Michael A Gomez

Dados Biográficos

ID84000
NOMEMichael A Gomez
PRENOMESMichael A
SOBRENOMEGomez
ASSINATURAGOMEZ M A
AFILIAÇÕESNew York University
ORCID0000-0002-5668-7177
VERIFICADOSim
TOTAL DE OBRAS54
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES116
TOTAL COMO AUTOR53
TOTAL COMO EDITOR1
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO1985
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2020
ÍNDICE H7

  • Thoughts on the Western Savannah and Sahel

    Open AccessMichael A GomezARTICLEThe Journal of African History2020Referências: 25

    A recent revival of interest in the empires of the medieval western Savannah and Sahel has generated new insights into slavery, ethnicity, race, and gender in precolonial West Africa. New histories of medieval West Africa also expand the spatial frame through which the relationship between the region's polities and the broader world can be understood. This essay offers a survey of that literature

  • Of Fitnas and Fratricide

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter examines Songhay's twenty-year nadir, which was first and foremost a time of myopia relative to the expansive, internationalist age of Askia Muḥammad that preceded it, its parochialism a function of an unprecedented rivalrous spirit invested in sanguinary practice distinctive in both elevation and scope, reaching the most privileged while encompassing a broad expanse of social formations. A collective royal neurosis of the most toxic…

  • Surfeit and Stability

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter details the thirty-four-year reign of Askia Dāwūd, which punctuates the bloodletting of the nadir, with Dāwūd turning from his remaining brothers to his own children to fill key positions of authority. This essentially meant the descendants of Askia Muḥammad, the Mamar hamey , were now favored over the scions of Kanfāri ʻUmar, the third royal branch. In the process, Dāwūd reclaimed some of the power previously ceded to Songhay's stak…

  • The Sunni and the Scholars

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter highlights the antagonisms between Timbuktu's scholarly community and Sunni ʻAlī. The chroniclers characterize the tensions with sweeping generalizations, but the sunni 's relationship with the scholars was in fact more complicated than straightforward, with some in persecuted families willing to broker an accommodation with the ruler. In the end, however, the sunni seriously miscalculated in alienating such a powerful coalition of t…

  • Prologue

    Open AccessMichael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of the domestically enslaved, and the invention and evolution of empire were all unfolding. In contrast to notions of an early Africa timeless and unchanging in its social and cultural categories and conventions, here was a western Savannah and Sahel that…

  • Of Clerics and Concubines

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter argues that while the religious leaders of Timbuktu and Jenne enjoyed unrivaled prestige, there were other actors who, though receiving scant attention in the secondary materials, were nonetheless significant figures. Specifically, holy men associated with the Mori Koyra community played influential roles, as did royal women, including, and especially, the royal concubines. Indeed, women were a critical component of the askia 's stra…

  • The Rending Asunder

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter describes how, between Askia Dāwūd's death in 990–91/1582–83 and the Battle of Tondibi in 999/1591 that marked the beginning of Morocco's occupation, the empire endured the tumultuous reigns of four askias , the depravations of famine, and a civil war so destructive that Timbuktu's religious elites felt compelled to intervene. Less than ten years following the death of Askia Dāwūd, imperial Songhay lay in utter ruin, never more to ri…

  • Mansā Mūsā and Global Mali

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter describes Mali's most legendary figure: Mansā Mūsā. A remarkable period of stability and expansion ensued under Mansā Mūsā, resulting in a West Africa at its pinnacle. Mūsā would embrace Islam emphatically, breaking with predecessors by building mosques in key cities, laying the foundation for Mali's reputation as a Muslim land. Islam would soon become a principal cultural signifier, articulating a realm of growing ethnic diversity w…

  • Sunni ‘Alī and the Reinvention of Songhay

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter studies the onset of Songhay, which was in fact a reemergence, in that it recentered the ancient town of Gao, capital of the novel experiment. Inheriting the mantle of Mali, Songhay would undertake important innovations in meeting the demands of international commerce, ethnic diversity, and Islam's expansion. By way of serial effort, experimentation, and even regime change, Songhay boldly attempted the realization of a pluralist soci…

  • Intrigue, Islam, and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter explores the writings of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, which provide a glimpse into a post- Mansā Mūsā Mali in initial decline. Suffering from invidious comparison with his brother, Sulaymān's reign is yet remarkable in including an episode featuring a demoted wife, Qāsā, challenging for the leadership of his vast empire. It is also with Sulaymān that the pivot to North Africa begins. However, relations between the regions are less than transparent, …

  • Reversing Sail

    Open AccessMichael A GomezBOOKReversing Sail2019

    Beginning with antiquity, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience. In this second edition, Michael A. Gomez updates the text to include the most recent research on the African Diaspora. Continuing to pay particular attention to the lives of the working classes, the second edition expands its temporal boundaries to include devel…

  • Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilād As-Sūdān

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter looks at the trans-Saharan slave trade and its imbrications with developing notions of race and gender. The fifth/eleventh century transition to reform Islam in the western Sahel was coterminous with an intensification in slaving, generating a lively discourse regarding eligibility, within which notions of race and gender unfolded. The imbrication of slavery, race, and gender would partially inform processes by which West African eli…

  • Renaissance

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter discusses the reign of Askia Muḥammad. Originally affixed to clerical and commercial interests, the askia 's arrogation of power would encourage a review of those relations, leading to a series of challenges to Timbuktu and Jenne's self-promotion as bastions of autonomy and self-regulation. The askia 's policies are therefore not unlike those of Mansā Mūsā, who paired internationalism with indigenization. These challenges would endur…

  • The Middle Niger in Pre-Antiquity and Global Context

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter discusses the consistent omission of early and medieval Africa in world and imperial histories. West Africa is certainly left out of the narrative of early human endeavor, and only tends to be mentioned, with brevity, in conjunction with European imperialism. Nevertheless, substantial archaeological work has been underway in West Africa for decades, particularly in the middle Niger valley. For it was during the period of the Shang, C…

  • Early Gao

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter examines Gao's early historical significance, which is often relegated in the scholarship on early West Africa. This tendency issues from a failure to more critically assess the region's two most important thirteenth/seventeenth-century chronicles; a far more plausible rendering of Gao's importance forms when considering those chronicles in conjunction with the external sources, the archaeological record, and the epigraphic evidence.…

  • The Meanings of Sunjata and the Dawn of Imperial Mali

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter assesses the narrative of the rise of imperial Mali and the life of its founder, Sunjata. Sunjata and Mali's origins are at the center of an involved discussion of sources and method. As such, a layering of testimony is critical to uncovering Mali's imperial transformation, and more important than whether it was completed under Sunjata is the subsequent deployment of his person and period as vehicles of authentication. Perhaps the mo…

  • A Thousand Years

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This epilogue discusses how, some four hundred years after its fall, the world was reminded of imperial Songhay's former glory when, in early January of 2012, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawād—or the MNLA—attacked the towns of Menaka and Aguelhok, leading to the collapse of the national army in northern Mali. However, the twenty-first century was not the first instance in which the modern world reflected on West African anterior …

  • The Kingdoms of Ghana

    Michael A GomezCHAPTERAfrican Dominion2019

    This chapter focuses on Ghana. The rise, fall, and rise again of Ghana is a study of why mutually beneficial commercial and political relations between Muslim and non-Muslim rulers and merchants were disrupted by the spread of reform Islam, and how the region was radically altered as a consequence. Divergent models of negotiating cultural difference lost their competition with a withering, less tolerant Islam, signaling a shift in the region's pr…

  • African Dominion

    Open AccessMichael A Gomez, Michael GomezBOOKAfrican Dominion2019Citada por: 3

    Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book tells a different story. Interweaving political and social history and drawing on a rich array of sources, the book unveils a new vision of how categories of ethnicity, race, gender, and caste emerged in Africa and in global history. Focusing on the Savannah and Sahel region, the book traces how Islam's…

  • Literature under the Microscope

    Michael A GomezARTICLEBulletin of Spanish Studies2018

    There is no doubt that Ramón y Cajal’s scientific activities are familiar to many. Less well known are his undertakings as a writer. This is not to say that these have been ignored by the author’s contemporaries or by critics. As to the latter, attention has been paid to topics ranging from the connection between such work and late nineteenth-century Spanish ‘regenerationism’, to the inspirations for Cajal’s production. It is with the latter that…

  • African Dominion

    Michael A Gomez, Michael GomezBOOKAfrican Dominion2018Citada por: 18

  • Freedom and the Soul within the Mechano-Materialist System

    Michael A GomezARTICLEBulletin of Spanish Studies2014

    The tensions between Pardo Bazán's Catholicism and her condition as even a mitigated‘naturalist’ writer have been the focus of commentary within literary and intellectual circles for over a hundred years. Such commentaries have tended to fall into three categories: those which claim that, if there are naturalistic elements in the writings of the Spaniard, these are—due to the author's ‘spiritualist’ stance—necessarily limited to the stylistic; th…

  • Africans, Religion, and African Religion through the Nineteenth Century

    Michael A GomezARTICLEJournal of Africana Religions2012

    This essay explores the intersections of colonialism, enslavement, freedom struggles, and religion in the African global experience, focusing on the critical navigational properties of leadership

  • Provocative Questions on the Race Issue

    Michael A Gomez, Michael GomezARTICLEPrésence Africaine2007

  • Diasporic Africa

    Open AccessLauren Hauptman, Michael A GomezARTICLEAfrican American Review2007Citada por: 10