Monson, Ingrid T. The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. London: Routledge, 2003.

The African Diaspora presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora, including Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, that engage with broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music.

[Source: Book Description by publisher].

Moolla, F. Fiona. Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel & the Idea of Home. Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2014.

Moolla examines his writing within the framework of Somali society and culture, Islamic traditions and political contexts, all of which are central themes in his work. She also addresses Farah's engagement with women's lives - his female characters and identities being at the heart of, rather than peripheral, to his stories - something that has distinguished him from many other male African writers. The book finally suggests that through his literary negotiation of the central contradiction of modern identity, Farah comes close to constituting a subject who no longer is transcendentally 'homeless' but finds a home 'everywhere' - a fitting project for a writer who has been in exile for the greater part of his life.

[Source:https://boydellandbrewer.com].

Moore, Allison. Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2020.

In Embodying Relation, Allison Moore examines the tensions between the local and the global in the art photography movement in Bamako, Mali, which blossomed in the 1990s after Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé became internationally famous and the Bamako Photography Biennale was founded. Moore traces the trajectory of Malian photography from the 1880s —when photography first arrived as an apparatus of French colonialism — to the first African studio practitioners of the 1930s and the establishment in 1994of the Bamako Biennale, Africa’s most important continent-wide photographic exhibition. In her detailed discussion of Bamako is artistic aesthetics and institutions, Moore examines the post-fame careers of Keïta and Sidibé, the biennale’s structure, the rise of women photographers, cultural preservation through photography, and how Mali’s shift to democracy in the early 1990senabled Bamako’s art scene to flourish. Moore shows how Malian photographers’ focus on cultural exchange, affective connections with different publics, and merging of traditional cultural precepts with modern notions of art embody Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s notion of “relation” in ways that spark new artistic forms, practices, and communities.

[Source: Duke University Press].

Moreno-Gavara, Carme, and Ana Isabel Jiménez-Zarco, eds. Sustainable Fashion: Empowering African Women Entrepreneurs in the Fashion Industry. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, 2019.

This book offers detailed case studies of sustainable fashion enterprises in a number of African countries. Explores and analyses opportunities for female entrepreneurs in the African textile industry. Links economic development and social integration with the study of female entrepreneurship, making this text an interdisciplinary read.

[Source: Springer.com]

Morgan, Philip D., and Sean Hawkins (eds), Black Experience and the Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 3 Oct. 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290673.001.0001

This work explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style. The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. Accordingly, thirteen substantive essays and a scene-setting introduction range from West Africa in the sixteenth century, through the history of the slave trade and slavery down to the 1830s, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century participation of blacks in the empire as workers, soldiers, members of colonial elites, intellectuals, athletes, and musicians. No people were more uprooted and dislocated; or travelled more within the empire; or created more of a trans-imperial culture. In the crucible of the British empire, blacks invented cultural mixes that were precursors to our modern selves — hybrid, fluid, ambiguous, and constantly in motion.

Source: Book abstract from academic.oup.com

Morsiani, Benedetta. “From Local Production to Global Relations: The Congo Fashion Week London”. Fashion Theory ahead-of-print, n^o ahead-of-print (s. d.): 1‑19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1845532.

This article examines the Congo Fashion Week London (CFWL), a fashion catwalk produced and consumed by Congolese and other Black Africans in London. The paper addresses the various ways through which CFWL organizers, designers and performers act within the contemporary fashion industry. The process is defined as “double-bind”. It involves a multifaceted, often contradictory, positionality between ways of dealing with the “Western gaze", the reproduction of cultural “authenticity” and the contestation of the limiting discourses of Western exoticism. The article reveals how CFWL social actors are influenced by Western and non-Western power relations through which the global fashion industry operates, while their body performances simultaneously emphasize an “original” African narrative and subvert stereotypical boundaries dictated by the West. In addition, the entanglement between the cultural/aesthetic sphere of the CFWL spectacle and its fundraising goal is explored. The paper, therefore, argues that the medium of fashion and its system are embedded in the social world of Black Africans and have effective political weight.

[Source: Article abstract].

Mortimer, Mildred. Journeys Through the African Novel. Heineman, UK, 1990.

Mildred Mortimer questions the preeminence of outer and inner voyages in the francophone African novel. Rooted in both African oral tradition and the European novel, the journey motif not only reflects cultural blending but also African experiences of migration, exploration, and conquest. The author focuses on the importance of orature to African writing, links between Maghrebian and sub-Saharan African fiction, and the distinction between men's and women's journeys.

[Source: Amazon.com].

Moses E. Ochono

Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of History, Department of History, Vanderbilt University

Contact Phone: 615-322-3388

Email: moses.ochonu@vanderbilt.edu