Bayo Holsey Wins Africa Book Award

Bayo Holsey Wins Africa Book Award

Dr. Bayo Holsey's book, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (University of Chicago Press, 2008) is the winner of this academic year's Toyin Falola Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) Africa Book Award. The US$500 cash award, citation, and elegant plaque was awarded at the 27th Annual Conference of the ATWS which convened at the Elmina Beach Resort in Ghana from November 21 to 24, 2009.

Indeed, Dr. Holsey's book beat a field of many great books that were submitted for this year's award, and the choice was unanimous as the best book on Africa. The following is sample of excerpts from the judges' commentaries:

"The issue of slavery has often been addressed from people outside of Africa. This ethnographic study is as close as we've come to hearing the voices of African peoples on this issue."

"Holsey's work fuses historical antecedents and contemporary global relationships to explore the refashioning of the narrative of the slave trade and slavery in Africa in general and Ghana in particular. The strength of the work lies in Holsey's ability to weave the thematic strands of colonialism, racism, cosmopolitanism and globalization in order to interrogate the sequestering of the slave trade from the local African and Ghanaian discourses as well as the renewed clamor for resituating slavery in the proper historical context. Holsey's anthropological investigation shows how the public and the private discourse on slavery conspire to fashion slavery along Eurocentric perspectives on the one hand, and inspire a concerted effort for an Afrocentric interpretation. The work is a brilliant re-conceptualization of the horrendous trans-Atlantic slave trade."

"That the African Renaissance is holding roots is hardly in dispute when one reads the Africancentric exploration of the vexing issue of slavery in Bayo Holsey's effulgent work. The timing of this work and what is taking place at the Mali-South African Timbuktu Project must be the blessings of the Creator and the Afrikan ancestors."

The Toyin Falola ATWS Africa Book Award, in honor of Toyin Falola, one of Africa's outstanding historians and intellectuals, was initially given for the best book on Africa published in 2005-2006. The first award was presented at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of ATWS, November 2-4, 2006, Winston -Salem State University.

Dr. Holsey is a professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University