Rabiat Akande, "Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

New Books in African Studies

Set in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge UP, 2023) grapples with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, Rabiat Akande vividly illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state's governance of religion and interrogates the legacy of that governance agenda in the postcolonial state. This book is a novel commentary on the dynamic interplay between law, faith, identity, and power in the context of the modern state's emergence from colonial processes.

Dr. Akande is currently an Assistant Professor in the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada and chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies as an Academy Scholar from 2019-2021. She received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation, “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. At Harvard University, Dr. Akande held the Clark Byse fellowship at the Law School and was a Dissertation Fellow and Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also served on the editorial board of the Harvard International Law Journal. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Akande obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with First Class Honors and at the top of her class. She later studied at the Nigerian Law School, from which she also graduated with First Class Honors.

Dr. Katz is currently a postdoc in Grants Operations Management and Creative Engagement at UNC Chapel Hill. She was previously a postdoc in the History Department at Duke University, and a Visiting Assisting Professor at Loyola University New Orleans. She received her PhD in African History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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