Research Africa News: April 1, 2020
A Place for Indigenous Languages in African Fiction
By Adipo Sidang, March 7th 2020
African mother tongue languages are increasingly being abandoned, with sub-Saharan. Africa being one of the regions with the most endangered languages. But the solution will not come from simply promulgating policy. The “African society” must hold conversations with itself and overhaul its value system, because language is culture, and culture is empty without its set of values and truths.
Read the details in this link here.
Introducing ‘African Arguments- Debating Ideas’
By Alex Dewaal on MARCH 16, 2020
Alex de Waal (Director at the World Peace Foundation and editor at African Arguments) introduces the ethos of Debating Ideas – the latest addition to the African Arguments website. Welcome to African Arguments—Debating Ideas. Our vision to publish writing that is engaged – and when needed, enraged – from the African continent, and by those in intellectual and moral solidarity with Africans. We aim to provide a forum for debate and controversy. We will pick up on the issues of the day; we will use the titles in the African Arguments book series as the basis for discussion; and we will seek to set an agenda for the debates of tomorrow.
Read the rest of the story here.
The desperate final days of a domestic worker in Lebanon
By Timour Azhari 24 Mar 2020
Beirut, Lebanon – On the morning of March 13, Faustina Tay sent a final desperate message to an activist group she had contacted about the abuse she was suffering at the hands of her Lebanese employers. “God please help me,” the 23-year-old Ghanaian domestic worker wrote. About 18 hours later, she was found dead.
Read the details in this link.
Colonial-era treaties are to blame for the unresolved dispute over Ethiopia’s dam
The Conversation: March 25, 2020
Disputes over the filling and operation of Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have, once again, threatened security in North-East Africa. The dam – a huge project on one of the River Nile’s main tributaries, the Blue Nile in Ethiopia – is designed to generate 6,000 megawatts of electricity. Its reservoir can hold more than 70 billion cubic metres of water. That’s nearly equal to half of the Nile’s annual flow. Filling the immense reservoir will diminish the flow of the Nile.
Read the details in this link.
Why black Americans are moving to Africa
By Princess Jones, March 28, 2020
Monique John wasn’t sure what to expect when she stepped off the plane in her new home: the West African nation of Liberia. “It was very rundown looking,” the Brooklyn-born 28-year-old recalled of her first glimpse of the capital, Monrovia, nearly three years ago. “But my feeling as I was walking along the city’s main streets was a sense of excitement . . . it felt almost like an out-of-body experience to finally be in Africa.” John is one of a number of African Americans moving to the Motherland, some inspired by the recent “Year of Return” movement initiated by Ghana, 400 years after the first Africans were brought in chains to Jamestown, Va. Last year, Ghana gave citizenship to 126 people of African descent, many of them Americans.
Read the details in this link.
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
Shaping the African Savannah: From Capitalist Frontier to Arid Eden in Namibia
[صناعة السافانا الأفريقية: من تخومات الرأسمالية إلى أقطام عدن في ناميبيا]
Author: Michael Bollig
The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an ‘Arid Eden’ in recent literature, as one of Africa’s most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a ‘last frontier’ by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia’s Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this ‘Arid Eden’ came into being, how this ‘last frontier’ was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
The Challenge of African Potentials: Conviviality, Informality and Futurity
[تحديات إفريقيا: العيش المشترك ، المجالات غير الرسمية والمسقبل]
Author (Editor): Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, Motoji Matsuda
This collection of articles is based on presentations and discussions at the 2018 African Potentials Forum, held in Accra, Ghana. This forum was a part of the African Potentials Project, which aims to clarify the latent problem-solving abilities, ways of thinking, and institutions that have been created, accumulated, unified, and deployed in the everyday experiences of Africans. The notion of Africa’s latent power/potential is not related to romanticisation of the traditional knowledge of African society and its institutions as fixed, essentialised ‘magic wands’. This notion also raises objections against political dogmas that seek to smoke out and eliminate thought and values originating in Western modernity. The keyword of the Accra Forum was futurity. Africa’s future is laden with possibilities, latent power, and potential. It is bright and hopeful but, simultaneously, bleak and thought-provoking. For nascent democracies and economically challenged communities, the value of this potential lies not in its static qualities but in how these qualities can be harnessed and translated into beneficial practical outcomes. As a concept, ‘potential’ connotes a time to come; a futurity that is full of known and unknown possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2020.
Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention
[قطاع موبيوس ملك الإمبراطورية: أصداء التاريخ في أزمتي الهجرة و الاعتقال في إيطاليا]
Author: Stephanie Malia Hom
Italy’s current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom‘s new book Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state’s historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today’s refugee crisis. What is at stake in Empire’s Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy’s most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of “colonialism lite.” But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy’s colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village.
Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Hollywood and Africa: Recycling the ‘Dark Continent’ Myth, 1908-2020
[هوليوود وأفريقيا: إعادة صناعة أسطورة “القارة المظلمة” ، 1908-2020]
Author: Okaka Opio Dokotum
This book is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the ‘colonial mastertext’ of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the term’s development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of Hollywood–Africa film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave Hollywood–Africa phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate — and even critique — these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywood’s whitewashing of African history.
Publisher: NISC (Pty) Ltd, South Africa, 2020.
Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
[في رفقة مسرحية السود: الحركة الابداعية في المهجر الافريقي في باكورة اسبانيا الحديثة]
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
This book analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States.
Publisher: Penn State University Press, 2019.
Crossroads of Dreams: A Poetry Anthology
[مفترق طرق الأحلام: مختارات شعرية]
Auther (s):Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla, MD Mbutoh
Crossroads of Dreams is a steamy potpourri of poetry by Franklin Agogho, Jude A. Fonchenalla and M.D. Mbutoh which redefine representations of African youth through the prisms of politics, emigration and the enduring threat of underdevelopment. How would one explain the persistence of poverty and oppression in Africa amidst the superabundance of natural and human resources? In their search for answers, the poets not only chastise but also to point to a verdant and promising future – free of corruption, greed, violence and neo-colonialism. Other themes covered in the anthology include gender, identity and family ties. Animated by three distinctive styles, the eighty-eight poems in this volume will surely enrage, provoke laughter, sorrow, disgust but also hope, courage and visions of a promising Africa in all its splendour and tribulations.
Publisher: Spears Media Press, Cameroon, 2020.
——– ———— ———–
Research Africa (research_africa-editor@duke.edu) welcomes submissions of books, events, funding opportunities, and more to be included in the next edition.
