There had always been music along the banks of the Congo River-lutes and drums, the myriad instruments handed down from ancestors. But when Joseph Kabasele and his African Jazz went chop for chop with O.K. Jazz and Bantous de la Capitale, music in Africa would never be the same. A sultry rumba washed in relentless waves across new nations springing up below the Sahara. The Western press would dub the sound soukous or rumba rock; most of Africa called in Congo music. Born in Kinshasa and Brazzaville at the end of World War II, Congon music matured as Africans fought to consolidate their hard-won independence. In addition to great musicians-Franco, Essous, Abeti, Tabu Ley, and youth bands like Zaiko Langa Langa-the cast of characters includes the conniving King Leopold II, the martyred Patrice Lumumba, corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, military strongman Denis Sassou Nguesso, heavyweight boxing champs George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, along with a Belgian baron and a clutch of enterprising Greek expatriates who pioneered the Congolese recording industry. Rumba on the River presents a snapshot of an era when the currents of tradition and modernization collided along the banks of the Congo. It is the story of twin capitals engulfed in political struggle and the vibrant new music that flowered amidst the ferment. For more information on the book, visit its other online home at rumbaontheriver.com-an impressive resource.

Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) from 1965 until 1997, was fond of saying “happy are those who sing and dance,” and his regime energetically promoted the notion of culture as a national resource. During this period Zairian popular dance music (often referred to as la rumba zaïroise) became a sort of musica franca in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But how did this privileged form of cultural expression, one primarily known for a sound of sweetness and joy, flourish under one of the continent’s most brutal authoritarian regimes? In Rumba Rules, the first ethnography of popular music in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bob W. White examines not only the economic and political conditions that brought this powerful music industry to its knees, but also the ways that popular musicians sought to remain socially relevant in a time of increasing insecurity. Drawing partly on his experiences as a member of a local dance band in the country’s capital city Kinshasa, White offers extraordinarily vivid accounts of the live music scene, including the relatively recent phenomenon of libanga, which involves shouting the names of wealthy or powerful people during performances in exchange for financial support or protection. With dynamic descriptions of how bands practiced, performed, and splintered, White highlights how the ways that power was sought and understood in Kinshasa’s popular music scene mirrored the charismatic authoritarianism of Mobutu’s rule. In Rumba Rules, Congolese speak candidly about political leadership, social mobility, and what it meant to be a bon chef (good leader) in Mobutu’s Zaire.

A modern tale rooted in recent historical events but filtered through a patiently unfolding storytelling style that pays homage to The Arabian Nights, The Lazarus Rumba is a stunning literary debut, a virtuoso performance like no other Latino writer has ever produced. This extraordinary ambitious novel sets out to portray the spiritual landscape of the Cuban people in the wake of Castro's revolutionary upheaval. Like Cervantes' Don Quixote, The Lazarus Rumba describes a country best by social dislocation and personal confusion, a country whose soul is best captured by a lush magic realism woven from innumerable tales, tales told contrapuntally in voices both melancholy and lively, lyrical and coarse, delicate and grotesque. As intensely political as Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman or Milan Kundera's The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, The Lazarus Rumba centers around three generations of women in the Lucientes family and follows the story of Alicia Lucientes as she almost inadvertantly becomes the most famous dissident on the Island.

A moving lyric meditation on the Congo River that explores the identity, chaos, and wonder of the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as race and the detritus of colonialism. With The River in the Belly, award-winning Congolese author Fiston Mwanza Mujila seeks no less than to reinitiate the Congo River in the imaginary of European languages. Through his invention of the “solitude”—a short poetic form lending itself to searing observation and troubled humor, prone to unexpected tonal shifts and lyrical u-turns—the collection celebrates, caresses, and chastises Central Africa’s great river, the world’s second largest by discharge volume. Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Soviet history, Congolese popular music, international jazz, and everyday life in European exile, Mwanza Mujila has fashioned a work that can speak to the extraordinary hopes and tragedies of post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo while also mining the generative yet embattled subject position of the African diasporic writer in Europe longing for home. Fans of Tram 83 will discover in River the same incandescent, improvisatory verbal energy that so dazzled them in Mwanza Mujila’s English-language debut.

Two friends, one a budding writer home from Europe, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village. Fiston Mwanza Mujila (b. 1981, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo) is a poet, dramatist, and scholar. Tram 83 is his award-winning and raved-about debut novel that caused a literary sensation when published in France in August 2014.

A professor of poetry uses a deck of playing cards to measure the time until her lover returns from Afghanistan. Congolese soldiers find their loneliness reflected in the lyrics of rumba songs. Survivors of the siege of Sarajevo discuss which book they would have never burned for fuel. A Romanian political prisoner writes her memoir in her head, a book no one will ever read. These are the arts of survival in times of crisis.Rumba Under Fire proposes we think differently about what it means for the arts and liberal arts to be "in crisis." In prose and poetry, the contributors to Rumba Under Fire explore what it means to do art in hard times. How do people teach, create, study, and rehearse in situations of political crisis? Can art and intellectual work really function as resistance to power? What relationship do scholars, journalists, or even memoirists have to the crises they describe and explain? How do works created in crisis, especially at the extremes of human endurance, fit into our theories of knowledge and creativity?The contributors are literary scholars, anthropologists, and poets, covering a broad geographic range - from Turkey to the United States, from Bosnia to the Congo. Rumba Under Fire includes essays, poetry and interviews by Tim Albrecht, Carla Baricz, Greg Brownderville, William Coker, Andrew Crabtree, Cara De Silva, Irina Dumitrescu, Denis Ferhatovic, Susannah Hollister, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Sharon Portnoff, Anand Taneja, and Judith Verweijen.

In Cuban Fire, the prize-winning author Isabelle Leymarie tells the thrilling story of popular music of Cuban origin and its major artists from the 1920s to today. Afro-Cuban music derives its richness from the fusion of many cultures. On the island of tobacco, rum and coffee, nicknamed 'The Green Caiman' because of its long and curvy shape, the wedding of sacred and secular African musical genres with Spanish and French melodies gave rise to numerous genres that have gained international fame- son, rhumba, guaracha, conga, mambo, cha-cha-cha, pachanga, and nueva timba. The history of Cuban music also unfolds in the United States, where large Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Hispanic communities have established themselves over the years. It was in New York, indeed, that the boogaloo, salsa and Latin jazz, created by such musicians as Machito, Mario Bauz , Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, emerged out of the contact with the Puerto Ricans and African-Americans of that city. This major reference book also deals with the incandescent rhythms of Puerto Rico and -- to a lesser degree -- Santo Domingo, integrated today into salsa and Latin jazz.

Black Man's Grave chronicles the hijacking of Sierra Leone's fledgling democracy by corrupt politicians, the plundering of the country's diamonds, and the rise of the notorious Revolutionary United Front. Based on letters from villagers to the authors, both former Peace Corps Volunteers in Sierra Leone, the book exposes 'big man' Siaka Stevens, warlord Charles Taylor, and rebel leader Foday Sankoh.