Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture – serie

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36 produkter

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36 produkter

Antecedents to Modern Rwanda
The Nyiginya Kingdom
AvJ. Vansina
Inbunden, Engelska, 2004
740 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda's recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today.
Antecedents to Modern Rwanda
The Nyiginya Kingdom
AvJ. Vansina
Häftad, Engelska, 2004
279 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
To understand the genocide and other dramatic events of Rwanda's recent past, one must understand the history of the earlier realm. Jan Vansina provides a critique of the history recorded by early missionaries and court historians and provides a bottom-up view, drawing on hundreds of grassroots narratives. He describes the genesis of the Hutu and Tutsi identities, their growing social and political differences, their bitter feuds, revolts, and massacres, and the relevance of this dramatic history to the post-genocide Rwanda of today.
Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks
African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa
AvBenjamin N. Lawrance,Emily Lynn. Osbornm. fl.
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
336 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
As a young man in South Africa, Nelson Mandela aspired to be an interpreter or clerk, noting in his autobiography that “a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African.” Africans in the lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy often held positions of little official authority, but in practice these positions were lynchpins of colonial rule. As the primary intermediaries among European colonial officials, African chiefs, and subject populations, these civil servants could manipulate the intersections of power, authority, and knowledge at the center of colonial society.By uncovering the role of such men (and a few women) in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective. They offer important insights on hegemony, collaboration, and resistance, structures and changes in colonial rule, the role of language and education, the production of knowledge and expertise in colonial settings, and the impact of colonization in dividing African societies by gender, race, status, and class.
Power in Colonial Africa
Confict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960
AvElizabeth A. Eldredge
Inbunden, Engelska, 2007
750 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Even in its heyday European rule of Africa had limits. Whether through complacency or denial, many colonial officials ignored the signs of African dissent. Displays of opposition by Africans, too indirect to counter or quash, percolated throughout the colonial era and kept alive a spirit of sovereignty that would find full expression only decades later. In ""Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960"", Elizabeth A. Eldredge analyzes a panoply of archival and oral resources, visual signs and symbols, and public and private actions to show how power may be exercised not only by rulers but also by the ruled. The BaSotho - best known for their consolidation of a kingdom from the 1820s to 1850s through primarily peaceful means, and for bringing colonial forces to a standstill in the Gun War of 1880-1881 - struggled to maintain sovereignty over their internal affairs during their years under the colonial rule of the Cape Colony (now part of South Africa) and Britain from 1868 to 1966. Eldredge explores instances of BaSotho resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness in forms of expression both verbal and non-verbal. Skillfully navigating episodes of conflict, the BaSotho matched wits with the British in diplomatic brinksmanship, negotiation, compromise, circumvention, and persuasion, revealing the capacity of a subordinate population to influence the course of events as it selectively absorbs, employs, and subverts elements of the colonial culture.
Naming Colonialism
History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870-1960
AvOsumaka Likaka
Häftad, Engelska, 2009
293 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
What's in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners' physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range - often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village's understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, ""Naming Colonialism"" advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process - the naming of Europeans - can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents - 'the home burner', 'Leopard', 'Beat, beat', 'The hippopotamus-hide whip' - clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
Defeat Is the Only Bad News
Rwanda Under Musinga, 1897-1931
AvAlison Liebhafsky Des Forges,David Newbury
Häftad, Engelska, 2011
289 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
A Rwandan proverb says “Defeat is the only bad news.” For Rwandans living under colonial rule, winning called not only for armed confrontation, but also for a battle of wits—and not only with foreigners, but also with each other. In Defeat Is the Only Bad News, Alison Des Forges recounts the ambitions, strategies, and intrigues of an African royal court under Yuhi Musinga, the Rwandan ruler from 1896 to 1931. These were turbulent years for Rwanda, when first Germany and then Belgium pursued an aggressive plan of colonization there. At the time of the Europeans’ arrival, Rwanda was also engaged in a succession dispute after the death of one of its most famous kings. Against this backdrop, the Rwandan court became the stage for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, filled with deceit, shrewd calculation, ruthless betrayal, and sometimes murder. Historians who study European expansion typically focus on interactions between colonizers and colonized; they rarely attend to relations among the different factions inhabiting occupied lands. Des Forges, drawing on oral histories and extensive archival research, reveals how divisions among different groups in Rwanda shaped their responses to colonial governments, missionaries, and traders. Rwandans, she shows, used European resources to extend their power, even as they sought to preserve the autonomy of the royal court. Europeans, for their part, seized on internal divisions to advance their own goals. Des Forges’s vividly narrated history, meticulously edited and introduced by David Newbury, provides a deep context for understanding the Rwandan civil war a century later.
Mau Mau's Children
