that war so often catalyzes, Crossroad Mirror takes us from grassland to cornfield to coastline and explores the role storytelling and spirituality play in leaving and grieving.