Laurel Rose analyzes how traditional ruling elites in Swaziland, as in other parts of Africa, use harmony ideologies to downplay and resolve land disputes. Such disputes could be used by foreign development agents or indigenous new elites as justification for implementing land tenure changes, including a reduction of traditional elites' power based upon land control. Swazi commoners accept the cultural value and legitimacy of most harmony ideologies, but they adopt various strategies when disputing about particular land rights in order to produce more favorable outcomes. This book is unusual...

This book argues that the formal art of the Old English epic Beowulf is shaped and determined by the poetic language that the poet inherited from the traditional, oral culture of Anglo-Saxon England. The patterns of meter and alliteration exhibited in the poem were not imposed by the poet on his language, but were part of the language that he spoke, the rules of which constituted his metrical grammar. Professor Kendall investigates the constraints of syntax, meter and alliteration that govern the formal art of Beowulf. He shows how the half-lines of the poem, which are the basic units of...

Scholarship on the West African kingdom of Asante is at the leading edge of Africanist research. T.C. McCaskie gives a detailed and nuanced historical portrait of precolonial Asante. The book is both a profound historical reconstruction of an African polity, and a deeply informed meditation on Asante concepts and ideas. Throughout the book, the Asante experience is consistently discussed in relation to a broad range of historiography and critical theory.

This is a study of how self-transformation may occur through the practice of reframing one's personal experience in terms of a canonical language: that is, a system of symbols that purports to explain something about human beings and the universe they live in. The Christian conversion narrative is used as the primary example here, but the approach used in this book also illuminates other practices such as psychotherapy in which people deal with emotional conflict through language.

Peter Murphy's book examines the tension between the material, economic pressures motivating poetry as an occupation, and traditional notions of the forces of literary history defining poetry as an art. It focuses on five writers in the Romantic period: James MacPherson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth. The first four are Scottish; the economic and linguistic status of Scotland during the period makes its writers especially interesting as examples of poetic ambition. Murphy's study then crosses the border into England, offering a new perspective on Wordsworth's...

This book examines the decline of slavery in Northern Nigeria during the first forty years of colonial rule. At the time of the British conquest, the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in modern history. Rather than emancipate slaves, the colonial state abolished the legal status of slavery, encouraging them to buy their freedom. Many were unable to do so, and slavery was not finally abolished until l936. The authors have written a provocative book, raising doubts over the moral legitimacy of both the Sokoto Caliphate and the colonial state.

Once the major success story of a troubled continent, by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities that sustain them. The analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields, combining many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.

Eritrea, the newest nation-state in Africa, gained independence from the Ethiopian state after a prolonged and bitter conflict. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the country's political history over the past three decades. It examines the origins of Eritrean nationalism, and charts the development of its various nationalist movements, assessing the programs and capabilities of the parties contending for power. It also analyzes the regional and international context within which the battles for independence were fought.

In a study of Africa's political and religious past, Christopher Wrigley uses local traditions and comparative mythology to explore an ancient system of myth and ritual in the precolonial kingdom of Buganda, the nucleus of modern Uganda. The study includes critical assessment of oral traditions and places Buganda in a wider regional context. The book is an elegant, wide-ranging and original study of one of Africa's most famous kingdoms.

This edited collection, written by leading specialists, deals with nineteenth-century commercial transition in West Africa: the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and development of alternative forms of "legitimate" trade. Approaching the subject from an African perspective, the case studies consider the effects of transition on the African societies involved, and provide new insights into the history of precolonial Africa and the slave trade, origins of European imperialism, and longer term issues of economic development in Africa.