News and Issues
Does Citizenship Shape Identity? A “Third-Culture” Writer Takes Stock
By Rawiya Kameir, October 19, 2018
When I was a child, my mother liked telling people that I’d learned French in a month flat. It was true: my family had moved to a Francophone country, and a few weeks of playing outside was all it took. But her retellings weren’t simply boasts about her daughter’s abilities; they, like much of my childhood, were proof of just how easily a young brain, not yet calcified with experience and expectation, can adapt. From there, I would learn firsthand that it isn’t just language that can be absorbed.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.vogue.com/article/does-citizenship-shape-identity-vogue-november-2018-issue
The Short yet Inspiring Life of Josina Machel, the Mozambican Heroine who Died Fighting for her Country at 25
By Mweha Msemo, October 28, 2018
Like many other influential women in Africa, not so much is known of Josina Machel, a significant African revolutionary figure and heroine of the struggle for Mozambican national liberation. She boldly wore combat gear and fought in the war of independence as a guerrilla, created orphanages and travelled throughout the country raising awareness of women’s active role in the war.
Read the story in this link:
Les migrations actuelles réveillent la question coloniale
Par Alexis Lacroix, le 30 octobre 2018
Échange entre le philosophe africain Souleymane Bachir Diagne et l’historien Benjamin Stora sur la question post-coloniale. A l’heure de la mondialisation, les symétries semblent faciles entre les histoires. Mais le sont-elles réellement ? Ne nécessitent-elles pas, plus que jamais, un effort de traduction ? En effet, les regards croisés entre l’Europe et l’Afrique sont plus complexes qu’on croit. Le Sénégalais Souleymane Bachir Diagne, qui pense l’Afrique sous tous ses aspects, dans sa relation avec l’Europe notamment, et qui vient de publier En quête d’Afrique (s), universalisme et pensée décoloniale, dialogue avec le Français Benjamin Stora, spécialiste de l’histoire du Maghreb et des décolonisations, professeur émérite à Paris 13 et président du Musée de l’Immigration.
Read the story in this link:
https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/les-migrations-actuelles-reveillent-la-question-coloniale_2044964.html?fbclid=IwAR2kUFwqXymko3RGI0T8DEPRCjBDcsVP9pV60sfuUUQM1GAf1wDbc1KZ6ak#atdAuelZTeFuS31K.01
New Books كتب جديدة
Curing Our Ills: The Psychology of Chronic Disease Risk, Experience and Care in Africa
[علاج ما لدينا من العلل: معرفة مخاطر الأمراض المزمنة ، والمآسي والمعاناة في أفريقيا]
Author: Ama de-Graft Aikins
In this inaugural lecture, Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins discusses the psychology of chronic disease risk, experience and care in Africa. She makes a case for why the problem of NCDs needs to be examined through a psychological lens. She draws on her independent and collaborative work on diabetes representations and experiences among Ghanaians in Ghana and Europe to highlight the complex, multi-level context of chronic diseases. She presents a synthesis of her evidence through the concepts of physical ills and ideological ills, arguing that both are interconnected and, as a result, must be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. She concludes by offering practical solutions for reducing chronic disease risk and improving the quality of long-term experience and care in Ghana, using examples from countries that have implemented successful NCD interventions.
Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana, 2018
The Blue Economy Handbook of the Indian Ocean Region
[دليل الاقتصاد الأزرق في منطقة المحيط الهندي]
Author (Editor): V.N. Attri and Narnia Bohler-Mulleris
This book is the first of its kind, providing fresh insights into the various aspects and impacts of the Blue Economy in the Indian Ocean Region. The contributions come from a variety of disciplines by scholars and experts from seven countries. From shifting paradigms, to an accounting framework, gender dynamics, the law of the sea and renewable energy, this handbook aims to increase awareness of the Blue Economy in the Indian Ocean Region and to provide evidence to policy-makers in the region to make informed decisions.
