Jamie Monson
Biographic Data
| ID | 125491 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jamie Monson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jamie |
| FAMILY NAME | Monson |
| SIGNATURE | MONSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macalester College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8609-1841 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Performing internationalism: Tanzanian women’s delegations to China, 1961–1965
Learning by Heart: Training for Self-Reliance on the Tazara Railway, 1968–1976
Matteo Rizzo. Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis
Matteo Rizzo’s Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis is a book on urban transport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and it makes two important scholarly contributions. The first is an intervention into debates about neoliberalism, as Rizzo seeks to go beyond binary debates over structure versus agency to show the significance of what he calls “grounded neoliberalism.” The second, mor…
Working History: China, Africa, and Globalization
Challenges of creating alliances across borders: Midterm reflections from the Alliance for African partnership
This paper seeks to share cross-border (geographic, disciplinary and cultural) challenges in the ethical design, establishment, implementation, and evaluation of the performance of alliances and partnerships. The paper reviews the Alliance for African Partnership’s two-year experience stressing lessons learned and shows how it has benefitted philosophically on the subject from recent linkage with the International Development Ethics Association. …
Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, by Laura Madokoro
Book Review: Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War Laura Madokoro Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 331
African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements
African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements Jamie Monson The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies: Back to the Future? In 1997, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza wrote as president of the African Studies Association that the field of African studies had been plagued by perpetual crisis since its institutionalization in the 1950s. The crisis had its roots in deeply embedded historical structures of race and hierarchy, on the one hand, and institution…
Rachel K. Bright. Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902–10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle
During the years following the South African War (1902–1910), ideas about race, labor, and the formation of the state were at the forefront of reconstruction politics. Rachel K. Bright's extensive archival research demonstrates that a scheme to bring Chinese indentured laborers to the mines of the Transvaal played a far greater role in those transition politics than previous historiography has allowed. Mining capitalists and their political suppo…
Des « hommes nouveaux: Mémoires De Travailleurs Du Rail Et Coopération Sino-Africaine
En Zambie et en Tanzanie, une génération de travailleurs est en train d'atteindre l'âge de la retraite : il s'agit de ceux qui, aux côtés de leurs collègues chinois, ont construit dans les années 1970 le chemin de fer TAZARA, reliant le bassin minier (Copperbelt) zambien à l'océan Indien. Façonnés dans leur jeunesse, ces « nouveaux ouvriers » ont souscrit à la promesse et à l'édification de nations socialistes en Afrique de l'Est, avec l'espoir d…
Introduction: Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
IntroductionAfrica and China: New Engagements, New Research Jamie Monson, Guest Editor (bio) and Stephanie Rupp, Guest Editor (bio) Overview The idea to put together this African Studies Review Forum was sparked more than two years ago when a group of interdisciplinary researchers prepared double panel sessions for the fifty-second Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2009. The panels brought together a broad [End Page 21] s…
Remembering Work on the Tazara Railway in Africa and China, 1965-2011: When "New Men" Grow Old
In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China-African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their exper…
Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From protective lions to angry spirits: Environmental degradation and the authority of elders in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania
Along the route of the TAZARA railway in southern Tanzania, the increased circulation of people, goods and ideas has led to changes in the utilization of environmental resources. The settlement of newcomers in the Kilombero Valley, who not only plant crops but also fish in the Kilombero river floodplain, has led to concern among those who consider themselves to be “local” that outsiders have simultaneously brought both development and degradation…
Railway Time: Technology Transfer And The Role Of Chinese Experts In The History Of Tazara
During the construction of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s, African and Chinese workers not only laboured side by side but also engaged in what was known as 'technical cooperation' as Chinese railway experts trained their African counterparts in the workplace and in technical training workshops. This cooperation continued to develop over the years following the railway's completion, as a total of 14 successive teams of Chin…
Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania
Don't eat the oranges: they're laced with knockout drops. That's what Westerners hear, but there is far more to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) story than expatriate anxieties. Built from 1970 to 1975 with assistance from the People's Republic of China, TAZARA was a major international development project embodying Third World solidarity during the Cold War. Designed to end African nations' dependence on the southern African line of rail and…
Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War
Chapter One. War Of Words: The Narrative Efficacy Of Medicine In The Maji Maji War
In this chapter, the author takes the analysis of the role of maji during the war and its aftermath still further. His approach seeks to go beyond an evaluation of the instrumental and symbolic efficacy of the maji medicine, to understand its narrative efficacy in specific historical and geographical settings. The chapter considers the way stories of maji functioned as a set of ideas that came to be mobilized within and among societies in souther…
Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War
The Maji Maji war of 1905-07 in Tanzania was the largest African rebellion against European colonialism. This volume offers the fullest account of the war in the English language. Using oral accounts and little-used documentary evidence, contributors offer detailed histories of districts and localities as well as groups, such as African soldiers in the German army, elephant hunters and women, whose roles in war have been neglected. The contributo…
Defending the People's Railway in the Era of Liberalization: Tazara in Southern Tanzania
When the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district-level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision-making was being guided by profit-making rather than nation-building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the peopl…
Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken Written Unearthed
An overview of the ongoing methods used to understand African history. Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing. This book is…
Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania
The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'lvoire, 1880-1995
1. Introduction 2. The collision of empires, 1880-1911 3. The uncaptured corvee, 1912-46 4. Repackaging cotton, 1947-63 5. Making cotton work, 1964-84 6. 'To sow or not to sow': the extensification of cotton, gender politics, and rural mobilization, 1985-95 7. Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography
Tanzania: The Story of Julius Nyerere
Memory, Migration and the Authority of History in Southern Tanzania, 1860–1960
According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level…
Claims to History and the Politics of Memory in Southern Tanzania, 1940-1960
A partir du recit historique dissident dans lequel Anton Mwilenga, tailleur de son etat, narra en 1947 l'histoire de son peuple, les Ndamba de la vallee de Kilombero (Tanzanie meridionale), et d'autres recits historiques similaires, l'A. met en evidence la connexion entre, d'une part, les enjeux et les revendications politiques locaux et, d'autre part, la relation entre la memoire collective et les differentes versions de l'histoire de la vallee.…
Remembering Work on the Tazara Railway in Africa and China, 1965-2011: When "New Men" Grow Old
In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China-African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their exper…
Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War
The Maji Maji war of 1905-07 in Tanzania was the largest African rebellion against European colonialism. This volume offers the fullest account of the war in the English language. Using oral accounts and little-used documentary evidence, contributors offer detailed histories of districts and localities as well as groups, such as African soldiers in the German army, elephant hunters and women, whose roles in war have been neglected. The contributo…
The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'lvoire, 1880-1995
1. Introduction 2. The collision of empires, 1880-1911 3. The uncaptured corvee, 1912-46 4. Repackaging cotton, 1947-63 5. Making cotton work, 1964-84 6. 'To sow or not to sow': the extensification of cotton, gender politics, and rural mobilization, 1985-95 7. Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography
Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918
In the summer of 1995, I was hiking in the Uluguru mountains above Morogoro in Tanzania when I met an old man on the path. He was carrying a load of wood poles on his head, and we stopped to talk. I was curious about the visible deforestation on the mountainside, and asked him about the changing forest cover. He told me the following story
Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Defending the People's Railway in the Era of Liberalization: Tazara in Southern Tanzania
When the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district-level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision-making was being guided by profit-making rather than nation-building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the peopl…
Introduction: Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
IntroductionAfrica and China: New Engagements, New Research Jamie Monson, Guest Editor (bio) and Stephanie Rupp, Guest Editor (bio) Overview The idea to put together this African Studies Review Forum was sparked more than two years ago when a group of interdisciplinary researchers prepared double panel sessions for the fifty-second Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2009. The panels brought together a broad [End Page 21] s…
Memory, Migration and the Authority of History in Southern Tanzania, 1860–1960
According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level…
Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania
From Commerce to Colonization: A History of the Rubber Trade in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, 1890-1914
The end of the nineteenth-century in East Africa was the beginning of a new era of political, economic and social change. As legitimate began to replace the external slave trade throughout the continent, European powers sought new products needed to fuel industrialization. A major product shipped from the East African coast from the 1890s onwards was rubber, which grew wild in parts of the interior and was brought to the coast for shipment to Eur…
