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About Me

I am a historian of southern Africa. My research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola.

My work looks at different media and how their uses, the practices and meanings people develop around them, and their relationship to power shift over time. Whether music, radio, film, or photography (sound or visual), I am interested in questions of mediation of presents that become pasts and the past as a discipline of study.

I have published on music, fashion, film, radio, and urban space. I serve on the editorial collective of the Radical History Review and on the editorial board of Africa is a Country where I also contribute as a blogger.

Recent Publications

Books

 

Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).

 

In progress

 

Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002 (under advance contract with Ohio University Press, currently revising manuscript submitted for review July 30, 2017).

 

Refereed articles and chapters

 

“Guerrilla Broadcasts and the Unnerved Colonial State in Angola, 1961-1974,” Journal of African History, accepted for publication November 2017, forthcoming 59(2): March 2018.

 

“Luanda Humms and Buzzes: Urban Soundscapes, Club Music, and Dance, 1960-present,” forthcoming in Goethe Institut’s Johannes Hossfeld, Joyce Nyairo, and Florian Sievers, eds., Ten Cities: Berlin, Bristol, Cairo, Johannesburg, Kiev, Lagos, Lisbon, Luanda, Nairobi, Naples (Leipzig: Spector, forthcoming 2018).

 

“Radio Remediated: Sissako’s Life on Earth and Sembène’s Moolaadé,” Cinema Journal 57(1): 94-116, November 2017.

 

“Intimating Nationalism: Gender in the MPLA’s maquis,” in Pantoja, Selma; Bergamo, Edvaldo A.; Silva, Ana Cláudia (org.). Angola e as angolanas: memória, sociedade e cultura. São Paulo: Intermeios, 2016.

“Along the Edges of Comparison,” in Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs, eds., Apartheid/Israel: the Politics of an Analogy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).

 

“City Building in Post-Conflict, Post-Socialist Luanda: Burying the past with phantasmagorias of the future,” with Anne Pitcher in Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pieterse, eds., African Cities Reader III: Land, Property, & Value (Johannesburg: Chimurenga, December 2014 online, in print 2015).

 

“Anatomy of kuduro: articulating the Angolan body politic after the war,” African Studies Review, 57 (3), December 2014: 21-40.

 

“ ‘Sempre a subir’: música e nação no kuduro luandense e na diaspora,” (Always on the up and up: music and nation in Luandan kuduro and the diaspora), in Ivana Stolze Lima and Laura do Carmo, eds., História da Língua Nacional 2: diaspora Africana (Rio de Janeiro: Nau Editora, 2014).

 

“Airing the Politics of Nation: Radio in Angola Past and Present,” chapter 15 in Liz Gunner, Dumisani Moyo and Dina Ligaga, eds., Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, November 2011): 238-255.

 

Co-editor, with Kathleen Sheldon, UCLA, Lusotopie special dossier on gender, November 2005.

 

“Dueling Bands and Good Girls: Gender and Music in Luanda’s musseques, 1961-74,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37(2), 2004: 255-88.

 

“Putting on a pano and Dancing Like Our Grandparents: Dress and Nation in Late Colonial Luanda,” in Jean Allman, ed., Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 84-103.

 

“Of Westerns, Women and War: Resituating Angolan Cinema and the Nation,” Research in African Literature 32(3), Fall 2001: 103-22.

Media Coverage

Blog posts and media "Propaganda in Portugal's colonies: lessons for the West today," The Conversation – Africa, February 15, 2017: https://theconversation.com/propaganda-in-portugals-colonies-lessons-for-the-west-today-71106 NPR affiliate WBEZ in Chic

Social Media

@mjmoorman

Country Focus

Angola, South Africa

Expertise by Geography

Africa

Expertise by Chronology

20th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Gender, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Technology, Women