The Making of Kenya's Postcolonial Elite
AvDavid Sandgren
Häftad, Engelska, 2012
302 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In 1963 David P. Sandgren went to Kenya to teach in a small, rural school for boys, where he remained for the next four years. These were heady times for Kenyans, as the nation gained its independence, approved a new constitution, and held its first elections. In the school where Sandgren taught, the sons of Gikuyu farmers rose to the challenges of this post colonial era and, in time, entered Kenyan society as adults, joining Kenya's first generation of post colonial elites. In Mau Mau's Children, Sandgren has reconnected with these former students. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, he provides readers with a collective biography of the lives of Kenya's first post colonial elite, stretching from their 1940s childhood to the peak of their careers in the 1990s. Through these interviews, Mau Mau's Children shows the trauma of growing up during the Mau Mau Rebellion, the nature of nationalism in Kenya, the new generational conflicts arising, and the significance of education and Gikuyu ethnicity on his students' path to success.
Whispering Truth to Power
Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda
AvSusan Thomson
Häftad, Engelska, 2013
307 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
For 100 days in 1994, genocide engulfed Rwanda. Since then, many in the international community have praised the country's post-genocide government for its efforts to foster national unity and reconciliation by downplaying ethnic differences and promoting ""one Rwanda for all Rwandans"". Examining how ordinary rural Rwandans experience and view these policies, Whispering Truth to Power challenges the conventional wisdom on post-genocide Rwanda.Susan Thomson finds that many of Rwanda's poorest citizens distrust the local officials charged with implementing the state programme and believe that it ignores the deepest problems of the countryside: lack of land, jobs, and a voice in policies that affect lives and livelihoods. Based on interviews with dozens of Rwandan peasants and government officials, this book reveals how the nation's disenfranchised poor have been engaging in everyday resistance, cautiously and carefully—""whispering"" their truth to the powers that be. This quiet opposition, Thomson argues, suggests that some of the nation's most celebrated post-genocide policies have failed to garner the grassroots support needed to sustain peace.
Cubans in Angola
South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991
AvChristine Hatzky
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
450 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Angola, a former Portuguese colony in southern central Africa, gained independence in 1975 and almost immediately plunged into more than two decades of conflict and crisis. Fidel Castro sent Cuban military troops to Angola in support of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), leading to its ascension to power despite facing threats both international and domestic. What is less known, and what Cubans in Angola brings to light, is the significant role Cubans played in the transformation of civil society in Angola during these years. Offering not just military support but also political, medical, administrative, and technical expertise as well as educational assistance, the Cuban presence in Angola is a unique example of transatlantic cooperation between two formerly colonized nations in the global South.
Early African Entertainments Abroad
From the Hottentot Venus to Africa's First Olympians
AvBernth Lindfors
Häftad, Engelska, 2014
336 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African and pseudo-African performers were displayed as curiosities throughout Europe and America. Appearing in circuses, ethnographic exhibitions, and traveling shows, these individuals and troupes drew large crowds. As Bernth Lindfors shows, the showmen, impresarios, and even scientists who brought supposedly representative inhabitants of the ""Dark Continent"" to a gaping public often selected the performers for their sensational impact. Spotlighting and exaggerating physical, mental, or cultural differences, the resulting displays reinforced pernicious racial stereotypes and left a disturbing legacy.Using period illustrations and texts, Early African Entertainments Abroad illuminates the mindset of the era's largely white audiences as they viewed wax models of Africans with tails and watched athletic competitions showcasing hungry cannibals. White spectators were thus assured of their racial superiority. And blacks were made to appear less than fully human precisely at the time when abolitionists were fighting to end slavery and establish equality.
Education As Politics
Colonial Schooling and Political Debate in Senegal, 1850s–1914
AvKelly M. Duke Bryant
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
607 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In 1914, Blaise Diagne was elected as Senegal’s first black African representative to the National Assembly in France. Education as Politics reinterprets the origins and significance of this momentous election, showing how colonial schools had helped reshape African power and politics during the preceding decades and how they prepared the way for Diagne’s victory.Kelly M. Duke Bryant demonstrates the critical impact of colonial schooling on Senegalese politics by examining the response to it by Africans from a variety of backgrounds and statuses—including rural chiefs, Islamic teachers, and educated young urbanites. For those Africans who chose to engage with them, the French schools in Senegal provided a new source of patronage, a potentially beneficial connection to the bureaucratizing colonial state, a basis for claims to authority or power, or an arena in which to debate pressing issues like the future of Qur’anic schooling and the increasing racism of urban society under colonial rule.Based on evidence from archives in Senegal and France, and on interviews Duke Bryant conducted in Senegal, she demonstrates that colonial schooling remade African politics during this period of transition to French rule, creating political spaces that were at once African and colonial, and ultimately allowing Diagne to claim election victory.
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860–1913
The Breakdown of a Moral Order
AvJelmer Vos
Inbunden, Engelska, 2015
750 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
