Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, c.1935–1972 (African Studies, Series Number 122) - Hardcover

Derek R. Peterson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107021162 ISBN 13: 9781107021167

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival shows how, in the era of African political independence, cosmopolitan Christian converts struggled with east Africa's patriots over the definition of culture and community. The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of east Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition.

About this title

Book Description:

This book shows how cosmopolitan Christian converts and east African patriots struggled to define political community in the mid-twentieth century. Derek Peterson traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that challenged patriots' effort to root people in place as inheritors of a cultural heritage.

About the Author:

Derek R. Peterson teaches African history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya and the editor of several books, including Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa and the Atlantic. Peterson is a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1107021162
• ISBN 13: 9781107021167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 370