Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence

Meredith Terretta is an associate professor of history at the University of Ottawa and the author of Petitioning for Our Rights, Fighting for Our Nation: The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949–1960.

"Meredith Terretta's book constitutes a highly significant contribution to the historiography of Cameroon, West Africa, and African nationalism more generally.… In challenging conventional political and cultural understandings of Cameroonian nationalism and its chronological development, the [work] makes important theoretical contributions to the field … and serves as an important model for future studies of African nationalism." "In following the paths of Cameroonian nationalists where they actually lead, Meredith Terretta's study does a number of things that no previously published histories of Cameroon's decolonization have done." (African Studies Quarterly) "This book is a valuable contribution to the current effort to reframe and reinvigorate our understanding of the nationalist period in African history. … Scholars seeking to understand the character of African nationalism have in [it] a wealth of ideas about how better to capture its substance, complexity, and vitality." (Histoire Sociale) "A well-researched addition to the growing literature on African nationalism(s)…. Terretta provides Cameroonians with a history that the country's various postcolonial governments tried to hide." (Africa Spectrum) "Terretta's history of the anticolonial insurgency that bedeviled central Cameroon in the years immediately before and after independence in 1960 will likely become the standard English-language history of that important but obscure conflict.…Terretta indicates important parallels between the UPC and the Algerian Front de libération nationale while insisting on the significance of pan-African networks of freedom fighters…Highly recommended." (Choice) "The subject matter of Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence is significant, the story movingly tragic and revealing of Cameroon's postcolonial morass, and the research has an admirable depth and breadth."