James R Brennan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 133892 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | James R Brennan |
| NOMBRES | James R |
| APELLIDO | Brennan |
| FIRMA | BRENNAN J R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4382-212X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 160 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The Press at Work
To understand the place and role of Gakaara Wanjaũ in the development of a print culture in Central Kenya, it is useful to start with a contrast between the story of the small press that he set up in the provincial town of Karatina in 1971 and the familiar, sometimes apocryphal stories of how the printing press arrived in Africa and the aura that surrounded it. In general, the arrival of the missionary printing press in Africa was seen as the tri…
Islam, Politics and the Limits of Authority in Mainland Tanzania, 1955–1968
This chapter examines how Tanganyika's urban Islamic institutions and Muslim population by turns led, negotiated and endured the rise of African nationalism and the establishment of a secular socialist regime between 1955 and 1968.This is explored through four sequential arenas.The first explores how efforts to officialise public elements of Islam, particularly regarding festivals, catalysed fissures that led to a wide-scale reorganisation of Mus…
Chosen Peoples
As Africa’s most recently independent nation-state, founded in 2011, South Sudan owes its existence to the efforts of nationalist fighters, politicians, and citizens, the bulk of whom understood their cause and actions primarily in religious terms. Indeed, the role of Christianity, Islam, and freedom of worship are such unavoidable points of departure to understand the two brutal civil wars fought between Christian South Sudanese and the Khartoum…
Print Culture, Islam and the Politics of Caution in Late Colonial Dar es Salaam
This article examines the history of Ramadhan Machado Plantan’s newspaper Zuhra, an independent African weekly newspaper that served as both an advocate for Dar es Salaam’s Muslim African community, as well as a kind of spiritual advisor and diviner. The content of Zuhra engages with a host of issues that were germane to its reading public, some of which were conventionally nationalist (segregation, land rights) and others which seem particularly…
A Partial “History of Histories” of the British Intelligence Machine
The largely unpublished histories of intelligence generated by state institutions for internal consumption are as much cultural artifacts and policy prescriptions as they are inquiries into the pas
S hravan V idyarthi and E rin H aney , editors. Priya Ramrakha
Until the 1950s, photojournalism in colonial East Africa was a barren field controlled by government information departments staffed with amateur European photographers. While commercial photography in the region was initially developed by South Asian entrepreneurs, who established studios in coastal towns beginning in the late nineteenth century, independent newspapers faced too small a market and too many technological hurdles to support profes…
Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain’s Late Decolonisation. By Peter Brooke
The Secret Lives of Dennis Phombeah
Processes of decolonization in the context of the Cold War provided enormous opportunities for nationalist figures to parlay insider nationalist knowledge into significant metropolitan influence. This article offers an ‘agent-focused’ rather than ‘agency-focused’ approach to the study of Cold War intelligence competition in Africa’s decolonization through a study of the career of Dennis Phombeah, a Nyasalander by birth and Tanganyikan nationalist…
Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1953–64
The Rents of the Dead
This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its ‘post-normative’ orientation toward its subject, firmly discarding the ‘expectations’ of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the ‘vernacularization’ of urban structures and strategies in A…
The Rents of the Dead
This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its ‘post-normative’ orientation toward its subject, firmly discarding the ‘expectations’ of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the ‘vernacularization’ of urban structures and strategies in A…
The First Victory
Julie MacArthur. Cartography and the Political Imagination
Historicizing the construction of ethnic groups has been one of African historiography’s signature strengths. The field’s consensus on ethnogenesis—that the “form” of “tribe” was a product of colonial-era policies and incentives, though the “content” often drew on precolonial roots—has emerged through decades of research that sought to explain how and why “tribes” became central units of political activity during the twentieth century, while simu…
Sir Philip Mitchell and the Indian Ocean, 1944–49
This article examines the strategic initiatives that Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Kenya, brought to Great Britain’s Indian Ocean imperial and diplomatic policy in the years following the Second World War. Seeking to give strategic shape to his own coastal Islamic sympathies, Mitchell encroached on high-level policy debates with a proposal to reorganise Britain’s Western Indian Ocean around a political directorate to administer the coastal zon…
Popular Politics in East Africa from Precolonial to Postcolonial Times
Popular politics have influenced the development of East Africa’s political institutions from roughly two millennia ago up to contemporary times. Among the discernible political dynamics over this time period were pressures to include or exclude peoples from key institutions of belonging, the decisive role of patron–client relationships across all political institutions, the role of generational conflict, the source of political authority based o…
Ten years of Jeas
Looking back at its first 10 years, we are happy to see that the Journal of Eastern African Studies has established itself as a major Area Studies journal. As our readership has broadened – in addi
In between improvisation, compensation and negotiation
