Pamela Kea, Land, Labour and Entrustment West African Female Farmers and the Politics of Difference (BRILL, 2010)

Diverse contractual arrangements and forms of exchange established between smallholder farmers, their households and community work groups, are important to our understanding of processes of agrarian transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, little has been written in this area. Challenging portrayals of West African female farmers as a homogenous group, the present study provides an ethnographic account of the contractual relations established between female hosts and migrants, in the exchange of land and labour for agrarian production in a Gambian community. Further, it demonstrates the way in which, despite the liberalization of the economy, local cultural practices, such as that of entrustment, continue to be of significance in affecting the nature and particular character of agrarian transformation and postcolonial capitalist development.

Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (eds.), Art and the British empire (Manchester University Press, 2007)

This pioneering study argues that the concept of 'empire' belongs at the centre, rather than in the margins, of British art history. Recent scholarship in history, anthropology, literature and post-colonial studies has superseded traditional definitions of empire as a monolithic political and economic project.  Emerging across the humanities is the idea of empire as a complex and contested process, mediated materially and imaginatively by multifarious forms of culture. 

The twenty essays in Art and the British Empire offer compelling methodological solutions to this problematic, while engaging in subtle visual analysis of a previously neglected body of work.  Authors from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the USA and the UK examine a wide range of visual production, including book illustration, portraiture, monumental sculpture, genre and history painting, visual satire, marine and landscape painting, photography and film.  Together these essays propose a major shift in the historiography of British art and a blueprint for further research.

William J. Spurlin, Imperialism Within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (New York: Palgrave/St Martins, 2007)

Through focusing on the sexual politics that have emerged out of post-apartheid South Africa, Spurlin investigates textual and cultural representations of same-sex desire outside of the Euroamerican axes of queer culture and politics, and considers the ways in which queer cultural productions in southern Africa both intersect with and resist these.

Minoli Salgado, Writing Sri Lanka (Routledge, 2006)

Focusing on ways in which cultural nationalism has influenced both the production and critical reception of texts, Salgado presents a detailed analysis of eight leading Sri Lankan writers - Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunasekera, Shyam Selvadurai, A. Sivanandan, Jean Arasanayagam, Carl Muller, James Goonewardene and Punyakante Wijenaike – to rigorously challenge the theoretical, cultural and political assumptions that pit ‘insider’ against ‘outsider’, ‘resident’ against ‘migrant’ and the ‘authentic’ against the ‘alien’. By interrogating the discourses of territoriality and boundary marking that have come into prominence since the start of the civil war, Salgado works to define a more nuanced and sensitive critical framework that actively reclaims marginalized voices and draws upon recent studies in migration and the diaspora to reconfigure the Sri Lankan critical terrain.

David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

This volume uses a series of portraits of 'imperial lives' in order to rethink the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the stories of men and women who dwelt for extended periods in one colonial space before moving on to dwell in others, developing 'imperial careers'. These men and women consist of four colonial governors, two governors' wives, two missionaries, a nurse/entrepreneur, a poet/civil servant and a mercenary. Leading scholars of colonialism guide the reader through the ways that these individuals made the British Empire, and the ways that the empire made them. Their life histories constituted meaningful connections across the empire that facilitated the continual reformulation of imperial discourses, practices and cultures. Together, their stories help us to re-imagine the geographies of the British Empire and to destabilize the categories of metropole and colony.

Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820-2000  (Oxford University Press, 2006)

A Commonwealth of Knowledge addresses the relationship between social and scientific thought, colonial identity, and political power in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa. It hinges on the tension between colonial knowledge, conceived of as a universal, modernizing force, and its realization in the context of a society divided along complex ethnic and racial fault-lines. By means of detailed analysis of colonial cultures, literary and scientific institutions, and expert historical thinking about South Africa and its peoples, it demonstrates the ways in which the cultivation of knowledge has served to support white political ascendancy and claims to nationhood.

Stephanie Newell, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, (Oxford University Press, 2006.

This book demonstrates the ways in which postcolonial theory can be applied to West African literatures. It covers a wide range of authors, texts, and perspectives. Each chapter contains a map to helps readers position each author in relation to the region and other writers. The 'West African Timeline' at the start of book gives detailed guidance and information as to dates of key texts and political events.

Stephanie Newell, The Forger's Tale: The Search for Odeziaku (Ohio University Press, 2006.)

In The Forger's Tale: The Search for Odeziaku Stephanie Newell charts the story of the English novelist and poet John Moray Stuart-Young (1881-1939) as he traveled from the slums of Manchester to West Africa in order to escape the homophobic prejudices of late-Victorian society. Leaving behind a criminal record for forgery and embezzlement and his notoriety as a “spirit rapper,” Stuart-Young found a new identity as a wealthy palm oil trader and a celebrated author, known to Nigerians as “Odeziaku.”

In this fascinating biographical account, Newell draws on queer theory, African gender debates, and “new imperial history” to open up a wider study of imperialism, (homo)sexuality, and nonelite culture between the 1880s and the late 1930s. The Forger's Tale pays close attention to different forms of West African cultural production in the colonial period and to public debates about sexuality and ethics, as well as to movements in mainstream English literature.

Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves (eds.), South Africa's 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities  (Double Storey, 2005)

Most people see the 1940s as a decade that led inexorably towards apartheid, but the coming of Afrikaner nationalism was only one of several competing visions for the future. The decade was in fact marked by a general expectancy that the end of the war would usher in a brave new world. In the end, these hopes for reform were dealt a death blow, only to be resurrected 40 years later with the demise of white supremacy. These worlds of possibilities are explored more fully in this volume by a team of distinguished historians. Saul Dubow is Professor of History at Sussex University and Alan Jeeves is Professor of History at Queen’s University, Ontario.