Books
Key book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century.
Oxford: James Currey, 2022
Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.
Religion in Transforming Africa Series
Oxford: James Currey, April 2021
Assassinated by Idi Amin, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda’s most controversial and disruptive politician. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda’s first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. Earle and Carney show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extra-judicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never before seen sources from Kiwanuka’s personal papers, the authors upend many of the assumptions that have framed Uganda’s political and religious history for over sixty years.
FINALIST FOR THE BETHWELL A. OGOT BOOK PRIZE, 2018
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017
Colonial Buganda was one of the most important and richly documented kingdoms in East Africa. In this book, Jonathon L. Earle offers the first global intellectual history of the Kingdom, using a series of case studies, interviews and previously inaccessible private archives to offer new insights concerning the multiple narratives used by intellectuals. Where previous studies on literacy in Africa have presupposed 'sacred' or 'secular' categories, Earle argues that activists blurred European epistemologies as they reworked colonial knowledge into vernacular debates about kingship and empire. Furthermore, by presenting Catholic, Muslim and Protestant histories and political perspectives in conversation with one another, he offers a nuanced picture of the religious and social environment. Through the lives, politics, and historical contexts of these African intellectuals, Earle presents an important argument about the end of empire, making the reader rethink the dynamics of political imagination and historical pluralism in the colonial and postcolonial state.
Articles
‘Theodore and Trevelyan: How Trinity Historians & Eastern Africans Shaped the Course of American Democracy’, Trinity College Register, 2021, 127–45
'Political Activism and Other Life Forms in Colonial Buganda', History in Africa, 45 (2018), 373–95
'Researching Institutional Life in Modern Uganda', with Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, History in Africa, 45 (2018), 175–91
'Dreams and Political Imagination in Colonial Buganda', Journal of African History, 58.1 (2017), 85–105
'Reading Revolution in Late Colonial Buganda', Journal of Eastern African History, 6.3 (2012), 507–26
Chapters
'"Obuganda Buladde": Power, Anxiety and Calm in Postcolonial Buganda', in Anxiety in and about Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Approaches, ed. by Andrea Grant and Yolana Pringle (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020)
'Intellectual History and Historiography', in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Guide to Methods, Sources and Historiography in African History, ed. by Thomas Spear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
'Competing Conceptions of Justice in Colonial Buganda', in Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices, ed. by Jessica Johnson and George Karekwaivanane, Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 33–50
Short Articles and Entries
‘Benedicto Mugumba Kiwanuka’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Joseph Nnakabaale Kiwanuka, WF’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Nuhu Kyabasinga Mbogo’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Stanislaus Mugwanya’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Hamu Mukasa’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Rebecca Mukasa Allen Mulira’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
‘Rajat Neogy’, in Dictionary of African Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Emmanuel Akyeampong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)