Claims to History and the Politics of Memory in Southern Tanzania, 1940-1960
A partir du recit historique dissident dans lequel Anton Mwilenga, tailleur de son etat, narra en 1947 l'histoire de son peuple, les Ndamba de la vallee de Kilombero (Tanzanie meridionale), et d'autres recits historiques similaires, l'A. met en evidence la connexion entre, d'une part, les enjeux et les revendications politiques locaux et, d'autre part, la relation entre la memoire collective et les differentes versions de l'histoire de la vallee.…
From protective lions to angry spirits: Environmental degradation and the authority of elders in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania
Along the route of the TAZARA railway in southern Tanzania, the increased circulation of people, goods and ideas has led to changes in the utilization of environmental resources. The settlement of newcomers in the Kilombero Valley, who not only plant crops but also fish in the Kilombero river floodplain, has led to concern among those who consider themselves to be “local” that outsiders have simultaneously brought both development and degradation…
From Commerce to Colonization: A History of the Rubber Trade in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, 1890-1914
The end of the nineteenth-century in East Africa was the beginning of a new era of political, economic and social change. As legitimate began to replace the external slave trade throughout the continent, European powers sought new products needed to fuel industrialization. A major product shipped from the East African coast from the 1890s onwards was rubber, which grew wild in parts of the interior and was brought to the coast for shipment to Eur…
Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918
In the summer of 1995, I was hiking in the Uluguru mountains above Morogoro in Tanzania when I met an old man on the path. He was carrying a load of wood poles on his head, and we stopped to talk. I was curious about the visible deforestation on the mountainside, and asked him about the changing forest cover. He told me the following story
Memory, Migration and the Authority of History in Southern Tanzania, 1860–1960
According to their ethnographers, the Bena of the Rivers in colonial Tanganyika emerged ‘from the shadows into the light of day’ when they undertook a great migration from the forested hills of the Iringa highlands to the treeless floodplain of the Kilombero valley in the late 1800's. The phrase had two meanings – on one level, it described the physical relocation of the Bena from the shadows of the forest to the open floodplain. On another level…
Claims to History and the Politics of Memory in Southern Tanzania, 1940-1960
A partir du recit historique dissident dans lequel Anton Mwilenga, tailleur de son etat, narra en 1947 l'histoire de son peuple, les Ndamba de la vallee de Kilombero (Tanzanie meridionale), et d'autres recits historiques similaires, l'A. met en evidence la connexion entre, d'une part, les enjeux et les revendications politiques locaux et, d'autre part, la relation entre la memoire collective et les differentes versions de l'histoire de la vallee.…
Tanzania: The Story of Julius Nyerere
Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania
The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'lvoire, 1880-1995
1. Introduction 2. The collision of empires, 1880-1911 3. The uncaptured corvee, 1912-46 4. Repackaging cotton, 1947-63 5. Making cotton work, 1964-84 6. 'To sow or not to sow': the extensification of cotton, gender politics, and rural mobilization, 1985-95 7. Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography
Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken Written Unearthed
An overview of the ongoing methods used to understand African history. Spurred in part by the ongoing re-evaluation of sources and methods in research, African historiography in the past two decades has been characterized by the continued branching and increasing sophistication of methodologies and areas of specialization. The rate of incorporation of new sources and methods into African historical research shows no signs of slowing. This book is…
Defending the People's Railway in the Era of Liberalization: Tazara in Southern Tanzania
When the services of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania were threatened with cutbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, rural community leaders wrote petitions of protest to district-level officials. In these petitions, they complained that railway decision-making was being guided by profit-making rather than nation-building priorities in response to pressure from the IMF and the World Bank. The railway had abandoned its original role as a servant of the peopl…
Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War
Chapter One. War Of Words: The Narrative Efficacy Of Medicine In The Maji Maji War
In this chapter, the author takes the analysis of the role of maji during the war and its aftermath still further. His approach seeks to go beyond an evaluation of the instrumental and symbolic efficacy of the maji medicine, to understand its narrative efficacy in specific historical and geographical settings. The chapter considers the way stories of maji functioned as a set of ideas that came to be mobilized within and among societies in souther…
Maji Maji: Lifting the Fog of War
The Maji Maji war of 1905-07 in Tanzania was the largest African rebellion against European colonialism. This volume offers the fullest account of the war in the English language. Using oral accounts and little-used documentary evidence, contributors offer detailed histories of districts and localities as well as groups, such as African soldiers in the German army, elephant hunters and women, whose roles in war have been neglected. The contributo…
Railway Time: Technology Transfer And The Role Of Chinese Experts In The History Of Tazara