A case study of colonialism in Africa from economic, religious, and political perspectives that examines the participation of African elites in colonial ruleThis is a richly documented history of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm, told from the perspective of the kingdom’s inhabitants. It is the first book-length study of the colonial encounter in an African kingdom renowned for its long Catholic tradition and contributory role in the historical slave trade. Rejecting theories of doom and decline, Jelmer Vos shows how Kongo’s sacred city of São Salvador was vital to the expansion of European imperialism in west-central Africa, providing a platform from which different agents, African as well as European, were able to project their social, political, and economic agendas. He argues that the Kongo people built on the kingdom’s long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and European culture to become avid intermediaries in a growing world of colonial trade and mission schools.Vos highlights the complexity of an African people’s engagement with colonialism, but he also underlines some of the tragic consequences of Kongo’s incorporation in the European state system. One of the fundamental contradictions of European rule in Africa was that its often excessive demands for tax and labor tended to undermine the African structures of authority on which the colonial system depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo’s royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power.
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913
The Breakdown of a Moral Order
AvJelmer Vos
Häftad, Engelska, 2017
221 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
This richly documented account of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm is told from the perspective of the kingdom’s inhabitants. Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo’s sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom’s long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.Vos underlines that Kongo’s incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo’s royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power.
Spirit Children
Illness, Poverty, and Infanticide in Northern Ghana
AvAaron R. Denham
Inbunden, Engelska, 2017
729 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In parts of West Africa, some babies and toddlers are considered spirit children—nonhumans sent from the forest to cause misfortune and destroy the family. These are usually deformed or ailing infants, the very young whose births coincide with tragic events, or children who display unusual abilities. In some of these cases, families seek a solution in infanticide. Many others do not.Refusing to generalize or oversimplify, Aaron R. Denham offers an ethnographic study of the spirit child phenomenon in Northern Ghana that considers medical, economic, religious, and political realities. He examines both the motivations of the families and the structural factors that lead to infanticide, framing these within the context of global public health. At the same time, he turns the lens on Western societies and the misunderstandings that prevail in discourse about this controversial practice. Engaging the complexity of the context, local meanings, and moral worlds of those confronting a spirit child, Denham offers visceral accounts of families' life and death decisions.
Spirit Children
Illness, Poverty, and Infanticide in Northern Ghana
AvAaron R. Denham
Häftad, Engelska, 2019
215 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Some babies and toddlers in parts of West Africa are considered spirit children—nonhumans sent from the forest to cause misfortune and destroy the family. These are usually deformed or ailing infants, or children whose births coincide with tragic events or who display unusual abilities. Aaron R. Denham offers a nuanced ethnographic study of this phenomenon in Northern Ghana that examines both the motivations of the families and the structural factors that lead to infanticide. He also turns the lens on the prevailing misunderstandings about this controversial practice. Denham offers vivid accounts of families’ life-and-death decisions that engage the complexity of the context, local meanings, and moral worlds of those confronting a spirit child.
Postcolonial Paris
Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light
AvLaila Amine
Inbunden, Engelska, 2018
582 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In the global imagination, Paris is the city's glamorous center, ignoring the Muslim residents in its outskirts except in moments of spectacular crisis such as terrorist attacks or riots. But colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.Spanning the decades from the post–World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital—romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.
Postcolonial Paris
Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light
AvLaila Amine
Häftad, Engelska, 2021
279 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In the global imagination, Paris is the city's glamorous center, ignoring the Muslim residents in its outskirts except in moments of spectacular crisis such as terrorist attacks or riots. But colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light, including fiction by Charef, Chraïbi, Sebbar, Baldwin, Smith, and Wright, and such films as La haine, Made in France, Chouchou, and A Son.Spanning the decades from the post–World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital—romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.
Farming and Famine
Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889-1991
AvDonald Crummey,James McCann
Inbunden, Engelska, 2018
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In modern times, Ethiopia has suffered three grievous famines, two of which—in 1973–74 and in 1984–85—caught the world's attention. It is often assumed that population increase drove Ethiopia's farmers to overexploit their environment and thus undermine the future of their own livelihoods, part of a larger global process of deforestation. In Farming and Famine, Donald E. Crummey explores and refutes these claims based on his research in Wallo province, an epicenter of both famines.Crummey draws on photographs comparing identical landscapes in 1937 and 1997 as well as interviews with local farmers, among other sources. He reveals that forestation actually increased due to farmers' tree-planting initiatives. More broadly, he shows that, in the face of growing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. Yet the threat of famine remains because of constricted access to resources and erratic rainfall. To avoid future famines, Crummey suggests, Ethiopia's farmers must transform agricultural productivity, but they cannot achieve that on their own.
