Joshua Castillo

About Me

Joshua Castillo is a historian of twentieth- and twenty-first century Africa, specializing in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since independence. His first book, The Language of Power: Navigating Authoritarianism and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is being revised for submission and analyzes the historical relationship between language and political power in the Democratic Republic of Congo, especially during the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965 to 1997. The Language of Power illuminates the nuanced linguistic strategies that Congolese people have developed and deployed to navigate a complex terrain of power amid shifting relationships between language, political authority, and regional conflict. Castillo argues that shifts in Congo’s language of power—from French, to Lingala, to Swahili—shaped Congolese people’s relationships to political authority on a national level and in everyday life. Castillo combines top-down and bottom-up perspectives building on archival research in Congo, Belgium, and the US as well as over four hundred oral history interviews conducted in Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo, and Ciluba, as well as French across Congo’s national language zones.

Castillo’s second book project, tentatively entitled Living under the Leopard: A Social and Economic History of Congo-Zaire reexamines the Zairian period (1971-1997) in Congolese history from multiple social historical vantage points. Castillo will draw on oral historical and archival research that have already been conducted in conjunction with analysis of music, newspaper accounts, and other sources to re-think our understanding of the social and economic history of the expansion and collapse of Zaire’s formal economy, the golden age of Zairian rumba music, and the strategies used by Zairian women in particular to navigate this period of socioeconomic rupture.

As these two projects underscore, Castillo is interested in broader questions of political authority, social and linguistic identity, nationalism, conflict, and socio-economic change in Central Africa. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, The Boston University African Studies Center, the Boston University History Department and the US Department of Education.

Castillo offers courses on world history and Modern Africa.

Publications

Joshua Castillo and Chris Davey, “The Soldiers’ Field: Colonial legacies, language ideologies, and militarized violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Myles Osbourne, and Charlie Thomas, Colonial Legacies in African Militaries, (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming).

“From ‘Lingala Has No Respect’ to ‘Not Being a Yuma’: Navigating Authoritarianism and Sociolinguistic Change in the Congolese Intermediary City of Kikwit” accepted and forthcoming in The Canadian Journal of African Studies.

“Langue ya Pouvoir: Imposing, Opposing, and Navigating Lingala in Shaba (Katanga) - 1965-1997,” Michael Meeuwis, Janika Kuntzmann, and Nico Nassenstein, Current Topics in the Study of Lingala, (Mainz: Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung, 2025).

Michael Meeuwis, Margot Luyckfasseel, and Joshua Castillo, “Lingala only? A history of the D. R. Congo’s ideologies and counter-ideologies of monolingualism,” The Historical Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Navigating Lingala: Linguistic Change, Political Power, and Everyday Authoritarianism in Congo-Zaire, 1965–97,” The Journal of African History 65 (November 2024): 327-343.

“The Power of Language and the Language of Power: Sociolinguistic Methods and Social Histories of Political Power in Mobutu’s Congo-Zaire – 1965-1997,” History in Africa 50:1 (2023): 7-39.

“Revealing Debate: The 1974 First Seminar of Zairian Linguists and Congo’s Politics of Language in Historical Perspective,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 55:3 (December 2022): 303-324.

Courses Taught

HIST 1020: World History II
HIST 2120: Survey of Modern African History