Paul Ocobock Book Launch - An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya

Paul Ocobock, Assistant Professor - Book Launch - An Uncertain Age: The Politics of Manhood in Kenya

In twentieth-century Kenya, age and gender were powerful cultural and political forces that animated household and generational relationships. They also shaped East Africans' contact with and influence on emergent colonial and global ideas about age and masculinity. Kenyan men and boys came of age achieving their manhood through changing rites of passage and access to new outlets such as town life, crime, anticolonial violence, and nationalism. And as they did, the colonial government appropriated masculinity and maturity as means of statecraft and control.

4:30 p.m. - Introduction by Emily Osborn - Associate Professor of African History, African Studies, University of Chicago

Followed by reception in the Hesburgh Center Great Hall