Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age

by Ndubueze L. Mbah Ohio University Press 10/29/2019, paperback SKU: 9780821423899   Finalist for the 2020 African Studies Association Book Prize · Cowinner of the 2020 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize for outstanding original scholarship on gender and sexuality in the African diaspora, awarded by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). In Emergent Masculinities, Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through thei