Participant Info
- First Name
- Priya
- Last Name
- Lal
- Country
- United States
- State
- MA Massachusetts
- priya.lal@bc.edu
- Affiliation
- Boston College
- Website URL
- https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/history/people/faculty-directory/priya--lal.html
- Keywords
- 20th century Africa, East Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, development, nationalism, decolonization, socialism, Cold War, gender, medicine, higher education, labor history
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am an Associate Professor of History at Boston College. My research focuses on the politics of national development in decolonization-era and postcolonial Africa. My first book, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World, tells the story of Tanzania’s socialist experiment, the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-75. My current book project, tentatively entitled Human Resources, examines the training, labor, and circulation of medical and educational professionals in and beyond southeastern Africa since independence. Additional publications in print or forthcoming also analyze Maoism in Tanzania, African engagement with the New International Economic Order, unorthodox socialist projects across the 20th century world, reproductive labor in decolonization-era Africa, and Marxism’s varied lives in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Recent Publications
BOOKS:
African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:
“Decolonization and the Gendered Politics of Developmental Labor in Southeastern Africa,” in Stephen Macekura and Erez Manela, eds., The Development Century: A Global History (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2018)
“Actually Existing Marxisms: Africa,” in Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman, eds., Bloomsbury Companion to Marx (forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in 2018)
“Tanzanian Ujamaa in a World of Peripheral Socialisms,” in Martin Klimke, et al., eds., Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, 367–80. New York: Routledge, 2018.
“Villagization and the Ambivalent Production of Rural Space in Tanzania,” in Andrea Fischer-Tahir and Sophie Wagenhofer, eds., Disciplinary Spaces: Spatial Control, Forced Assimilation and Narratives of Progress since the 19th Century, 119–36. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, 2017.
“African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Humanity 6, 1 (2015) 17-31.
“Maoism in Tanzania: Material Connections and Shared Imaginaries,” in Alexander Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, 96–116. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
“Self-Reliance and the State: The Multiple Meanings of Development in Early Post-Colonial Tanzania,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82, 2 (2012) 212–234.
“Militants, Mothers, and the National Family: Ujamaa, Gender, and Rural Development in Postcolonial Tanzania,” Journal of African History 51, 1 (2010) 1–20.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- priyalalista
- Country Focus
- Tanzania, Zambia
- Expertise by Geography
- Africa
- Expertise by Chronology
- Modern, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Capitalism, Colonialism, Economic History, Emancipation, Gender, Government, Higher Ed, Local & Regional, Medicine, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Rural & Agrarian History, Women
