Olivette Otele

The books that forced me to stop and pause this year were those that made me reconsider narrative and emotion in history writing. Johny Pitts’ Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (Allen Lane) tells stories of survival and the ingenuity of those on the edge of several worlds. Shifting our gaze from migratory experiences to daily practices of resilience, the book invites us to witness the journeys and creativity of communities often unrecorded in studies of European history, highlighting the commonality of African-European experiences across the continent.

Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso) places voices from the history of anti-colonialism centre stage. This powerfully written book focuses on people whose call for action and activism unsettled the empire and inspired British liberation movements. Unapologetically rebellious, the insurgents did not surf on the waves of victimhood. Instead, they united, planned and attacked the imperial powers in various ways.

Imperialism rested on an arsenal of communication tools. In Electric News in Colonial Algeria (OUP), Arthur Asseraf reveals how the reception of global news impacted on the country. Expansive in its source material and full of in-depth analysis, this fascinating book examines how the arrival of world news created both dissension and cohesion among late 19th- and early 20th-century Algerians.

Olivette Otele has just been appointed professor of the history of slavery at the University of Bristol