Barack Obama’s political ascendancy has focused worldwide attention on Kenya. Carotenuto and Luongo argue that efforts to cast Obama as a “son of the soil” of the Lake Victoria basin invite insights into the politicized uses of Kenya’s past.
Matthew Carotenuto is associate professor of history and coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University. He studies the ways Kenyan identities are imagined within the context of colonial violence, postcolonial politics, and indigenous sport. Katherine Luongo is associate professor of history at Northeastern University. Her work examines the supernatural, law, and politics in Africa, and global asylum seeking. Her book, Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900–1955, was a finalist for the Bethwell Ogot Prize and the Martin A. Klein Award.
“In the US, Barack Obama is African; in Africa, he is Kenyan; and
in Kenya, he is Luo. … Historians Carotenuto (St. Lawrence Univ.)
and Luongo (Northeastern Univ.) emerge from the pages of this book
as a dynamic academic duo as they glide through Kenya's colonial
and postindependence periods.… This book also demonstrates that
African studies is in good academic hands. Summing up:
Recommended.”
*CHOICE*
“This book … represents a laudable attempt to confront distorted
and false depictions of Obama and the Kenyan past and present that
have appeared since 2008 in scholarly and nonscholarly works … In a
book that will be useful in American university classrooms and now
even more among the general public as Obama is succeeded as chief
executive by a long-time purveyor of the 'birther' myth,
[Carotenuto and Luongo] effectively dismantle the many stereotypes
and myths that have characterized writing about Obama and Kenya by
right-wing ideologues outside Kenya.”
*African Studies Review*
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