During the construction of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s, African and Chinese workers not only laboured side by side but also engaged in what was known as 'technical cooperation' as Chinese railway experts trained their African counterparts in the workplace and in technical training workshops. This cooperation continued to develop over the years following the railway's completion, as a total of 14 successive teams of Chin…
Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania
Don't eat the oranges: they're laced with knockout drops. That's what Westerners hear, but there is far more to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) story than expatriate anxieties. Built from 1970 to 1975 with assistance from the People's Republic of China, TAZARA was a major international development project embodying Third World solidarity during the Cold War. Designed to end African nations' dependence on the southern African line of rail and…
From protective lions to angry spirits: Environmental degradation and the authority of elders in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania
Along the route of the TAZARA railway in southern Tanzania, the increased circulation of people, goods and ideas has led to changes in the utilization of environmental resources. The settlement of newcomers in the Kilombero Valley, who not only plant crops but also fish in the Kilombero river floodplain, has led to concern among those who consider themselves to be “local” that outsiders have simultaneously brought both development and degradation…
Des « hommes nouveaux: Mémoires De Travailleurs Du Rail Et Coopération Sino-Africaine
En Zambie et en Tanzanie, une génération de travailleurs est en train d'atteindre l'âge de la retraite : il s'agit de ceux qui, aux côtés de leurs collègues chinois, ont construit dans les années 1970 le chemin de fer TAZARA, reliant le bassin minier (Copperbelt) zambien à l'océan Indien. Façonnés dans leur jeunesse, ces « nouveaux ouvriers » ont souscrit à la promesse et à l'édification de nations socialistes en Afrique de l'Est, avec l'espoir d…
Introduction: Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
IntroductionAfrica and China: New Engagements, New Research Jamie Monson, Guest Editor (bio) and Stephanie Rupp, Guest Editor (bio) Overview The idea to put together this African Studies Review Forum was sparked more than two years ago when a group of interdisciplinary researchers prepared double panel sessions for the fifty-second Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2009. The panels brought together a broad [End Page 21] s…
Remembering Work on the Tazara Railway in Africa and China, 1965-2011: When "New Men" Grow Old
In China, Tanzania, and Zambia, state officials participate in an ongoing articulation of official memory of the TAZARA railway project of the 1970s. In high-level diplomatic relations, the TAZARA project and its construction workers are continually held up as a foundational legacy for China-African development cooperation and friendship. However, the now-retired workers who built the railway tell very different kinds of stories about their exper…
Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Rachel K. Bright. Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902–10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle
During the years following the South African War (1902–1910), ideas about race, labor, and the formation of the state were at the forefront of reconstruction politics. Rachel K. Bright's extensive archival research demonstrates that a scheme to bring Chinese indentured laborers to the mines of the Transvaal played a far greater role in those transition politics than previous historiography has allowed. Mining capitalists and their political suppo…
African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements
African Studies: New Directions, Global Engagements Jamie Monson The Cosmopolitan Origins of African Studies: Back to the Future? In 1997, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza wrote as president of the African Studies Association that the field of African studies had been plagued by perpetual crisis since its institutionalization in the 1950s. The crisis had its roots in deeply embedded historical structures of race and hierarchy, on the one hand, and institution…
Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, by Laura Madokoro
Book Review: Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War Laura Madokoro Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 331
Working History: China, Africa, and Globalization
Challenges of creating alliances across borders: Midterm reflections from the Alliance for African partnership
This paper seeks to share cross-border (geographic, disciplinary and cultural) challenges in the ethical design, establishment, implementation, and evaluation of the performance of alliances and partnerships. The paper reviews the Alliance for African Partnership’s two-year experience stressing lessons learned and shows how it has benefitted philosophically on the subject from recent linkage with the International Development Ethics Association. …
Matteo Rizzo. Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis
Matteo Rizzo’s Taken for a Ride: Grounding Neoliberalism, Precarious Labour, and Public Transport in an African Metropolis is a book on urban transport in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and it makes two important scholarly contributions. The first is an intervention into debates about neoliberalism, as Rizzo seeks to go beyond binary debates over structure versus agency to show the significance of what he calls “grounded neoliberalism.” The second, mor…
Political science (19 works) · Law (18 works) · African history and culture studies (16 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · History (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Tanzania (10 works) · Archaeology (8 works)