Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
This book traces the history of the East African Revival, a Christian conversion movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa in the 1930s and 40s. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the enmity of east Africa’s patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition.
Awards
Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association, 2013
Martin A. Klein Prize for African History, American Historical Association, 2013
Runner-up, Philip Schaff Prize, American Society for Church History, 2013
Derek R. Peterson 