This volume collects essays from the 2009 edition of the annual conference held at the University of Texas in Austin and hosted by Toyin Falola. These conferences bring together a range of scholars from Africa and outside the continent organized around a different theme each year. Falola and Emily Brownell, a doctoral student at the university, have produced an edited volume of papers selected from the presentations. These conferences do a great service to Africanists, and Falola's commitment to intensifying engagement between scholars based on the continent and those outside, and to supporting younger scholars, is exemplary. Yet, the volumes produced, like this one, tend to be of uneven quality.

The essays cover a host of issues across the continent, and the editors strive mightily to achieve some unity. Brownell's conclusion, focused on the shaping of narratives, seeks to connect technological intervention and environmental change. Important essays in the collection include those by Jeremy Rich on the trade in primates in Gabon; Laura Mitchell on hunting in colonial South Africa; Catherine Reichart-Burikukiye on the symbolic appropriation of the railway by Africans in German East Africa; Tokunbo A. Ayoola on the relationship between railroads and health in Nigeria; Emmanual Mbah on pastoral policy in Cameroon; and Jennifer Lee Johnson on the rise of the Nile perch fishery in Lake Victoria Nyanza. Other essays in the volume will interest scholars in their particular fields.