Swahili Port Cities

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This well-written, well-researched book offers a careful argument about architectural history and its cultural contestations along the Swahili coast, with emphasis on the city of Mombasa.

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~Journal of African History

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Overall, Meier's text is beautifully written, comprehensive, and convincing. There are moments when her data seem slightly miscellaneous, but this is a particular challenge of interdisciplinary work. The text is of great value to scholars of East Africa in a number of fields, including archaeology, anthropology, history, and art history, and those interested in material culture and spatial studies more generally.

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~African Archaeological Review

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Meier's book Swahili Port Cities provides an invaluable and unique contribution to understandings of the complex history intertwining places, objects, and people along the littoral fringe of present-day Kenya and Tanzania. In so doing, it provides a solid foundation for scholars in any discipline investigating similar questions elsewhere.

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~H-AMCA

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Meier's book is a vital addition to the field, demonstrating the importance and complexity of Swahili architecture and material culture in the modern era and the insights they offer into wider issues of identity and politics.

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~Abe Journal

"Swahili Port Cities is an original, well-researched, and nicely crafted reading of the architectural and urban histories of a rare East African Islamic universe and its related aesthetic ways, which are somewhat removed from the worlds of Middle Eastern Islam and its architecture. At the same time, this universe challenges our received constructions of things African."

~Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"A groundbreaking architectural history of the Swahili coast, this book beautifully explores issues of cultural translation and the remapping of cultural boundaries. Prita Meier brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world art history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide new ways of studying the making of art and culture. She documents the way spaces once celebrated as icons of Muslim culture are now imbricated by the ethnic politics of the modern postcolonial nation-state and offers a new model for rethinking cosmopolitanism in the global context of the Indian Ocean."

~Salah M. Hassan, Cornell University

"Prita Meier has turned the tired question of 'who are the Swahili' on its ear by eschewing essentialist descriptions and showing how Swahili people themselves actively managed their identities locally and beyond, and throughout colonial and national administrations."

~Jeffrey Fleisher, Rice University

"This sophisticated book does much more than show us an Indian Ocean Africa that was the parallel to Atlantic Africa. With great clarity and commitment Prita Meier gives us the world of Swahili port cities that were not only trans-oceanic but trans-continental, places where merchants, slaves, nobles, and sailors met and exchanged ideas, styles, and commodities. Taste and ideas about décor were conspicuously displayed through objects and styles that were literally constructed from the experience of trade and travel in order to bring elsewhere home."

~Luise White, University of Florida

"Distinctive and decisive, calmly and elegantly written, this book provides a welcome case study of how the material world is made through a rich range of traveling cultural forms from across the Indian Ocean as a world system."

~Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand