Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Download Bodies, Politics, and African Healing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253222451
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (532 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Bodies, Politics, and African Healing by : Stacey A. Langwick

Download or read book Bodies, Politics, and African Healing written by Stacey A. Langwick and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

Bodies, Politics, and African Healing

Download Bodies, Politics, and African Healing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 025300196X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Bodies, Politics, and African Healing by : Stacey A. Langwick

Download or read book Bodies, Politics, and African Healing written by Stacey A. Langwick and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa

Download Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253357098
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (533 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa by : Hansjörg Dilger

Download or read book Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa written by Hansjörg Dilger and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa—and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

Download A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119251486
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (192 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa by : Roy Richard Grinker

Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa written by Roy Richard Grinker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Para-States and Medical Science

Download Para-States and Medical Science PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 082237627X
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Para-States and Medical Science by : Paul Wenzel Geissler

Download or read book Para-States and Medical Science written by Paul Wenzel Geissler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or responsive, national governments remain crucial in medical care, both as employers of health care professionals and as sources of regulation, access, and – albeit sometimes counterintuitively - trust for their people. “The state” has morphed into the “para-state” — not a monolithic and predictable source of sovereignty and governance, but a shifting, and at times ephemeral, figure. Tracing the emergence of the “global health” paradigm in Africa in the treatment of HIV, malaria, and leprosy, this book challenges familiar notions of African statehood as weak or illegitimate by elaborating complex new frameworks of governmentality that can be simultaneously functioning and dysfunctional. Contributors. Uli Beisel, Didier Fassin, P. Wenzel Geissler, Rene Gerrets, Ann Kelly, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, Lotte Meinert, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Branwyn Poleykett, Susan Reynolds Whyte

African American Folk Healing

Download African American Folk Healing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814757324
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis African American Folk Healing by : Stephanie Mitchem

Download or read book African American Folk Healing written by Stephanie Mitchem and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-07 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo. Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.

Healing Bodies, Saving Souls

Download Healing Bodies, Saving Souls PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9401203636
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (12 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Healing Bodies, Saving Souls by :

Download or read book Healing Bodies, Saving Souls written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism, from the late-1800s to the 1960s. Although the figure of mission doctor – exemplified by David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer – exercised a powerful influence on the Western imagination during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, few historians have examined the history of this important aspect of the missionary movement. This collection of articles on Asia and Africa uses the extensive archives that exist on medical missions to both enrich and challenge existing histories of the clinic in colonial territories – whether of the dispensary, the hospital, the maternity home or leprosy asylum. Some of the major themes addressed within include the attitude of different Christian denominations towards medical mission work, their differing theories and practices, how the missionaries were drawn into contentious local politics, and their attitude towards supernatural cures. Leprosy, often a feature of such work, is explored, as well as the ways in which local people perceived disease, healing and the missionaries themselves. Also discussed is the important contribution of women towards mission medical work. Healing Bodies, Saving Souls will be of interest not only to students and historians but also the wider reader as it aims to define the place of missionary within the overall history of medicine.

The walk without limbs: Searching for indigenous health knowledge in a rural context in South Africa

Download The walk without limbs: Searching for indigenous health knowledge in a rural context in South Africa PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : AOSIS
ISBN 13 : 1928523110
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (285 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The walk without limbs: Searching for indigenous health knowledge in a rural context in South Africa by : Gubela Mji

