December 26, 2017 Communique
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Events & Issues
– Africa’s leading innovation scholar, Calestous Juma, has died
Calestous Juma, the luminary Kenyan scholar who championed the cause of innovation and technology in transforming African countries, and whose books and papers about the environment, biotechnology, education, artificial intelligence, and the politics of land in Africa made him a towering figure both in the continent and across the world, has died. He was 64.
Read more on the story in this link:
Africa’s leading innovation scholar, Calestous Juma, has died
– Opinion: Decolonizing Ethiopian Studies
Addis Abeba, November 30/2017 –
I wrote this article as a way to initiate a conversation on the issues of decolonizing education pertaining directly to the field of Ethiopian Studies. The main purpose of this opinion is to highlight the importance of making Ethiopian languages and ideas dominant in the field of Ethiopian Studies.
Much of the knowledge on Africa has been produced from outside the continent and the methods that are used to study and represent the continent are rooted in colonial discourse. Similar to the rest of Africa, Ethiopia’s history seems to be significantly studied and written about from outside the country. Ethiopia had successfully fought off colonization and remained the single non-colonized sovereign country in Africa. Meaning, Europe had not been central to Ethiopian political, social or economic life as a result of its historical attachment in the continent. This gave Ethiopia the right and freedom to move on in history on its own right and speed, without the use of a European compass. But this did not happen. While ideals of modernization, human rights, ethnicity, development and nationalism engulfed Ethiopia’s educated class from the 20th century onward, through education Europe’s centrality in Ethiopian socio-political and economic thought would reach its completion. I attempt to present the case of scholarship presented about Ethiopians on a global stage and the problems that arise from the centering of Ethiopian studies around European ideals.
Read more on the story in this link:
– A battle for power in Turkey faces resistance in Senegal
Dakar, Senegal
One Saturday evening last January, hundreds of children and parents gathered in the schoolyard of Collège Bosphore in Senegal’s capital, bouncing to the sounds of a hip-hop concert being broadcast on national TV. Despite the festive mood of the crowd, they weren’t celebrating. They were protesting the influence of a political leader thousands of miles away—Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
‘“We are independent, we will not accept to be under a foreign dictatorship,” the concert’s host, Senegalese singer Fou Malade, told the crowd.
Read more on the story in this link:
A battle for power in Turkey faces resistance in Senegal
– The Great Unravelling The Disintegration of the Nigerian State
Chris Ngwodo, December, 2017
Ever since the end of Nigeria’s three-year civil war in 1970—a costly conflict that consumed an estimated three million lives—the nightmare scenario for the national defense and security establishment has always been a similar conflagration. In the elite imagination, the absolute worst that could happen would be a reprise of the war. Pundits and politicians alike habitually invoke the specter of such bloodshed as a sort of national Armageddon. The expectation is that the republic will collapse in a fiery apocalyptic spectacle. The official consciousness has been so conditioned by this narrative, that our strategic institutions have trouble imagining alternate scenarios, much less recognizing them.
Read more on the story in this link:
– Madagascar: State of denial People & Power investigates a country on the brink of civil war
While Madagascar celebrates 50 years of independence from France this year, the country remains mired in economic crisis and political uncertainty over who is legitimately leading the nation of 20 million.
In March 2009, clashes between the regime of Marc Ravalomanana, the then president, and the opposition movement, led by the capital’s former mayor, Andry Rajoelina, left more than 100 people dead and the nation in turmoil.
Many blamed the president’s heavy-handed National Guard for the killings, and calls for his removal reached fever pitch. Following days of sporadic violence and increasing political pressure, Ravalomanana – in office since 2002 – finally surrendered his post to the country’s military.
Read more on the story in this link:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/08/201081864237806607.html
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
– Hadija’s Story: Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields
[قصة هاديجا: قضايا التشتيت والانتماء الجنسي و العرقي في منطقة بامندا في الكاميرون]
Author: Harmony O’Rourke
In 1952, a woman named Hadija was brought to trial in an Islamic courtroom in the Cameroon Grassfields on a charge of bigamy. Quickly, however, the court proceedings turned to the question of whether she had been the wife or the slave-concubine of her deceased husband. In tandem with other court cases of the day, Harmony O’Rourke illuminates a set of contestations in which marriage, slavery, morality, memory, inheritance, status, and identity were at stake for Muslim Hausa migrants, especially women. As she tells Hadija’s story, O’Rourke disrupts dominant patriarchal and colonial narratives that have emphasized male activities and projects to assert cultural distinctiveness, and she brings forward a new set of women’s issues involving concerns for personal prosperity, the continuation of generations, and Islamic religious expectations in communities separated by long distances.
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2017).
– Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy.
This handbook investigates the current state and future possibilities of African Philosophy, as a discipline and as a practice, vis-à-vis the challenge of African development and Africa’s place in a globalized, neoliberal capitalist economy. The volume offers a comprehensive survey of the philosophical enterprise in Africa, especially with reference to current discourses, arguments and new issues—feminism and gender, terrorism and fundamentalism, sexuality, development, identity, pedagogy and multidisciplinarity, etc.—that are significant for understanding how Africa can resume its arrested march towards decolonization and liberation.
