Where present-day media has depicted violent conditions in Africa as a spectacle born out of political instability, postcolonial scholars have discussed violence as a dialectic of law and disorder, a regime structured by the biopolitical state, or as a performative tool used to challenge ethical and political norms. While the latter approaches rely on historical trajectories of violence, popular and academic discourse's shared emphasis on the state often loses sight of Africans' social histories and lived experiences of violence.
Violence in the Postcolony expands this discussion, presenting a set of microhistories, ethnographic accounts, and analyses of cultural forms to reflect on the postcolonial condition of Africa. Ambitious and expansive in its scope and scale, it brings together original contributions from a group of eminent scholars and includes case studies from North, West, and Southern Africa, as well as the African Great Lakes region. Through multidisciplinary frameworks, the contributors offer new lenses for examining entangled histories of violence, revealing the social and everyday processes that inform manifestations of violence and critiquing African subjectivities and lifeworlds produced through experiences of violence. Excavating histories of collective memory, the violence of belonging, colonial onomacide, the interplay between violence and sacredness, the everyday struggle for space, political violence, population displacement, xenophobia, and the lifeworld of génocidaires, this collection unfolds layered meanings of human suffering.
Through careful examination of the dynamics and logics of violence in its different forms, Violence in the Postcolony is an essential and timely invitation to embrace new avenues of inquiry into Africa's past and present.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Introduction
1. Violence in the Postcolony: Africa's Entangled Pasts, by Abikal Borah and Toyin Falola
Part II: Entangled Histories
2. Collective Memory and Historical Denials: Local Conflicts and the End of Apartheid, by Jill E. Kelly
3. History, Violence, and Memory in Sudan, by Amir Idris
4. Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Busani Mpofu
Part III: Forms of Violence
5. Rethinking Symbolic Violence in Colonial-Era Algeria through Personal Names, by Benjamin Claude Brower
6. Rally Day: The Urban Landscape of Postcolonial Political Violence in Sierra Leone, by Daniel J. Hoffman
7. Marketplaces, Identities, and Political Conflicts on the Jos Plateau, by Barira Mohammed
Part IV: Violence and Its Sacred Forms
8. Production of Violence in Postcolonial Africa: The Role of Sacred and Secular Sources, by Nimi Wariboko
9. The Ghosts of Colonialism: Religious Violence in Postcolonial Nigeria, by Toyin Falola
Part V: Displacement, Migration, and Xenophobic Violence
10. Encountering the Genocidaire: A Genocide of Rwandan Refugees, by Christopher P. Davey
11. Totalities and Community: Exploring the Roots of Xenophobic Violence in an Informal Settlement in Pretoria, by Sepetla Molapo
12. Political Violence and Population Displacement in Postcolonial Uganda, by Ogenga Otunnu
Part VI: Violence in Cultural Forms
13. Entangled Temporalities of Postcolonial Violence in Kenyan Literature, by Meghan Gorman-Darif
14. Violence in Postcolonial African Performance, by Toyin Falola
Part VII: Conclusion
15. Whither the Postcolony? Looking into the Future, by Toyin Falola
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Abikal Borah is Assistant Professor of History at San Diego State University. His research focuses on entangled histories of race and violence in pre-apartheid South Africa. He is coeditor (with Mobolanle E. Sotunsa) of Imagining Vernacular Histories: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in The Journal of African History, Africa Today, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Review: Fernand Braudel Center.
Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and the Nigerian Academy of Letters and has served as the President of the African Studies Association in the United States. He is the author of numerous works, including Global Yorùbá: Regional and Diasporic Networks, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, and The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalization. He has also published three memoirs: A Mouth Sweeter than Salt: An African Memoir, Counting the Tiger's Teeth: An African Teenager's Story, and Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My Encounters with Islam.
Review :
"This book will be a useful resource for those wanting to study violence in a holistic way, showing the complexity of tensions within and between groups on the African continent and allowing for a discussion that focuses on the fluidity of power and its implementation."—Dawne Y. Curry, author of Social Justice at Apartheid's Dawn: African Women Intellectuals and the Quest to Save the Nation
