Love in Africa

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life - a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. "Love in Africa" seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa.Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, "Love in Africa" is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

"It has taken long in coming--evidence of scholars in love with love in Africa. This well researched and compelling book is a welcome signpost and snippet view of how scholarship on Africa can be enriched through greater attention to the theme of love."--Francis B. Nyamnjoh, author of Married But Available, "This bold book on love in Africa at once sets two ethnographic and historical milestones. First, it demands that students of Africa confront the full spectrum of human emotion in the subcontinent. Second, and speaking more universally, it shows how love, while experienced in the most deeply personal of ways, is inevitably shaped by economic and social circumstance. Drawing on everything from the monetary exchanges that can so powerfully shape emotion and the advent of colonial conjugal ideals to Nollywood cinema and newspaper advice columns, this unflinching book will win an immediate place on the shelves of Africanists as well as social scientists in general."--Caroline Bledsoe, Northwestern University, "This is a breakthrough volume on a remarkably neglected topic. The contributors include many of the top scholars in the field, and the chapters offer wonderfully insightful and revealing analyses of a broad range of ethnographic and historical cases. The masterful introduction by Cole and Thomas offers an overview of the topic that will help set a new research agenda for studies of intimacy, romance, and affect on the continent."--James Ferguson, Stanford University

Jennifer Cole is associate professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago and the author of Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory. Lynn M. Thomas is associate professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya.