Megan Vaughan – författare

This account of the 1949 famine in colonial Malawi employs a wide variety of historical sources, ranging from Colonial Office documentation to the songs of women who lived through the tragedy. The analysis of the causes and development of the famine takes the reader through a detailed agricultural and social history of Southern Malwai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on the nature of social and economic stratification, changes in kinship systems and the position of women and placing all this within the wider context of the impact of colonial rule.

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring the representations of disease as well as medical practice, Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to both medical history and the social history of Africa.

This is a lively and original book, which treats Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa as a cultural system that constructed "the African" out of widely varying, and sometimes improbable, materials. Referring mainly to British dependencies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, it draws on diverse sources ranging from court records and medical journals to fund-raising posters and "jungle doctor" cartoons. Curing Their Ills brings refreshing concreteness and dynamism to the discussion of European attitudes toward their others, as it traces the shifts and variations in medical discourse on African illness.Among the topics the book covers are the differences between missionary medicine, which emphasized individual responsibility for sin and disease, and secular medicine, which tended toward an ethnic model of collective pathology; leprosy and the construction of the social role of "the leper"; and the struggle to define insanity in a context of great ignorance about what the "normal African" was like and a determination to crush indigenous beliefs about bewitchment.The underlying assumption of this discourse was that disease was produced by the disintegration and degeneration of "tribal" cultures, which was seen to be occurring in the process of individualization and modernization. This was a cultural rather than a materialist model, the argument being that Africans were made sick not by the material changes to their lives and environment, but by their cultural "maladaptation" to modern life. The "scientific" discourse about the biological inferiority of "the African," traced by one school of scientists to defects in the frontal lobe, makes painful reading today; it persisted into the 1950s.

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Herskovits Prize WinnerWhat are the problems of rural food supply in southern Africa today and how have they arisen historically? In part this book is a reconstruction of an African agricultural system over one hundred years; in part it is an examination of the construction of knowledge about a rural African people. The first half of the book focuses on the chitemene agricultural system of the Bemba known as slash and burn. The authors show that chitemene involves a great deal more than the cutting and burning of trees. The second half addresses the question of labour migration and its effects on the agricultural production of the area, re-visiting the colonial debate with new evidence.The authorsprovide a critical re-assessment of Audrey Richards' classic work, Land, Labour and Diet: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe and assess the ecological, social and political impact on a rural society undergoing rapid change.North America: Heinemann

In this epic history-cum-anthology, Megan Vaughan tells the story of the theatre blogosphere from the dawn of the carefully crafted longform post to today’s digital newsletters and social media threads. Contextualising the key debates of fifteen years of theatre history, and featuring the writings of over 40 theatre bloggers, Theatre Blogging brings past and present practitioners into conversation with one another.Starting with Encore Theatre Magazine and Chris Goode in London, George Hunka and Laura Axelrod in New York, Jill Dolan at Princeton University, and Alison Croggon in Melbourne, the work of these influential early adopters is considered alongside those who followed them.Vaughan explores issues that have affected both arts journalism and the theatre industry, profiling the activist bloggers arguing for broader representation and better working conditions, highlighting the innovative dramaturgical practices that have been developed and piloted by bloggers, and offering powerful insights into the precarious systems of labour and economics in which these writers exist. She concludes by considering current threats to the theatre blogosphere, and how the form continues to evolve in response to them.

In this epic history-cum-anthology, Megan Vaughan tells the story of the theatre blogosphere from the dawn of the carefully crafted longform post to today’s digital newsletters and social media threads. Contextualising the key debates of fifteen years of theatre history, and featuring the writings of over 40 theatre bloggers, Theatre Blogging brings past and present practitioners into conversation with one another.Starting with Encore Theatre Magazine and Chris Goode in London, George Hunka and Laura Axelrod in New York, Jill Dolan at Princeton University, and Alison Croggon in Melbourne, the work of these influential early adopters is considered alongside those who followed them.Vaughan explores issues that have affected both arts journalism and the theatre industry, profiling the activist bloggers arguing for broader representation and better working conditions, highlighting the innovative dramaturgical practices that have been developed and piloted by bloggers, and offering powerful insights into the precarious systems of labour and economics in which these writers exist. She concludes by considering current threats to the theatre blogosphere, and how the form continues to evolve in response to them.