It’s time to introduce some new October releases! Starting off with Masquerades in African Society which looks into the role of masquerades in African rituals and performances; The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provides an account of the development of ACHPR; Bulgaria, the Jews, and the Holocaust looks into the past and the remembrance of the Holocaust; A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures offers an up-to-date guide to the significance of sound in German-speaking cultures from the Middle Ages to the digital age, and last but not least, Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s – 1960s examines the literary production in West African newspapers and local printing presses in the first half of the 20th century.
Gender, Power and Identity
by Walter E A Van Beek and Harrie M. Leyten
This book takes an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of masquerades on the African continent to show how mask rituals are an integral part of African indigenous religions and societies, and are informed by and linked to specific types of social and ecological conditions. Having established the commonalities of mask rituals and a mask typology, the authors look at the varieties of mask performances and the types of rituals in which masks function in rites of passage and in rituals of gender, power, and identity.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights [2-volume set]
by Nat Rubner
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) was the first non-Western declaration of human rights. This book, for the first time, presents a comprehensive account of the development of the ACHPR, key to a proper understanding of its fundamental nature. Volume 1 outlines the dominant African political and cultural ideas upon which the OAU (now African Union) was founded. Volume 2 describes the process through which the ACHPR came into being.
![Book jacket image: The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights [2-volume set]](https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/boydell-and-brewer-wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/04093909/The-African-Charter-on-Human-and-Peoples-Rights-2-volume-set-scaled.jpg)
On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative
by Nadège Ragaru Translated by Victoria Baena and David A. Rich
In this new English translation of her work originally published in French, Nadège Ragaru presents a riveting, wide-ranging archival investigation encompassing 80 years and six countries (Bulgaria, Germany, the United States, Israel, North Macedonia and Serbia), in doing so exploring the origins and perpetuation of this heroic narrative of Bulgaria’s past. Moving between legal and political spheres, from artistic creations to museum exhibits, from the writing of history to transnational public controversies, she shows how the Holocaust north of the Danube became a “rescue” to the river’s south. She traces how individual merits were turned into “national” achievements, while blame for the deportations was planted squarely on Nazi Germany.
Edited by Rolf J. Goebel
Responding to new questions in sound studies in the context of German-speaking cultures, and incorporating up-to-date methodologies, this Companion explores the significance of sound from the Middle Ages and the classical-romantic period through high-capitalist industrial modernity, the Nazi period and the Holocaust, and postwar Germany to the present digital age. The volume examines how sonic events are represented in literary fiction, radio productions, cinema, newsreels, documentaries, sound art, museum exhibitions, and other media, drawing for this inquiry on philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, musicology, art theory, and cultural studies.
by Stephanie Newell
From their inception in the 1880s, African-owned newspapers in ‘British West Africa’ carried an abundance of creative writing by local authors, largely in English. Yet to date this rich and vast array of work has largely been ignored in critical discussion of African literature and cultural history. This book, for the first time, explores this under-studied archive of ephemeral writing – from serialised fiction to poetry and short stories, philosophical essays, articles on local history, travelogues and reviews, and letters – and argues for its inclusion in literary genres and anglophone world literatures. Combining in-depth case studies of creative writing in the Ghana and Nigeria press with a major reappraisal of the Nigerian pamphlets known as ‘Onitsha market literature’, and focusing on non-elite authors, the author examines hitherto neglected genres, styles, languages, and, crucially, readerships.
7 Books to Read on Maritime History