This article examines the socio-spatial history of the central market of a colonial African city. Colonial policies of racial segregation created obstacles to commerce, which in turn generated a local strategy of improvisational planning to placate various urban actors with a host of often contradictory concessions to ameliorate dislocation. These contradictions of colonial governance played out most visibly in the struggles over Kariakoo market,…
Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala. Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–1940
The story of Indian doctors in Kenya has been “almost entirely written out of the history books” (1). Thus begins Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala’s careful and exhaustively researched monograph, which aims to rectify this oversight by providing a collective biographical portrait of the two hundred or so Indian doctors who practiced Western medicine in Kenya between 1895 and 1940. Topiwala, the son of a Kenya Indian doctor, and Greenwood, a hi…
Print, Reading, and Patronage in the Colonial-Born Presses of the Indian Diaspora in Africa
As a response to Isabel Hofmeyr's book Gandhi's Printing Press, this essay examines Indian diasporic print culture, in order to both appreciate the magnitude of Hofmeyr's contribution and to challenge some of the book's generalizations. It considers the wider political economy of print in which Gandhi's printing press operated; the reception and agency among the readers of Gandhi's print products; and the comparable if considerably more modest pr…
The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa
This article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as …
Constructing Arguments and Institutions of Islamic Belonging
This article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The succes…
The Karimjee Jivanjee family
In the closing pages of this lavishly illustrated, oversized book, Dutch historian Gijsbert Oonk reveals his various intended audiences. This is limited neither to the general reader interested in
Julius Rex
This article examines political critics of Tanzania's first president, Julius K. Nyerere. While his detractors varied greatly in both ideological and sociological terms, the three major groups studied here shared a sharp intellectual frustration with Nyerere's effective utilization of humility as a political weapon to control debate, court international support, and silence opposition. Foreign critics, primarily European writers, were divided pri…
Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean
Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania, by Ned Bertz." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39(4), pp. 919–920
Sisters in Spirit
Sisters in Spirit: Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860–1970." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 54(2), pp. 362–364
Blood Enemies
The major concepts of nationalist political thought in Tanzania formed at the meeting point between local and international understandings of exploitation, and prescriptions for its removal. These ideas were given social form through a politics of enmity concerned with defining enemies of the nation and creating corresponding purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship in Tanzania required the demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation for a…
Lowering the Sultan's Flag
On 17 December 1961, Ronald Ngala faced an audience of some five hundred supporters in Malindi, a town on the East African coast of the Indian Ocean. The crowd had come to watch Ngala lower the flag that symbolized colonial rule along the coast. This was not the Union flag of Great Britain, but the red flag of the Sultan of Zanzibar. It flew over a number of towns located along the ten-mile coastal strip 'Protectorate' of what was then Kenya Colo…
Youth, the Tanu Youth League and Managed Vigilantism in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 1925-73
This article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. 'Youth', as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist …
Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent
The emergence of an African racial nationalism in Tanzania was as much an intellectual re-articulation of basic categories of identity as it was a response to the racial inequities of coastal East African society and European colonial rule. This article explores the intellectual agency of African thinkers who operated within structures of thought that understood civilization as something diffused from outside of Africa—either in the form of Swahi…
Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika
This article examines the history of two Indian newspapers,Tanganyika OpinionandTanganyika Herald, to demonstrate how business considerations provided both the opportunity for East African Indians to make public arguments and the central limitation on the arguments that could be made. Founded on the inspiration of mass nationalist action through a territorialhartal, theTanganyika Opinionand later theHeraldblazed the trails that articulated 'Great…
Challenge to Colonialism
South Asian Nationalism in an East African Context
Research Article| August 01 1999 South Asian Nationalism in an East African Context: The Case of Tanganyika, 1914–1956 James R. Brennan James R. Brennan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1999) 19 (2): 24–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-24 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James R. Brennan; South Asian Nationalis…
DestroyingMumiani
This article examines and contextualizes a riot that occurred in Dar es Salaam in 1959, in the peri-urban neighbourhood of Buguruni. The riot involved accusations that security guards and police were abducting neighbourhood residents and killing them in order to use their blood for the preparation of magical medicines. Those who abducted Africans for this purpose were popularly termed mumiani. Their rumoured existence is examined in the wider con…
Constructing Arguments and Institutions of Islamic Belonging
This article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The succes…
Sir Philip Mitchell and the Indian Ocean, 1944–49
