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Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented” Africa as a locus of difference and alterity.
Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform—rather than merely reflect—colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women’s writing.
Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.

This book examines the process through which the mantle of leadership passed from one leader to another in Botswana. It concerns the succession to high office in Botswana over the course of more than half a century from the colonial time to the present. Three case studies explore the relationship between the British colonial authorities and the tribal leaders in affirming the legitimacy of the tribal chiefs of the Bangwato tribe in the former Bechuanaland protectorate. The studies examine the succession crises of the Bangwato first in 1925 and again between 1948 to 1953 and the political changes from the Botswana National Archives contained in the appendices fully support the text.

Sugar Girls and Seamen illuminates the shadowy world of dockside prostitution in South Africa, focusing on the women of Cape Town and Durban who sell their hospitality to foreign sailors.

Dockside “sugar girls” work at one of the busiest cultural intersections in the world. Through their continual interactions with foreign seamen, they become major traffickers in culture, ideas, languages, styles, goods, currencies, genes, and diseases. Many learn the seamen’s languages, develop emotional relationships with them, have their babies, and become entangled in vast webs of connection. Henry Trotter argues that these South African women are the ultimate cosmopolitans, the unsung sirens of globalization.

Based on research at the seamen’s nightclubs, plus countless interviews with sugar girls, sailors, club owners, cabbies, bouncers, and barmaids, this book provides a comprehensive account of dockside prostitution at the southern tip of Africa. Through stories, analysis, and firsthand experiences, it reveals this gritty world in all its raw vitality and fragile humanity. Sugar Girls and Seamen is simultaneously racy and light, critical and profound.

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses - from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza's electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.

Contributors are Beth Bailey, Mike Foreman, Douglas Gomery, George Hamilton IV, Warren R. Hofstra, Joli Jensen, Bill C. Malone, Kristine M. McCusker, and Jocelyn R. Neal.