Andrea Mariko Grant – författare

How does anxiety impact narratives about African history, culture, and society?This volume demonstrates the richness of anxiety as an analytical lens within African studies. Contributors call attention to ways of thinking about African spaces—physical, visceral, somatic, and imagined—as well as about time and temporality. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the volume also brings histories of anxiety in colonial settings into conversation with work on the so-called negative emotions in disciplines beyond history. While anxiety has long been acknowledged for its ability to unsettle colonial narratives, to reveal the vulnerability of the colonial enterprise, this volume shows it can equally complicate contemporary narratives, such as those of sustainable development, migration, sexuality, and democracy. These essays therefore highlight the need to take emotions seriously as contemporary realities with particular histories that must be carefully mapped out.

Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda offers fascinating insight into the lived experiences of young people in Rwanda through ethnographic analysis of the ambiguities and ambivalences that have accompanied the country's rapid post-genocide development. Andrea Mariko Grant considers how Pentecostalism and popular music offer urban young people ways to craft themselves and their futures; to imagine alternative ways to 'be' Rwandan and inhabit the city in the post-genocide era. Exploring the idiom of the heart – and efforts to transform it – this book offers a richly nuanced perspective of urban young people's everyday lives, their aspirations and disappointments, at a political moment of both great promise and great constraint. Rather than insist on a resistance-dominance binary, Grant foregrounds the possibilities of agency available to young people, their ability to make 'noise', even when it may lead to devastating consequences.