This article examines the strategic initiatives that Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Kenya, brought to Great Britain’s Indian Ocean imperial and diplomatic policy in the years following the Second World War. Seeking to give strategic shape to his own coastal Islamic sympathies, Mitchell encroached on high-level policy debates with a proposal to reorganise Britain’s Western Indian Ocean around a political directorate to administer the coastal zon…
Julius Rex
This article examines political critics of Tanzania's first president, Julius K. Nyerere. While his detractors varied greatly in both ideological and sociological terms, the three major groups studied here shared a sharp intellectual frustration with Nyerere's effective utilization of humility as a political weapon to control debate, court international support, and silence opposition. Foreign critics, primarily European writers, were divided pri…
Print Culture, Islam and the Politics of Caution in Late Colonial Dar es Salaam
This article examines the history of Ramadhan Machado Plantan’s newspaper Zuhra, an independent African weekly newspaper that served as both an advocate for Dar es Salaam’s Muslim African community, as well as a kind of spiritual advisor and diviner. The content of Zuhra engages with a host of issues that were germane to its reading public, some of which were conventionally nationalist (segregation, land rights) and others which seem particularly…
Popular Politics in East Africa from Precolonial to Postcolonial Times
Popular politics have influenced the development of East Africa’s political institutions from roughly two millennia ago up to contemporary times. Among the discernible political dynamics over this time period were pressures to include or exclude peoples from key institutions of belonging, the decisive role of patron–client relationships across all political institutions, the role of generational conflict, the source of political authority based o…
Print, Reading, and Patronage in the Colonial-Born Presses of the Indian Diaspora in Africa
As a response to Isabel Hofmeyr's book Gandhi's Printing Press, this essay examines Indian diasporic print culture, in order to both appreciate the magnitude of Hofmeyr's contribution and to challenge some of the book's generalizations. It considers the wider political economy of print in which Gandhi's printing press operated; the reception and agency among the readers of Gandhi's print products; and the comparable if considerably more modest pr…
The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa
This article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as …
South Asian Nationalism in an East African Context
Research Article| August 01 1999 South Asian Nationalism in an East African Context: The Case of Tanganyika, 1914–1956 James R. Brennan James R. Brennan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1999) 19 (2): 24–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-24 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James R. Brennan; South Asian Nationalis…
Out of One, Many Africas
Even as symbols of Africa permeate Western culture in the 1990s, centers for the academic study of Africa suffer from a steady erosion of institutional support and intellectual legitimacy. Out of One, Many Africas assesses the rising tide of discontent that has destabilized the conceptions, institutions, and communities dedicated to African studies. In vibrant detail, contributors from Africa, Europe, and North America lay out the multiple, conte…
Challenge to Colonialism
Blood Enemies
The major concepts of nationalist political thought in Tanzania formed at the meeting point between local and international understandings of exploitation, and prescriptions for its removal. These ideas were given social form through a politics of enmity concerned with defining enemies of the nation and creating corresponding purge categories. Acquiring urban citizenship in Tanzania required the demonstrated commitment to fight exploitation for a…
Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent
The emergence of an African racial nationalism in Tanzania was as much an intellectual re-articulation of basic categories of identity as it was a response to the racial inequities of coastal East African society and European colonial rule. This article explores the intellectual agency of African thinkers who operated within structures of thought that understood civilization as something diffused from outside of Africa—either in the form of Swahi…
Political Genealogy, Race and Territory in Eastern Africa
Youth, the Tanu Youth League and Managed Vigilantism in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, 1925-73
This article examines the role of male youth in the political history of Dar es Salaam. 'Youth', as a category of opposition to elders, became important during the inter-war period as it was inhabited by educated African bureaucrats aspiring to representation in urban politics over the traditional claims of authority by local ethnic Zaramo and Shomvi elders. This group of bureaucrats grew in power through the popularization of racial-nationalist …
Dar es Salaam. Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis
From its modest beginnings in the mid-19th century, Dar es Salaam has grown to become one of sub-Saharan Africa?s most important urban centres. A major political, economic and cultural hub, the city stood at the cutting edge of trends that transformed twentieth-century East Africa. Dar es Salaam has recently attracted the attention of a diverse, multi-disciplinary, range of scholars, making it currently one of the continent?s most studied urban c…
DestroyingMumiani
This article examines and contextualizes a riot that occurred in Dar es Salaam in 1959, in the peri-urban neighbourhood of Buguruni. The riot involved accusations that security guards and police were abducting neighbourhood residents and killing them in order to use their blood for the preparation of magical medicines. Those who abducted Africans for this purpose were popularly termed mumiani. Their rumoured existence is examined in the wider con…
Lowering the Sultan's Flag
