Beneath these images that circulate political economies of affect, emotion, manhood, heartbreak, is the obscure romantization of drunken performances in Mexican popular culture. The presence of alcohol (literal or figurative) is, there, imperative to the successful des-ahogo of heartbreak. Des-ahogo is an ironic term, literally “un-drowning,” precisely evocative of the very drowning in alcohol. This is a tracing of the body that performs the pleasurable des-ahogos sustained and enhanced by intoxication, but also a disease in witnessing, analyzing and learning within this framework.

Listening to the voice and breath of Chavela reveals the power structures that exist as and within sentimiento, the affirmation of a public that notes in the vocal production of the other their own disgrace or good fortune. Understanding its historical trajectory as a highly contested ground for representation, not as a single representative of a national “Mexican” feeling. This is not to say Vargas rescues a voice of the past; instead, she forces one to listen and indulge in her pain, which resonates through her body messily, a cry to awaken the timbre corporeal, Musicologist Nina Eidsheim’s concept of the voice we hear as , to that sentimiento, that is only possible to perceive through the voice’s body, and cannot be attributed to merely “passionate” or “pastoral” lyrics, as it has been.

In late October 1952, the Pan-Africanist leader George Padmore sent a letter to Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana. “Brother,” he wrote, “since the storm in Kenya I have been working night and day.” Padmore was referencing an event in Kenya that had occurred only two days prior: Operation Jock Scott, during which the British colonial administration rounded up thousands of suspected supporters and leaders of the notorious “Mau Mau” movement. “Brother,” he continued, “it is hell let loose. Only the gods of Africa know how it will end.” Padmore’s letter was penned in London and travelled over 4,000 miles to reach Nkrumah in what was then the Gold Coast. It was through such transnational networks that the meaning of particular anticolonial African conflicts was articulated, discussed, and contested. And within both colonial and anticolonial networks on the Continent during the post-WWII era, few historical moments held more salience than that of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960).This dissertation (“‘The Storm in Kenya’: Mau Mau in Systems of Thought”) examines the international impact and legacy of the Mau Mau Uprising through analyzing a diverse body of source material drawn from archival collections located in Kenya, Great Britain, Portugal, France, and the United States. I reconstruct visions of Mau Mau in order to show how this event came to be understood in both other parts of the African continent and the wider world—visions which often compete against, or overlap with, one another. Through examining how Mau Mau was understood outside of Kenya, I show that the ways in which Mau Mau was embedded in broader networks and knowledge systems grants us novel insights into the political, intellectual, and social history of decolonization in Africa. “The Storm in Kenya” covers not only the period of the Mau Mau Emergency (which comprised most of the 1950s), but also historicizes the conceptual frameworks brought to bear on this movement both prior and subsequent to this period. The broader arc of the dissertation also engages with the comparative study of European imperialisms, Pan-African thought, and the history and theory of post-WWII counter-insurgency.