Rice University - Jeffrey Fleisher
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.
Universityof the Witwatersrand - Isabel Hofmeyr
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.
Cornell University - Salah M. Hassan
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.
Universityof Florida - Luise White
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.
