The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies masterfully fills a blind spot in the study of crime and justice. The volume is groundbreaking in its complete devotion to topics typically neglected in Western criminology, including Nelson Mandelas criminology, liberation criminology, indigenous African criminologies, African views on the death penalty, gangs in Trinidad and Tobago, White internationals, colonization, and gunboat criminology. Collectively, the authors have provided the discipline with a rare window into Africana-centered criminology. Thus, neophyte and more established social scientists interested in crime and justice will learn much from the volume and likely will be inspired to study this fertile area of inquiry that emanates from a distinctive Africana-centered epistemology.
Shaun L. Gabbidon, PhD Fellow, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice
This book highlights a seismic pulse in the push for the ontological recalibration of criminology to accommodate the African experience, in both its marginal and imaginative epistemes. It articulates the propulsive challenge of African scholars to the traditional criminological imagination and its hegemonic and Archimedean conclusions. Framed on an interdisciplinary nest, the book is seminal and represents cutting-edge research and analyses on the scholarly vortex that constitutes African criminology and criminal justice policies. [] This book represents probably the most comprehensive and compelling collection of scholarships on African criminology and criminal justice policies. I am fascinated by the fecundity of the knowledge it produces, the lucidity of its polemics, and the eclecticism of its scope. It is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the convulsive thinking, the radical eccentricity, and the insurgent heretical challenges posed by modern African criminologists to the disciple.
Ifeanyi Ezeonu, Brock University, Canada
A wonderful contribution to our understanding of criminology worldwide.
Hal Pepinsky, author of Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist
The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies closes one of the remaining major gaps in the criminological literature. This edited collection is dedicated to the decolonization paradigm with a magnificent 360 degree vision in its structure, in the topics and geographical areas it covers, and in the selection of authors who have contributed. Definitely, a must-read for students and scholars of criminology and criminal justice studies, no matter where in the world they reside. Refreshing nourishment for the mind!
Antje Deckert, Co-editor in Chief, Decolonization of Criminology and Justice
From the origins of modern colonialism in the 15th-century incursions into West Africa of the Portuguese to the mass incarceration of Africans across the globe, which persists, indeed accelerates, in the 21st century, from hip-hop to the war on terror, Du Bois to Mandela, crimes of sedition to intimate partner violence while traversing the continent of Africa to the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Europe, the contributions here are painted across a vast canvass, not simply historically, geographically, and empirically but conceptually and theoretically. This is a brave, unique, overdue, and, quite simply, thoroughly compelling collection. Through the perspectives, experiences, and insights of those of African descent at home and abroad, the essays here transcend both hegemonic and critical criminologies to lay the foundations of a scholarly-activist, liberatory paradigm which furthers global justice. Whatever your relationship is to criminology, this is the next book you should read.
Steve Tombs, Professor of Criminology, The Open University, UK
This timely book demonstrates the modern world as we know it arose and remains sustained from the stolen bodies, expropriated land, labor, and resources of the richest continent on earth Africa! Exceeding the epistemic bounds of criminology, this richly detailed, evocative, and original book takes us past the willful and persistent rapacity and genocidal imperative of a blood-sucking and cannibalistic colonialism. Readers will encounter African men and women on their feet, not as primitive rebels or criminals throwing off the colonizers knee on their neck, but as emblems of a new and just humanity. This book is truly beyond criminology.
Tamari Kitossa, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brock University, Canada
This collection is a quintessential model for Africana liberatory praxis in criminology. It contextualizes and foregrounds Black intellectual capital, and necessarily disrupts the orthodoxy by pushing the envelope beyond Western epistemologies toward rich, captivating, and all-inclusive Africana criminologies that can benefit all.
Jason Williams, PhD, Assistant Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University
Criminology has shamefully sidelined the issues of race, racism, and intersectionality and neglected the scholarship of indigenous and minority scholars. This book brings together voices of scholars of the African descent, with every chapter making an outstanding and original contribution. Africana Criminologies is coming at a critical moment in time when debates about criminal (in)justice and Black lives have entered the global consciousness. The collection challenges the Eurocentrism that has tainted the discipline and promotes decolonial perspectives. It needs to be on every undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum.
Monish Bhatia, Birkbeck, University of London
THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON AFRICANA CRIMINOLOGIES
The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies plugs a gaping hole in criminological literature, which remains dominated by work on Europe and settler-colonial locations at the expense of neocolonial locations and at a huge cost to the discipline that remains relatively underdeveloped.
It is well known that criminology is thriving in Europe and settler-colonial locations while people of African descent remain marginalized in the discipline. This handbook therefore defines and explores this field within criminology, moving away from the colonialist approach of offering administrative criminology about policing, courts, and prisons and making a case for decolonizing the wider discipline. Arranged in five parts, it outlines Africana criminologies, maps its emergence, and addresses key themes such as slavery, colonialism, and apartheid as crimes against humanity; critiques of imperialist reason; Africana cultural criminology; and theories of law enforcement and Africana people. Coalescing a diverse range of voices from Africa and the diaspora, the handbook explores outside Eurocentric canons in order to learn from the experiences, struggles, and contributions of people of African descent.
Offering innovative ways of theorizing and explaining the criminological crises that face Africa and the entire world with the view of contributing to a more humane world, this groundbreaking handbook is essential reading for criminologists and sociologists worldwide, as well as scholars of Africana studies and African studies.
Biko Agozino is a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech University.
Viviane Saleh-Hanna is a professor and chairperson at the Department of Crime and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
