Race B4 Race 2025, Seminar 4: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by the Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars.’

What are we reading?

For our fourth and final seminar meeting of the 2025-2026 year, we read Swahili Worlds in Globalism (Cambridge Elements, 2024) by Chapurukha M. Kusimba.

Dr. Chapurukha M. Kusimba is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Prior to his time there, he taught at American University in Washington DC, and at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also worked as a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History. He began his long and distinguished career in the Division of Archaeology at the National Museums of Kenya, and in 2018 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Swahili Worlds in Globalism is his fifth book.

Why are we reading this?

This is the third time our seminar series has featured a book from the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series edited by Geraldine Heng and Susan J. Noakes. Like Yonatan Binyan and Verena Krebs’s ‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330-1500 CE and Don Wyatt’s Slavery in East Asia, Chapurukha Kusimba’s Swahili Worlds in Globalism offers a fascinating introduction to the history of the stretch of East African coastline known as the Swahili Coast during what we in Europe-focused fields would call the medieval and early modern periods, roughly 500 to 1500 CE. It is an anthropological study, but also a historical narrative tracing the rise of city-states along the coast and their relationships with communities further inland as well as other maritime communities along and across the Indian Ocean.

Like the others in the Global Middle Ages series, this is an incredibly dense book, packed with information in spite of its brevity. It also offers a corrective to several hundred years of colonialist erasure and misinterpretation, presenting a complex web of kinship networks and communities both indigenous to Africa and emigrating from elsewhere. There are fascinating forays into archaeobotany (demonstrating the movement of plant life between Africa and Asia), the study of foodways and skeletal data, and the painstaking collection of pottery fragments, all of which call attention to the centrality of archaeology and anthropology to medieval and early modern studies more broadly. Those of us who study literature or history, for instance, could do well to remember that much of what we study comes from elite culture, since that is what is likeliest to survive in writing. This book concerns itself with a much broader swathe of society whose histories are primarily passed down through oral tradition, and reminds us that what we study is but a tiny piece in a much larger and more interconnected premodern world.

Further reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of foundational publications on the history and archaeology of the Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean generously provided by Dr. Kusimba.

Archaeology

Horton, Mark. Shanga: The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. London: British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996.

Kusimba, Chapurukha. The Rise and Fall of Swahili States. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999.

Wynne-Jones, Stephanie, and Adria LaViolette, eds. The Swahili World. London: Routledge, 2018.

Fleisher, Jeffrey. Various works on Songo Mnara and Swahili urban landscapes.

History of the Swahili Coast

Middleton, John. The World of the Swahili: An African Mercantile Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Pouwels, Randall L. Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873. London: James Currey, 1987.

Freeman-Grenville, G.S.P. The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Indian Ocean World

Chaudhuri, K.N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003.

Alpers, Edward A. The Indian Ocean in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Recommended Journals

Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa