Mark Deets on A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal

This discussion is with Dr. Mark W. Deets, an Assistant Professor of African and World History and the Director of the Center for American Studies and Research at The American University in Cairo. His research and teaching focus on 19 th and 20th century West African social and cultural history, especially in the Senegambian region. His first book, A Country of Defiance: Mapping the Casamance in Senegal, is published in 2023 with Ohio University Press. Dr.Deets has also published his work in The Journal of African History, History in Africa: A Journal of

Method, and the Africa Is A Country blog, among others. Dr. Deets serves as a book review editor for The Journal of West African History. He moved to Cairo in 2017 after obtaining his PhD in African history at Cornell University. He embarked on this academic career after 20

years as a helicopter pilot and a military diplomat in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a military attaché to the West African countries of Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Mauritania. In his final military assignment, Dr. Deets returned to his undergraduate alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy, to teach History and to serve as the varsity wrestling officer representative. Dr. Deets grew up in the small town of Beloit, Kansas.

 

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.