On 17 December 1961, Ronald Ngala faced an audience of some five hundred supporters in Malindi, a town on the East African coast of the Indian Ocean. The crowd had come to watch Ngala lower the flag that symbolized colonial rule along the coast. This was not the Union flag of Great Britain, but the red flag of the Sultan of Zanzibar. It flew over a number of towns located along the ten-mile coastal strip 'Protectorate' of what was then Kenya Colo…
Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika
This article examines the history of two Indian newspapers,Tanganyika OpinionandTanganyika Herald, to demonstrate how business considerations provided both the opportunity for East African Indians to make public arguments and the central limitation on the arguments that could be made. Founded on the inspiration of mass nationalist action through a territorialhartal, theTanganyika Opinionand later theHeraldblazed the trails that articulated 'Great…
Communications and Media in African History
This chapter examines how media technologies have constituted and transformed Africa’s multiple public spheres over the past two centuries. Exogenous and often ‘colonial’ in origin, print and electronic media have nonetheless induced new intellectual communities in which African actors played a determinative role. Knowledge and power had previously been tightly linked under the purview of precolonial elites. Colonial-era media transformed this re…
Rents and entitlements
This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its 'post-normative' orientation, firmly discarding the 'expectations' of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the 'vernacularization' of urban structures and strategies in Africa. While such w…
Rents and entitlements
This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its ‘post-normative’ orientation, firmly discarding the ‘expectations’ of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the ‘vernacularization’ of urban structures and strategies in Africa. While such w…
Constructing Arguments and Institutions of Islamic Belonging
This article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The succes…
The Karimjee Jivanjee family
In the closing pages of this lavishly illustrated, oversized book, Dutch historian Gijsbert Oonk reveals his various intended audiences. This is limited neither to the general reader interested in
Julius Rex
This article examines political critics of Tanzania's first president, Julius K. Nyerere. While his detractors varied greatly in both ideological and sociological terms, the three major groups studied here shared a sharp intellectual frustration with Nyerere's effective utilization of humility as a political weapon to control debate, court international support, and silence opposition. Foreign critics, primarily European writers, were divided pri…
Print, Reading, and Patronage in the Colonial-Born Presses of the Indian Diaspora in Africa
As a response to Isabel Hofmeyr's book Gandhi's Printing Press, this essay examines Indian diasporic print culture, in order to both appreciate the magnitude of Hofmeyr's contribution and to challenge some of the book's generalizations. It considers the wider political economy of print in which Gandhi's printing press operated; the reception and agency among the readers of Gandhi's print products; and the comparable if considerably more modest pr…
The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa
This article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as …
In between improvisation, compensation and negotiation
This article examines the socio-spatial history of the central market of a colonial African city. Colonial policies of racial segregation created obstacles to commerce, which in turn generated a local strategy of improvisational planning to placate various urban actors with a host of often contradictory concessions to ameliorate dislocation. These contradictions of colonial governance played out most visibly in the struggles over Kariakoo market,…
Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala. Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–1940
The story of Indian doctors in Kenya has been “almost entirely written out of the history books” (1). Thus begins Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala’s careful and exhaustively researched monograph, which aims to rectify this oversight by providing a collective biographical portrait of the two hundred or so Indian doctors who practiced Western medicine in Kenya between 1895 and 1940. Topiwala, the son of a Kenya Indian doctor, and Greenwood, a hi…
Sir Philip Mitchell and the Indian Ocean, 1944–49
This article examines the strategic initiatives that Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Kenya, brought to Great Britain’s Indian Ocean imperial and diplomatic policy in the years following the Second World War. Seeking to give strategic shape to his own coastal Islamic sympathies, Mitchell encroached on high-level policy debates with a proposal to reorganise Britain’s Western Indian Ocean around a political directorate to administer the coastal zon…
Popular Politics in East Africa from Precolonial to Postcolonial Times
Popular politics have influenced the development of East Africa’s political institutions from roughly two millennia ago up to contemporary times. Among the discernible political dynamics over this time period were pressures to include or exclude peoples from key institutions of belonging, the decisive role of patron–client relationships across all political institutions, the role of generational conflict, the source of political authority based o…
Ten years of Jeas
Looking back at its first 10 years, we are happy to see that the Journal of Eastern African Studies has established itself as a major Area Studies journal. As our readership has broadened – in addi
The Rents of the Dead
This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its ‘post-normative’ orientation toward its subject, firmly discarding the ‘expectations’ of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the ‘vernacularization’ of urban structures and strategies in A…
Political science (35 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Sociology (29 obras) · African history and culture studies (26 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · History (21 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (17 obras) · Geography (15 obras) · Colonialism (14 obras)