In 2022, ASC has seen publication of the twentieth title in the book series African Perspectives, published through the University of Michigan Press. The series has capitalized on U-M’s strong and distinctive position in the field of African studies and complements the four ASC-based presidential initiatives that advance the university’s scholarly collaborations on the continent: the African Heritage Initiative, the African Social Research Initiative, the STEM-Africa Initiative, and the U-M African Presidential Scholars Program. The series publishes the original research of both well-established and emerging scholars on topics of scholarly value.
Titles in the series have come from authors representing Nigeria, South Africa, Chad, Zambia, Cameroon, Mozambique, Mali, and West Africa and Southern Africa generally.
Among the most recent titles are Patience Mususa’s volume There Used to Be Order, addressing social change in Zambia’s Copperbelt region, and African Performance Arts and Political Acts, edited by Naomi André, Yolanda Covington-Ward, and Jendele Hungbo, which explores the intersection of politics and the arts across the African continent.
Series titles have explored African literature, gender, religion, colonialism, art and industry, apartheid, technology and surveillance, and voting practices, among other topics for Africa and worldwide.
Editors for the series are Kelly Askew, Founding Director of the African Studies Center and Chair, Department of Anthropology, UM; Laura Fair, Professor of East African Studies at Columbia University and author most recently of Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in 20th Century Urban Tanzania, which won the ASA’s Bethwell Ogot Prize; and Pamila Gupta, Professor of Social Anthropology at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand and author most recently of Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography.
For additional information about the series, please contact Sara Jo Cohen, Editorial Director, at sjco@umich.edu.