Senegal Abroad
Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries
AvMaya Angela Smith
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
1 024 kr
Skickas
Senegal Abroad explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Capturing the experiences of Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York, it depicts how they make sense of who they are—and how they fit into their communities, countries, and the larger global Senegalese diaspora. Drawing on extensive interviews with a wide range of emigrants as well as people of Senegalese heritage, Maya Angela Smith contends that they shape their identity as they purposefully switch between languages and structure their discourse.The Senegalese are notable, Smith suggests, both in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to language. She finds that, although the emigrants she interviews express complicated relationships to the multiple languages they speak and the places they inhabit, they also convey pleasure in both travel and language. Offering a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, they blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
Senegal Abroad
Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries
AvMaya Angela Smith
Häftad, Engelska, 2020
279 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Senegal Abroad explores the fascinating role of language in national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities. Capturing the experiences of Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York, it depicts how they make sense of who they are—and how they fit into their communities, countries, and the larger global Senegalese diaspora. Drawing on extensive interviews with a wide range of emigrants as well as people of Senegalese heritage, Maya Angela Smith contends that they shape their identity as they purposefully switch between languages and structure their discourse.The Senegalese are notable, Smith suggests, both in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to language. She finds that, although the emigrants she interviews express complicated relationships to the multiple languages they speak and the places they inhabit, they also convey pleasure in both travel and language. Offering a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, they blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
Whose Agency
The Politics and Practice of Kenya's HIV-Prevention NGOs
AvMegan Hershey
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
804 kr
Skickas
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are ubiquitous in the Global South. Often international in origin, many attempt to assist local efforts to improve the lives of people often living in or near poverty. Yet their external origins often cloud their ability to impact health or quality of life, regardless of whether volunteers are local or foreign.By focusing on one particular type of NGO—those organized to help prevent the spread and transmission of HIV in Kenya—Megan Hershey interrogates the ways these organizations achieve (or fail to achieve) their planned outcomes. Along the way, she examines the slippery slope that is often used to define “success” based on meeting donor-set goals versus locally identified needs. She also explores the complex network of bureaucratic requirements at both the national and local levels that affect the delicate relationships NGOs have with the state. Drawing on extensive, original quantitative and qualitative research, Whose Agency serves as a much-needed case study for understanding the strengths and shortcomings of participatory development and community engagement.
Health in a Fragile State
Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo
AvJohn M. Janzen
Inbunden, Engelska, 2019
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care after the collapse of the Congolese state in the 1980s and 1990s. This work brings into focus John M. Janzen's earlier books on African health and healing, revealing the collaborative effort by local, national, and international agencies to create viable alternative institutions to those that represented the centralized state. This book documents and analyzes the realignment of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that shape health and healing.Janzen explores the manner in which power and information, including science, are legitimized in the preservation and improvement of health. Institutional validity and knowledge empower citizens and health practitioners to gain the upper hand over the region's principal diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and HIV/AIDS.
Health in a Fragile State
Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo
AvJohn M. Janzen
Häftad, Engelska, 2021
250 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care after the collapse of the Congolese state in the 1980s and 1990s. This work brings into focus John M. Janzen's earlier books on African health and healing, revealing the collaborative effort by local, national, and international agencies to create viable alternative institutions to those that represented the centralized state. This book documents and analyzes the realignment of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that shape health and healing.Janzen explores the manner in which power and information, including science, are legitimized in the preservation and improvement of health. Institutional validity and knowledge empower citizens and health practitioners to gain the upper hand over the region's principal diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and HIV/AIDS.
Names of the Python
Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
AvDavid L. Schoenbrun
Inbunden, Engelska, 2021
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork-the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities-in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.
Names of the Python
Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930
AvDavid L. Schoenbrun
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
364 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static, automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications. Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun examines groupwork—the imaginative labor that people do to constitute themselves as communities—in an iconic and influential region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in Schoenbrun’s skillful mastery of historical linguistics and vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond. This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative cultural imagination.