Download or read book The walk without limbs: Searching for indigenous health knowledge in a rural context in South Africa written by Gubela Mji and published by AOSIS. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a country as diverse as South Africa, sickness and health often mean different things to different people – so much so that the different health definitions and health belief models in the country seem to have a profound influence on the health-seeking behaviour of the people who are part of our vibrant, multicultural society. This book is concerned with the integration of indigenous health knowledge (IHK) into the current Western--orientated Primary Health Care (PHC) model. The first section of the book highlights the challenges facing the training of health professionals using a curriculum that is not drawing its knowledge base from the indigenous context and the people of that context. Such professionals will later recognise that they are walking without limbs in matters pertaining to health. The area that was chosen for conducting the research was KwaBomvana in Xhora (Elliotdale), Eastern Cape province, South Africa. The people who reside there are called AmaBomvana. The area where the Bomvana peoples reside is served by Madwaleni Hospital and eight surrounding clinics. Qualitative ethnographic, feminist methods of data collection supported the research done for Section 1 of the book. Section 2 comprises the translation and implementation of PhD study outcomes and had contributions from various researchers. In the critical research findings of the PhD study, older Xhosa women identify the inclusion of social determinants of health as vital to the health problems they managed within their homes. For them, each disease is linked to a social determinant of health, and the management of health problems includes the management of social determinants of health. For them, it is about the health of the home and not just about the management of disease. They believe that healthy homes make healthy villages, and that the prevention of the development of disease is related to the strengthening of the home. Health and illness should be seen within both physical and spiritual contexts; without health, there can be no progress in the home. When defining health, the older Xhosa women add three critical components to the WHO health definition, namely, food security, healthy children and families, and peace and security in their villages. Prof. Mji further proposes that these three elements should be included in the next revision of the WHO health definition because they are not only important for the Bomvana people where the research was conducted, but also for the rest of humanity. In light of the promise of National Health Insurance and the revitalisation of PHC, this book proposes that these two major national health policies should take cognisance of the IHK utilised by the older Xhosa women. In addtion to what this research implies, these policies should also take note of all IHK from the indigenous peoples of South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world, and that there should be a clear plan as to how the knowledge can be supported within a health care systems approach.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies

Download A Traffic of Dead Bodies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691059259
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (592 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Traffic of Dead Bodies by : Michael Sappol

Download or read book A Traffic of Dead Bodies written by Michael Sappol and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

The Experiential Caribbean

Download The Experiential Caribbean PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469630885
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Experiential Caribbean by : Pablo F. Gómez

Download or read book The Experiential Caribbean written by Pablo F. Gómez and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

My Grandmother's Hands

Download My Grandmother's Hands PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Central Recovery Press
ISBN 13 : 1942094485
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (42 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis My Grandmother's Hands by : Resmaa Menakem

Download or read book My Grandmother's Hands written by Resmaa Menakem and published by Central Recovery Press. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NATIONAL BESTSELLER "My Grandmother's Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice."— Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide. Paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system. Offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary. Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, is a therapist with decades of experience currently in private practice in Minneapolis, MN, specializing in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert on conflict and violence. Menakem has studied with bestselling authors Dr. David Schnarch (Passionate Marriage) and Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score). He also trained at Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute.

Working the Roots

Download Working the Roots PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780692857878
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (578 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Working the Roots by : Michele Elizabeth Lee

Download or read book Working the Roots written by Michele Elizabeth Lee and published by . This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Working The Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing" is an engaging study of the traditional healing arts that have sustained African Americans across the Atlantic ocean for four centuries down through today. Complete with photographs and illustrations, a medicines, remedies, and hoodoo section, interviews and stories.

Fat Girls in Black Bodies

Download Fat Girls in Black Bodies PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
ISBN 13 : 1623174996
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (231 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fat Girls in Black Bodies by : Joy Arlene Renee Cox, Ph.D.

Download or read book Fat Girls in Black Bodies written by Joy Arlene Renee Cox, Ph.D. and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combatting fatphobia and racism to reclaim a space for womxn at the intersection of fat and Black To be a womxn living in a body at the intersection of fat and Black is to be on the margins. From concern-trolling--"I just want you to be healthy"--to outright attacks, fat Black bodies that fall outside dominant constructs of beauty and wellness are subjected to healthism, racism, and misogynoir. The spaces carved out by third-wave feminism and the fat liberation movement fail at true inclusivity and intersectionality; fat Black womxn need to create their own safe spaces and community, instead of tirelessly laboring to educate and push back against dominant groups. Structured into three sections--"belonging," "resistance," and "acceptance"--and informed by personal history, community stories, and deep research, Fat Girls in Black Bodies breaks down the myths, stereotypes, tropes, and outright lies we've been sold about race, body size, belonging, and health. Dr. Joy Cox's razor-sharp cultural commentary exposes the racist roots of diet culture, healthism, and the ways we erroneously conflate body size with personal responsibility. She explores how to reclaim space and create belonging in a hostile world, pushing back against tired pressures of "going along just to get along," and dismantles the institutionally ingrained myths about race, size, gender, and worth that deny fat Black womxn their selfhood.

Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa

Download Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821444662
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa by : Ruth J. Prince

Download or read book Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa written by Ruth J. Prince and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa has emerged as a prime arena of global health interventions that focus on particular diseases and health emergencies. These are framed increasingly in terms of international concerns about security, human rights, and humanitarian crisis. This presents a stark contrast to the 1960s and ‘70s, when many newly independent African governments pursued the vision of public health “for all,” of comprehensive health care services directed by the state with support from foreign donors. These initiatives often failed, undermined by international politics, structural adjustment, and neoliberal policies, and by African states themselves. Yet their traces remain in contemporary expectations of and yearnings for a more robust public health. This volume explores how medical professionals and patients, government officials, and ordinary citizens approach questions of public health as they navigate contemporary landscapes of NGOs and transnational projects, faltering state services, and expanding privatization. Its contributors analyze the relations between the public and the private providers of public health, from the state to new global biopolitical formations of political institutions, markets, human populations, and health. Tensions and ambiguities animate these complex relationships, suggesting that the question of what public health actually is in Africa cannot be taken for granted. Offering historical and ethnographic analyses, the volume develops an anthropology of public health in Africa. Contributors:Hannah Brown, P. Wenzel Geissler, Murray Last, Rebecca Marsland, Lotte Meinert, Benson A. Mulemi, Ruth J. Prince, Noémi Tousignant, and Susan Reynolds Whyte

Law in Light

Download Law in Light PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520397088
Total Pages : 251 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Law in Light by : LAUREN. COYLE ROSEN

Download or read book Law in Light written by LAUREN. COYLE ROSEN and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law in Light is a groundbreaking book on the resurgence and transformation of Akan path spiritual communities in the United States and Ghana. Drawing on extensive collaborative ethnographic research, the book offers powerful portraits of priestesses, priests, and others on their spiritual journeys, in their ancestral reconnections, and in their everyday lives. The book spotlights a queen mother, shrine elders, priests, and priestesses of a prominent shrine house in Maryland, as well as leaders at a legendary Asuo Gyebi source shrine in Ghana. In exploring worlds of healing, empowerment, and justice, Lauren Coyle Rosen argues for the importance of two novel theoretical concepts, which she calls copresent jurisdictions and constellations of subjectivity. The book urges a broader retheorization of alternative spiritual orders within contemporary theopolitical, cosmopolitical, and postjuristocratic debates.

Global Health for All

Download Global Health for All PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1978827407
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (788 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Global Health for All by : Jean-Paul Gaudillière

Download or read book Global Health for All written by Jean-Paul Gaudillière and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Health for All is a deeply historical and ethnographically rich analysis of health at a global scale. It combines sixteen inquiries into actors, institutions, objects, and ideas at the centers and margins of global health, to give a uniquely collaborative account of health's entanglement with development, science, and globalization.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History

Download The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191667552
Total Pages : 693 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History by : John Parker

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History written by John Parker and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History represents an invaluable tool for historians and others in the field of African studies. This collection of essays, produced by some of the finest scholars currently working in the field, provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of, the history of Africa - a continent with a rich and complex past. An understanding of this past is essential to gain perspective on Africa's current challenges, and this accessible and comprehensive volume will allow readers to explore various aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - of the continent's history over the last two hundred years. Since African history first emerged as a serious academic endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, it has undergone numerous shifts in terms of emphasis and approach, changes brought about by political and economic exigencies and by ideological debates. This multi-faceted Handbook is essential reading for anyone with an interest in those debates, and in Africa and its peoples. While the focus is determinedly historical, anthropology, geography, literary criticism, political science and sociology are all employed in this ground-breaking study of Africa's past.