Research Africa News: September 6th, 2019
Call for Papers
Roundtable on Religion, Economy, and Class in Global Context
Kirsten Wesselhoeft and Deonnie Moodie are seeking 8,000-10,000-word contributions to a roundtable on religion, economy, and class in global context to submit to a leading US journal in Religious Studies. In particular, they seek contributions examining the ways that religion and economy co-produce one another in non-Western and non-Christian contexts in the current moment of late capitalism.
300-word abstracts are due on October 15, 2019 and full articles are due April 1, 2020. They expect the roundtable to be published by early 2021.
Please email the editors Kirsten Wesselhoeft (kwesselhoeft@vassar.edu) and Deonnie Moodie (dmoodie@ou.edu) with submissions and questions.
Read the details in this link here–Abstract
News and Issues
1. Ibram X Kendi on why not being racist is not enough
By Owen Jones, Aug 14, 2019
There is a moment that disturbs Ibram X Kendi to this day. It was the 90s, and Kendi – then in his final year of high school – was scheduled to deliver a speech at a public-speaking contest held in Martin Luther King’s honour.
Read the story in this link.
2. Hamdok: Man of the moment on Sudan’s future
By Fred Oluoch, Aug 28, 2019
As the new Sudan Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok took office on August 21, the biggest hope among the Sudanese was that he will turn around the economy, which was part of the motivation for protests that led to the ousting of strongman Omar al-Bashir. Dr Hamdok, 65, comes with over 30 years of a distinguished international career, having worked with financial and non-financial multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the African Development Bank.
Read the story in this link.
3. At age 15, this Ethiopian general with powerful afro hair helped free his people from Italian fascists
By Mildred Europa Taylor, March 24, 2019
Jagama Kello was only 15 when he took to the bush and the battlefield to defend his country, Ethiopia, from the Italian invasion of 1935. In October 1935, fascist Italian war leader Benito Mussolini launched his invasion of Ethiopia. Held at bay by Emperor Haile Selassie’s troops, Mussolini would eventually enter Addis Ababa on May 5, 1936, declaring the country as part of the Italian empire and Italian East Africa.
Read the story in this link.
4. The 1619 Project
By Dannielle Bowman, Aug 14, 2019
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and places the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
Read the story in this link
5. How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans
By Michael White, Dec 20, 2017
Our genetic make-up is the result of history. Historical events that influenced the patterns of migration and mating among our ancestors are reflected in our DNA — in our genetic relationships with each other and in our genetic risks for disease. This means that, to understand how genes affect our biology, geneticists often find it important to tease out how historical drivers of demographic change shaped present-day genetics.
Read the story in this link.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Digitalization and the Field of African Studies
الرقمنة ومجال الدراسات الأفريقية))
Author: Mirjam de Bruijn
Urbanization in Africa also means rapid technological change. At the turn of the 21st century, mobile telephones appeared in urban Africa. Ten years later, it covered large parts of rural Africa and – thanks to the smartphone – became the main method for accessing to the internet. This development is part of technological transformations in digitalization that are supposed to bridge the urban and the rural. These technological transformations bridge urban and rural through the creation of economic opportunities, the flow of information and by influencing people’s definition of self, belonging and citizenship. These changes are met with huge optimism and the message of Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) for Africa has been one of glory and revolution. In practice, however, technological transformations may not be entirely good. Increasingly, academic publications show that we are facing a new form of digital divide, in which Africa is (again) at the margins. These technological transformations influence the relation between urban and rural Africa, and between ‘Africa’ and the World. Hence, technological transformations influence the field of African Studies and its forms of knowledge production.
Publisher: Basel Namibia Studies Series, 2019
Nhakanomics: Harvesting Knowledge and Value for Re-generation Through Social Innovation
( Nhakanomics: ترميم المعرفة والقيم لإعادة الاصلاح من خلال الابتكار الاجتماعي )
Author: Munyaradzi Mawere, Daud Taranhike, Ronnie Lessem
The study argues that the process and substance of nhakanomics, with its pre-emphasis on the relational South, provides a robust and holistic approach to social innovation and social transformation, grounded in relational networks and ‘meshworks’. The central idea is a call to re-GENE-rate society, through local Grounding and Origination, while tapping into local-global Emergent Foundations via a newly global Emancipatory Navigation, while ultimately culminating in global-local transformative Effects in four recursive cycles of re-GENE-rating C(K)umusha, Culture, Communication, and Capital after re-Constituting Africa-the 5Cs. With a novel and radical approach, this book is an interrogation of neo-liberal economics in the Global South.
Publisher: Africa Talent Publishers, Zimbabwe, 2019
Telecommunications Law and Practice in NIGERIA: Perspectives on Consumer Protection
(قوانين وممارسات الاتصالات السلكية واللاسلكية في نيجيريا: وجهات نظر حول حماية المستهلك)
Author: Jacob Otu Enyia
Telecommunications Law and Practice in Nigeria: Perspectives on Consumer Protection is intended primarily to provide a new source of information on the theoretical and legal frameworks of telecommunication regulation in Nigeria with respect to how such legal frameworks assists in addressing the consumers’. The book covers the evolution of telecommunications across the world in addition to Nigeria, raising a variety of issues including the early organizations, regulatory regimes, the deregulation era, interconnectivity and privacy law, telecommunications and intellectual property, international trade and drafting international trade contracts, encryption technology and privacy in telecommunications.
Publisher: Malthouse Press, Nigeria, 2019
Postcolonial Automobility Car Culture in West Africa
(ثقافة السيارات في غرب أفريقيا في فترة ما بعد الاستعمار)
Author: Lindsey Green-simms
Cars promise freedom, autonomy and, above all, movement. However, they leave whole cities stuck in traffic, breathing polluted air, create deadly crashes, and dependent on vast the vast infrastructures of road networks and oil production. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) examines the paradoxes and ambivalences of automobiles through the lens of West African films, novels, plays, and poems. From the melodramas of Nollywood to the socialist realism of Ousmane Semebene, African artists have delved into the pleasures and anxieties of the road to theorize capitalist development, globalization, patriarchy, and the ethics of accumulation. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, Lindsey Green-Simms joins host Jacob Doherty to discuss how West African entrepreneurs appropriated colonial technologies, how stalled cars embody the crises of structural adjustment, and what emerges from the pages, screens, and stages of West African popular and literary culture.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2019
The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta
(جذور الصراعات العرقية في إفريقيا: السياسة والعنف في مناطق دارفور وأوروميا ودلتا تانا)
Author: Tsega Etefa
Are ethnic conflicts in Africa the product of age-old ancient hatreds? Tsega Etefa’s new book, The Origins of Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Politics and Violence in Darfur, Oromia, and the Tana Delta, provides an answer, arguing that elites mobilize their co-ethnics for political gain. To do so, Etefa analyzed the historical roots of three different cases of ethnic conflict in Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. Not only does his new book tell us why elites mobilize ethnically, Etefa also provides a series of recommendations to escape colonial legacies of identity politics.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillian, 2019
Righteous Indignation
(نقمة الصالحين)
Author: Jabulani Mzinyathi
“When I vision through the seas of oppression and the grinding poverty I write not out anger but righteous indignation.” Jabulani Mzinyathi is the child of isiNdebele- and ChiShona-speaking parents in the Midlands Province of what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He has published pieces in various journals and anthologies over the years and his maiden collection of poetry, Under The Steel Yoke, was published in 2018.
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe, 2019.
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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.
