Voices of the Poor in Africa:

Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory -- an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years. She brings together a wide range of disciplines -- anthropology, fiction, art and art history, philosophy, and contemporary literary theory -- to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premisses. The result is a history of popular consciousness which shows the experiences of ordinary people, often in protest at their exploitation by generation after generation of powerful foreigners and locals.

Elizabeth Isichei is professor of religious studies, Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand, and author of over a dozen books on African history and political thought. She holds an Oxford doctorate and a D.Litt from the University of Canterbury, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Reviews

The book is an important contribution to our understanding of Africa. It may become one of those "must read" books for all Africanists. --H-AFRICA Elizabeth Isichei's Voices of the Poor is an eloquent and ambitious effort to reconstruct the popular consciousness of ordinary Africans through the myths, rumors, and memories that circulate in African societies. Voices of the Poor is ambitious in its aims and sweeping in its scope. It is eloquently written and copiously documented...Isichei's fine book points the way to further integration between anthopology and history, providing a rich example of the means by which scholars can investigate popular consciousness by taking seriously the world of symbolic meaning. --INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES, Volume 36 Number 2 (2003)

Details

First Published: 09 Sep 2002
13 Digit ISBN: 9781580461078
Pages: 296
Size: 6 x 9
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series: Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Subject: African Studies
BIC Class: GTB

Details updated on 08 Sep 2010

Contents

• 1  Introduction: Truth from Below
• 2  An Overview
• 3  The Slave Traders
• 4  The Imported Commodities
• 5  Cowries
• 6  Transformations: Enslavement and the Middle Passage in African American Memory
• 7  An Overview
• 8  The Entrepreneur and the Zombie
• 9  Colonial Vampires: The Theft of Life and Resources
• 10  Changing Bodies, Changing Worlds
• 11  Symbolic Money
• 12  Dangerous Women in an Age of AIDS
• 13  Village Intellectuals and the Challenge of Poverty
• 14  Mami Wata: Icon of Ambiguity
• 15  Symbolic Appropriations of Modernity
• 16  Converging Worlds, Polarized Worlds: the Realm Beneath the Sea Revised
• 17  Eating the State: Ridicule and the Crisis of the Quotidian
• 18  Conclusion