100 books like In Search of Brightest Africa

Where to begin. Hoganson’s first book had already transformed our understanding about why the US acquired a colonial empire in 1898 through the politics of gender.

In Consumers’ Imperium she once again flips the script by investigating the domestic side of the Gilded Age capitalist empire. In doing so, wealthy white women are recast as power brokers of American globalization and imperialism through their purchasing habits, exhibitions, and armchair travel clubs.

It’s not possible to understand the United States without understanding its maritime past. Rouleau takes us onto the forecastle to show just how important US mariners were (how could they not be when 100,00 departed the republic each year?) in a vivid account with lots of surprising details drawn from scrimshaw and logbooks. These working-class diplomats shaped the foreign perception of the United States in port cities around the world through their (often violent) encounters with foreign peoples, their onshore carousing, and their spread of black face minstrelsy around the globe.

Reforming the World sees Ian Tyrrell, the master practitioner of transnational approaches to US history, at the peak of his powers. After tackling the world temperance movement, and US-Australian environmental connections, Tyrrell here turns to the “soft power” of Christian missionaries and evangelicals as they proselytized around the world and hoped to remake it in their image. You cannot fail to be gripped by the idiosyncratic personal histories of Tyrrell’s protagonists which he captures with characteristic attention to detail, humanity, and clear-eyed analysis. This is an important story in its own right, but what’s important is the way in which it sets the scene for US power in the twentieth century.

This is transnational scholarship at its best. Asaka tells the story of how the history of emancipation in Canada and the United States is intertwined into the history of efforts to exile freed people to tropical climates around the world where they could be used to create a monopoly over indigenous lands. This is a tale of hemispheric proportions, taking the reader from North America to the Caribbean and the East Coast of Africa, but of global importance – telling as it does the history of the racialization of freedom in the Age of Empire. Just as important, and told here in arresting fashion, are the ways in which black activists contested and remade those spaces.

The 1960s and 70s were periods of Black Consciousness, both in Africa and the diaspora. At the heart of this was Pan-Africanism, a political ideology built on historical and cultural links between Black people everywhere. At the heart of these ideas was a psychical and physical “return” to Africa, the “motherland”. This short, but powerful play, explore these politics in the marriage of Ato Yawson and Eulalie Rush, a Ghanaian man and an African-American woman who emigrate from the US to Ghana in search of racial and cultural harmony. What occurs is a dramatization of what happens when political ideologies are applied to private lives. What I love about this text is its confrontation of slavery as traumas that cannot be easily erased by political rhetoric and national endeavors to “move on.”

The canon of anti-colonial, anti-racism writing from and about Africa includes many authors whose passion and insights are sometimes muddied by turgid or masculinist prose. For me, Rodney stands out – and stands the test of time – by the way he so masterfully weaves history into a compelling narrative that utterly demolishes the lies and conceits about supposed Western benevolence toward the continent. Scales fell from my eyes the first time (of many) I read this book. And yes, Rodney is almost as androcentric in his language, sources, and arguments as was the norm in those days. But his acknowledgment of the dignity of African women is implicit, and his discussion of the regressive elements of the colonial economy and education for African women and girls presaged a field of scholarly enquiry and activism that still intrigues me.

I loved this book! It is an engaging inspirational novel of two people who love God and answer His call to go to Africa as missionaries. The author does a wonderful job of putting the reader right there in the scene. I especially loved the way the characters at times struggled in their faith but always sought God's will. This is a really great book that will help to strengthen the reader's faith and walk with God. Harriet Michael was born in Nigeria, West Africa. The Whisper of the Palms, based on the love story of her parents, offers an authentic insight into a missionary’s life in Africa.

Paulina Alberto wrote a binge-reading biography of Raúl Grigera, a Black legend of Buenos Aires during the golden age of tango. While Alberto reconstructs the family’s history of Grigera since the times of slavery in early nineteenth-century Argentina, the narrative arc of the book is the unequal power to control narratives about the self, which affected Grigera and other Black men and women who suffered the dominant and racist narratives about Blackness in Argentina, particularly on the disappearance of Afro-Argentines. This book illustrates the biographical turn in African Diaspora Studies combined with an exquisite interdisciplinary approach, which Alberto employs in her examination of “racial stories” as a methodology.

This edited volume studies Black festive traditions in the Americas that are rooted in African interpretations of early-modern Iberian customs. It shows how, from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved and free Africans in the Americas used Catholic brotherhoods as spaces for cultural and religious expression, social organization, and mutual aid. By demonstrating that the syncretic development of certain Black performance traditions in the Americas is a phenomenon that already set in on African soil, it breaks with previous scholarship that (mis)interpreted these festive traditions in the Americas as new, Creole syncretisms. I am convinced that this pioneering book will strongly affect the way future generations of scholars will come to understand Black cultural and religious identity formation in the Americas.

This book is the best overall summary of Christianity in North Africa I have ever read. There are so many books that are close to this topic but are usually more specialized, focusing only on Augustine or archaeology.

This book not only surveys the influential theologians from North Africa, Perpetua, Tertullian, and Cyprian, but also illumines the lived worship practices of everyday Christians in what we now call Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria.

I love the well-rounded and comprehensive survey of North African Christianity that this book provides.