– Allows new and established scholars of African Philosophy to re-engage their own and other philosophers’ ideas, arguments, and thoughts about Africa and her predicament in a global world where issues of knowledge, technologies, sexuality, hybridity, gender, neoliberalism, and terrorism have become major intellectual staples;
– Provides researchers, students and teachers of African Philosophy with a handy volume about the past, current states, and future possibilities of the discipline;
– Represents a comprehensive handbook in a field that has not had such a volume for many years
***Please see the attached Table of Contents and Preface.
– Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania
[أرشيف الشوارع والحياة في المدينة: المثقفون الشعبويون في تنزانيا ما بعد الاستعمار]
Author: Emily Callaci
In Street Archives and City Life Emily Callaci maps a new terrain of political and cultural production in mid- to late twentieth-century Tanzanian urban landscapes. While the postcolonial Tanzanian ruling party (TANU) adopted a policy of rural socialism known as Ujamaa between 1967 and 1985, an influx of youth migrants to the city of Dar es Salaam generated innovative forms of urbanism through the production and circulation of what Callaci calls street archives. These urban intellectuals neither supported nor contested the ruling party’s anti-city philosophy; rather, they navigated the complexities of inhabiting unplanned African cities during economic crisis and social transformation through various forms of popular texts that included women’s Christian advice literature, newspaper columns, self-published pulp fiction novellas, and song lyrics. Through these textual networks, Callaci shows how youth migrants and urban intellectuals in Dar es Salaam fashioned a collective ethos of postcolonial African citizenship. This spirit ushered in a revolution rooted in the city and its networks—an urban revolution that arose in spite of the nation-state’s pro-rural ideology.
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2017
– Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition.
[الكتابة في عهد ما بعد الاستعمار: الأدب الفرنكوفوني في شمال أفريقيا ومرحلة الانتقال]
Author: Jane Hiddleston
‘Focusing on francophone writing from North Africa as it has developed since the 1980s, Writing After Postcolonialism explores the extent to which the notion of ‘postcolonialism’ is still resonant for literary writers a generation or more after independence, and examines the troubled status of literature in society and politics during this period. Whilst analysing the ways in which writers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have reacted to political unrest and social dissatisfaction, Jane Hiddleston offers a compelling reflection on literature’s ability to interrogate the postcolonial nation as well as on its own uncertain role in the current context. The book sets out both to situate the recent generation of francophone writers in North Africa in relation to contemporary politics, to postcolonial theory, and evolving notions of ‘world literature, and to probe the ways in which a new and highly sophisticated set of writers reflect on the very notion of ‘the literary’ during this period of transition
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK, 2017.
– Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa
[تقييم الانتماء العرقي: فن الجاز وفن الأدب الخيالي في أفريقيا الفرنكوفونية]
Author: Pim Higginson
This volume focuses on how this naturalization of black musicality occurred and its impact on Francophone African writers and filmmakers for whom the idea of their own essential musicality represented an epistemological obstacle. Despite this obstacle, because of jazz’s profound importance to diaspora aesthetics, as well as its crucial role in the French imaginary, many African writers have chosen to make it a structuring principle of their literary projects.
Publisher: James Currey on Jun 16, 2017
– Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations
[المثليون المغاربة في فرنسا: اللغة والهيام وتبدّل الهوية]
Author: Denis Provencher,
This book investigates the lives and stories of queer Maghrebi and Maghrebi French men who moved to or grew up in contemporary France. It combines original French language data from my ethnographic fieldwork in France with a wide array of recent narratives and cultural productions including performance art and photography, films, novels, autobiographies, published letters, and other first-person essays to investigate how these queer men living in France and the diaspora stake claims to time and space, construct kinship, and imagine their own future. By closely examining empirical evidence from the lived experiences of these queer Maghrebi French-speakers, this book presents a variety of paths available to these men who articulate and pioneer their own sexual difference within their families of origin and contemporary French society. These sexual minorities of North African origin may explain their homosexuality in terms of a “modern coming out” narrative when living in France. Nevertheless, they are able to negotiate cultural hybridity and flexible language, temporalities, and filiations, that combine elements from a variety of discourses on family, honor, face-saving, the symbolic order of gender differences, gender equality, as well as the western and largely neoliberal constructs of individualism and sexual autonomy.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2017.
– Sortir l’Afrique de la servitude monétaire. À qui profite le franc CFA ?
[نحو اخراج أفريقيا من العبودية النقدية. من يستثري من عملة فرنك الأفريقي]
Authors: Sous la direction de Kako Nubukpo, Martial Ze Belinga, Bruno Tinel et Demba Moussa Dembele
Plus de soixante ans après la décolonisation, le franc CFA est toujours la monnaie officielle de quinze pays d’Afrique francophone. Garanti par le Trésor français, adossé à l’euro, il est utile à la stabilité des États concernés pour certains économistes africains. Mais pour d’autres — dont ceux qui ont dirigé ce livre —, il est surévalué et constitue une survivance coloniale qui maintient la tutelle de Paris sur des pays officiellement indépendants. Une partie des réserves de change d’Afrique francophone est toujours conservée à Paris… Dense, mais clair, l’ouvrage rappelle le rôle économique et politique de toute monnaie, explique l’histoire et le fonctionnement du CFA, avant d’entrer dans le vif d’un débat qui, malgré son importance, peine à atteindre le grand public. Contrairement à une idée reçue, la parité CFA-euro freine l’unification des marchés africains. Les conséquences sociales de toute monnaie forte ont, en Afrique francophone, des effets multipliés par l’inégalité des échanges.
Publisher: La Dispute, Paris, 2016.
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Research Africa welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in next week’s edition.
Website: https://researchafrica.duke.edu/
