Ray, D: Ethnicity, Identity, and Conceptualizing Community i

A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending study. This book charts new territory for Indian Ocean and East African Studies, incorporating influences from both land and sea across time, while centering vernacular cultures and politics. A ground-breaking reconceptualization of not only ethnicity, but also kinship, Islamization, urbanization, and the oceanic. - Bettina Ng'weno, University of California, Davis Daren E. Ray's history of Kenyan coastal identities ranges over two millennia through changing social formations using a community-centered approach. His work is exemplary cross-disciplinary scholarship, featuring deft use of archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic data as well as oral and written sources. A mosaic of words, objects, and experiences illuminates nested identities, all in motion in the East African and Indian Ocean worlds. An engaging narrative from start to finish, this book will be welcomed across many fields of inquiry and in a wide range of classrooms. - Adria LaViolette, University of Virginia An impressive work of detailed and meticulous scholarship that is unreservedly recommended as a core addition to personal, community, and college/university library East African history collections and supplemental linquistics and Black studies curriculum lists. (Midwest Book Review) Through incorporating insights from numerous methodological modalities, Ray pieces together an impressively longue-durée history of community identity formation, of ethnicity and its cultural ancestors, and of the ways that the peoples of the coast interacted with and depended upon each other. Ray's work speaks meaningfully to historiographies of ethnicity in Africa and to the smaller historiography of ethnicity in the Indian Ocean. It disrupts contemporary assumptions about the history of "Swahili towns" and about the shared histories of Mijikenda and Swahili ethnic identities. The cis-oceanic approach makes a very useful critique of the ways that local littoral concerns, motives, identities, and sociopolitical structures are sometimes glossed over in transoceanic histories of the Indian Ocean. Ultimately, this book is successful in its stated goals, and it adds some much-needed time depth to the history of the East African littoral. (H-Africa / H-Net Reviews)

This volume makes an important contribution to history and social science in southeastern Kenya while challenging problematic dichotomies and mummified identities on the continent. Ray's text will interest anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and Africanists in general, as well as those who want to learn more about similar dynamics and related communities in Tanzania.

(Tanzanian Affairs) Recommended. (Choice)