Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience

Kai Kresse is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, and Vice Director for Research at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. Before that, he was Associate Professor of African and Swahili Studies at Columbia University. He is author of Philosophizing in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast.

Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience highlights the great diversity of postcolonial Muslim lives in Kenya and the nuances of race and language that inform religion as a mediated experience that infiltrates life on the coast. Deeply ethnographic and well researched, this book is an important addition to the libraries of African studies scholars, anthropologists and historians of Africa and Islam, and anthropologists of media.(American Ethnologist) This well-researched study should be considered for purchase by any library with an extensive African studies collection.(Choice) Kresse's ability to weave together questions of rhetoric, postcoloniality, religion, culture, and politics, and to understand them from the epistemological vantage point of ethnographic actors themselves, is truly remarkable.- Marcus Timothy Haworth (Reading Relgion)