Love in Africa. Edited by Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 pp. $23.00)

Abstract

With chapters representing diverse regions of the African continent – Madagascar, Niger, South Africa, Kenya, Zanzibar, and Nigeria – the collection Love in Africa is an important volume for at least two reasons. For Africanists, the very subject matter is a welcome introduction to new scholarship that places that complex of feelings, actions and imaginings called ‘love’ firmly at the heart of histories of our continent. For, as Cole and Thomas remind us in their erudite Introduction, “… emotions are embedded in historically situated words, cultural practices, and material conditions that constitute certain kinds of subjects and enable particular kinds of relationships.”[3] Love and its “affective practices and discourses emerge out of the particular convergence of political, economic, and cultural processes.”[29] In the African context as elsewhere, therefore, emotions such as love, hate, fear, anger, pride, and shame must be studied with a regard for the tension between universal human expressions of affect and historically constituted relationships. For the new generation of academic studies of emotion and modernity, on the other hand, these case studies offer much by way of introducing the modern history of Africa, and extending our understanding of the ways in which Christianity, capitalism, literacy, popular media and consumerism have reshaped ideas and practices of romantic love, gender, individuality, intimacy and respectability in a continent which has largely been typified as unchanging and uncivilized, and, perhaps particularly hostile to the experience of love.