Publisher: Africa Institute of South Africa, South Africa, 2018
Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa’s Eastern Cape
[لجم الموافقة: الاغتصاب والحكم في منطقة الكيب الشرقية بجنوب افريقيا]
Author: Elizabeth Thornberry
Elizabeth Thornberry uses historical evidence to shed light on South Africa’s contemporary epidemic of sexual violence. Drawing on over a thousand cases from a diverse set of courts, Thornberry reconstructs the history of rape in South Africa’s Eastern Cape from the precolonial era to the triumph of legal and sexual segregation. She digs deeply into questions of conceptions of sexual consent. Through this process, Thornberry also demonstrates the political stakes of disputes over sexual consent, and the ways in which debates over the regulation of sexuality shaped both white and black politics in this period. From customary authority to missionary Christianity to segregationism, political claims implied theories of sexual consent and enabled the control of female sexuality. The political history of rape illuminates not only South Africa’s contemporary crisis of sexual violence, but the entangled histories of law, sexuality, and politics across the globe.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018
Voices From/ From Africa
[أصوات من أفريقيا وعنها]
Author (Editors): The 14th International Symposium on Comparative Literature Committee
This collection of conference papers argues that in an era where technology and social media are claimed to contribute to dissolving boundaries and creating a unified globe, borders continue to exist. Some of these barriers are physical while others are imaginary and psychologically reflected in language, literature, linguistics and the arts. Still, the world is a place where barriers and borders are constructed and reconstructed. Intersections of different kinds of borders, such as those of ethnicity, class, and gender, are among the prominent features of our world as forms of intersectionality. Attempts at crossing existing borders are constantly made: sometimes with great success, other times with utter failure.
Publisher: Department of English Language and Literature, Cairo University, 2018
Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-slavery Mauritania
[مسائل في العمل و الحالة الاجتماعية، والمساواة بين الجنسين في مرحلة ما بعد العبودية في موريتانيا]
Author: Katherine Ann Wiley
Although slavery was legally abolished in 1981 in Mauritania, its legacy lives on in the political, economic, and social discrimination against ex-slaves and their descendants. Katherine Ann Wiley examines the shifting roles of Muslim Ḥarāṭīn (ex-slaves and their descendants) women, who provide financial support for their families. Wiley uses economic activity as a lens to examine what makes suitable work for women, their trade practices, and how they understand and assert their social positions, social worth, and personal value in their everyday lives. She finds that while genealogy and social hierarchy contributed to status in the past, women today believe that attributes such as wealth, respect, and distance from slavery help to establish social capital. Wiley shows how the legacy of slavery continues to constrain some women even while many of them draw on neoliberal values to connect through kinship, friendship, and professional associations. This powerful ethnography challenges stereotypical views of Muslim women and demonstrates how they work together to navigate social inequality and bring about social change.
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2018).
The Value of Disorder: Autonomy, Prosperity and Plunder in the Chadian Sahara
[فائدة الفوضى: الحكم الذاتي والرفاهية والتسلط في الصحراء التشادية]
Author: Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele
Despite its central role in the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been closed to researchers since the late 1960s and thus remains virtually unknown to scholarship. Based on long-term fieldwork, The Value of Disorder is an original, in-depth account of the area and its Tubu inhabitants. Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele examine trans-border connectivity and trade, civil war and rebellion, wealth creation, and labour and gender relations. They highlight the aspirations for moral autonomy in northern Chad from an internal point of view: a point of view that in turn participates in a dynamic process of regional interdependence. Vividly ethnographic, the book gives precedence to local categories of value while asking broader questions about the nature of non-state regional political organization. They raise points that inform current political developments in the Saharan region. Certainly, this work has the potential to challenge key concepts in Saharan Studies and the social sciences.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018
Contestations islamisées: Le Sénégal entre diplomatie d’influence et islam politique
[نزاعات متأسلمة: السنغال بين النفوذ الدبلوماسي وتأثير الإسلام السياسي]
Language: French
Author : Bakary Sambe
Senegal is experiencing the geopolitical paradox of embodying both the continuum of sub-Saharan depth of the Arab-Muslim world and a traditional strategic partnership with the Western world. Although it has been penetrated by ideological currents that fuel political Islam, Senegal has, however, remained for now, an “island of stability in an ocean of instability.” It is at the center of political and security developments in West Africa and the Sahel, where these same Western powers and Arab-Persian Gulf agents are in an unrestrained quest for oases of influence. In this book, Bakary Sambe gives a detailed analysis of these encounters in a context where the tense security situation, the rise of extremism and the perils linked to transnational terrorism are paradoxically challenging the “secular” states of the region. Through its systematic interdisciplinary approach, this book deciphers the strategies used by Arab and Western countries in leveraging influence over the direction of public policy and diplomacy in Senegal.
Publisher: Editions Afrikana, Canada, 2018.
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Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.