Entrepreneurial Goals
Development and Africapitalism in Ghanaian Soccer Academies
AvItamar Dubinsky
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The idea that the African private sector will generate economic prosperity and social wealth—an objective many governments and foreign charitable organizations have failed to achieve—continues to attract attention in business and policy circles. Yet little research has actually been conducted on Africapitalist endeavors. With the immense popularity of sports and the many aspirations they foster, the successes and shortcomings of soccer academies have kicked their way into the spotlight. Entrepreneurial Goals breaks away from studies that focus on the international relations consequences of soccer ventures, which are often rebuked as extended forms of European colonialism and exploitation of local talent, and instead centers Ghanaian establishments and the opportunities they create for local development within their surrounding communities.Itamar Dubinsky’s extensive ethnographic research offers an innovative theoretical approach by assessing three institutions—Mandela Soccer Academy, Kumasi Sports Academy, and Unistar Soccer Academy—through an Africapitalist prism. He demonstrates that these business endeavors, when viewed from the perspective of local interests, realize many of the educational, financial, and community building ambitions of the region. This pioneering examination of locally owned academies in Ghana reflects Dubinsky’s aim of illuminating the entrepreneurs and programs whose success passes to participating youth and their families, while also exposing the contradictions of for-profit development initiatives that purport to reap collective social benefits.
Religious Entanglements
Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
AvDavid Maxwell
Inbunden, Engelska, 2022
895 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa.Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities.Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.
Religious Entanglements
Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
AvDavid Maxwell
Häftad, Engelska, 2023
354 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
The Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) was one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa. Maxwell examines the roles of CEM missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa, illustrating the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and how the Luba shaped missionary research.
Violence in Rural South Africa, 1880–1963
AvSean Redding
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
Violence was endemic to rural South African society from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. But acts of violence were not inherent in African culture; rather, violence resulted from the ways in which Africans navigated the hazardous social and political landscape imposed by white rule. Focusing on the Eastern Cape province, Sean Redding investigates the rise of large-scale lethal fights among men, increasingly coercive abduction marriages, violent acts resulting from domestic troubles and witchcraft accusations within families and communities, and political violence against state policies and officials. Many violent acts attempted to reestablish and reinforce a moral, social, and political order among Africans. However, what constituted a moral order changed as white governance became more intrusive, land became scarcer, and people reconstructed their notions of “traditional” culture. State policies became obstacles around which Africans had to navigate by invoking the idea of tradition, using the state’s court system, alleging the use of witchcraft, or engaging in violent threats and acts. Redding’s use of multiple court cases and documents to discuss several types of violence provides a richer context for the scholarly conversation about the legitimation of violence in traditions, family life, and political protest.
Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria
AvOlufemi Vaughan
Inbunden, Engelska, 2023
922 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
In 2003, Olufemi Vaughan received from his ninety-five-year-old father, Abiodun, a trove of more than three thousand letters written by four generations of his family in Ibadan, Nigeria, between 1926 and 1994. The people who wrote these letters had emerged from the religious, social, and educational institutions established by the Church Missionary Society, the preeminent Anglican mission in the Atlantic Nigerian region following the imposition of British colonial rule. Abiodun, recruited to be a civil servant in the colonial Department of Agriculture, became a leader of a prominent family in Ibadan, the dominant Yoruba city in southern Nigeria. Reading deeply in these letters, Vaughan realized he had a unique set of sources to illuminate everyday life in modern Nigeria.Letter writing was a dominant form of communication for Western-educated elites in colonial Africa, especially in Nigeria. Exposure to the modern world and a growing sense of nationalism were among the factors that led people to begin exchanging letters, particularly in their interactions with British colonial authorities. Through careful textual analysis and broad contextualization, Vaughan reconstructs dominant storylines, including themes such as kinship, social mobility, Western education, modernity, and elite consolidation in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. Vaughan brings his prodigious skills as an interdisciplinary scholar to bear on this wealth of information, bringing to life a portrait, at once intimate and expansive, of a community during a transformative period in African history.

Africa and the Diaspora: History, Politics, Culture – serie

Antecedents to Modern Rwanda

Antecedents to Modern Rwanda

Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks

Power in Colonial Africa

Naming Colonialism

Defeat Is the Only Bad News

Mau Mau's Children

Whispering Truth to Power

Cubans in Angola

Early African Entertainments Abroad

Education As Politics

Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860–1913

Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913

Spirit Children

Spirit Children

Postcolonial Paris

Postcolonial Paris

Farming and Famine

Senegal Abroad

Senegal Abroad

Whose Agency

Health in a Fragile State

Health in a Fragile State

Names of the Python

Names of the Python

Entrepreneurial Goals

Religious Entanglements

Religious Entanglements

Violence in Rural South Africa, 1880–1963

Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria