African Miracle, African Mirage

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821445820
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis African Miracle, African Mirage by : Abou B. Bamba

Download or read book African Miracle, African Mirage written by Abou B. Bamba and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed. In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

Independent Africa

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253066662
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Independent Africa by : Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong

Download or read book Independent Africa written by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Independent Africa explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of independence through the joint projects of nation-building, economic development, and international relations. Drawing on the political careers of four heads of states: Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sâekou Tourâe of Guinea, Lâeopold Sâedar Senghor, and Julius Kambarage Nyerere of Tanzania, Independent Africa engages four major themes: what does it mean to construct an African nation-state and what should an African nation-state look like; how does one grow a tropical economy emerging from European colonialism; how to explore an indigenous model of economic development, a "third way," in the context of a Cold War that had divided the world into two camps; and how to leverage internal resources and external opportunities to diversify agricultural economics and industrialize. Combining aspects of history, economics, and political science, Independent Africa examines the important connections between the first generation of African leaders, and the shared ideas that informed their endeavors at nation-building and worldmaking"--

A Dam for Africa

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253059984
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis A Dam for Africa by : Stephan F. Miescher

Download or read book A Dam for Africa written by Stephan F. Miescher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its construction in the early 1960s, the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam across the Volta River has exemplified the possibilities and challenges of development in Ghana. Drawing upon a wealth of sources, A Dam for Africa investigates contrasting stories about how this dam has transformed a West African nation, while providing a model for other African countries. The massive Akosombo Dam is the keystone of the Volta River Project that includes a large manmade lake 250 miles long, the VALCO aluminum smelter, new cities and towns, a deep-sea harbor, and an electrical grid. On the local level, Akosombo has meant access to electricity for people in urban and industrial areas across southern Ghana. For others, Akosombo inflicted tremendous social and environmental costs. The dam altered the ecology of the Lower Volta, displaced 80,000 people in the Volta Basin, and affected the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians. In A Dam for Africa, Stephan Miescher explores four intersecting narratives: Ghanaian debates and aspirations about modernization in the context of decolonization and Cold War; international efforts of the US aluminum industry to benefit from Akosombo through cheap electricity for their VALCO smelter; local stories of upheaval and devastation in resettlement towns; and a nation-wide quest toward electrification and energy justice during times of economic crises, droughts, and climate change.

Sixty Years of Service in Africa

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000982068
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Sixty Years of Service in Africa by : Julius A. Amin

Download or read book Sixty Years of Service in Africa written by Julius A. Amin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on previously unused primary sources obtained from both sides of the Atlantic, this study provides a more fundamental, consistent, and balanced source-based assessment of the role of the U.S. Peace Corps across its entire existence in Africa. The study sheds light on a new and intriguing historical perspective of the Peace Corps’ meaning and significance. Though the main trust is Cameroon, the study offers a window to understanding Peace Corps performance in all of Africa, and the larger global community. It examines Volunteers’ service in countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, and Guinea, showing how the agency transitioned from a Cold War agency to the Post-Cold War era, while asking important questions about the continuous relevance of Peace Corps in Africa. In addressing the topic, the book goes beyond the Peace Corps and delves into America’s "Achilles heels," which was the culture of anti-black racism, showing how it impacted U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era. The book interrogates modernization theories showing how those ideas shaped the creation of the Peace Corps, but ultimately contributed to the agency’s problems. The book questions the Peace Corps’ effectiveness as a development organization and much more. Yet for all the agency’s problems, the Peace Corps served as a rite of passage for returned Volunteers to make everlasting contributions to American life and society. This book contributes to modern African and American studies, and to diplomatic history.

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821447688
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa by : Saheed Aderinto

Download or read book Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa written by Saheed Aderinto and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa broadens the historiography of animal studies by putting a diverse array of species (dogs, horses, livestock, and wildlife) into a single analytical framework for understanding colonialism in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. From his study of animals with unequal political, economic, social, and intellectual capabilities, Aderinto establishes that the core dichotomies of human colonial subjecthood—indispensable yet disposable, good and bad, violent but peaceful, saintly and lawless—were also embedded in the identities of Nigeria’s animal inhabitants. If class, religion, ethnicity, location, and attitude toward imperialism determined the pattern of relations between human Nigerians and the colonial government, then species, habitat, material value, threat, and biological and psychological characteristics (among other traits) shaped imperial perspectives on animal Nigerians. Conceptually sophisticated and intellectually engaging, Aderinto’s thesis challenges readers to rethink what constitutes history and to recognize that human agency and narrative are not the only makers of the past.

The Art of Life in South Africa

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821445901
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Art of Life in South Africa by : Daniel Magaziner

Download or read book The Art of Life in South Africa written by Daniel Magaziner and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives. Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group’s efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school. There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now clichéd experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.

Africa since 1940

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108480683
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Africa since 1940 by : Frederick Cooper

Download or read book Africa since 1940 written by Frederick Cooper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of decolonisation and independence, this text helps students understand how Africa's global position has emerged since 1940.

Diplomacy and Capitalism

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 081229856X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Diplomacy and Capitalism by : Christopher R.W. Dietrich

Download or read book Diplomacy and Capitalism written by Christopher R.W. Dietrich and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time as modern capitalism became an engine of progress and a source of inequality, the United States rose to global power. Hence diplomacy and the forces of capitalism have continually evolved together and shaped each other at different levels of international, national, and local transformations. Diplomacy and Capitalism focuses on the crucial questions of wealth and power in the United States and the world in the twentieth century. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies on the history of international political economy and its array of state and non-state actors, the volume's authors analyze how material interests and foreign relations shaped each other. How did the rising and then disproportionate power of the United States and the actions of corporations, creditors, diplomats, and soldiers shape the twentieth-century world? How did officials in the United States and other nations understand the relationship between foreign investment and the state? How did people outside of the United States respond to and shape American diplomacy and political-economic policy? In detailed discussions of the exchanges and entanglements of capitalism and diplomacy, the authors answer these crucial questions. In doing so, they excavate how different combinations of material interest, geopolitical rivalry, and ideology helped create the world we live in today. The book thus analyzes competing and shared visions of international capitalism and U.S. diplomatic influence in chapters that bring the book's readers from the dawn of the twentieth century to its end, from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Contributors: Abou Bamba, Giulia Crisanti, Christopher R. W. Dietrich, Max Paul Friedman, Joseph Fronczak, Alec Hickmott, Jennifer M. Miller, Alanna O'Malley, Nicole Sackley, Jayita Sarkar, Erum Sattar, Jason Scott Smith.

The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030511065
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa by : Véronique Dimier

Download or read book The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa written by Véronique Dimier and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together a range of case studies by both established and early career scholars to consider the nexus between business and development in post-colonial Africa. A number of contributors examine the involvement of European companies (most notably those of former colonial powers) in development in various African states at the end of empire and in the early post-colonial era. They explore how businesses were not just challenged by the new international landscape but benefited from the opportunities it offered, particularly those provided by development aid. Other contributors focus on the development agencies of the departing colonial powers to consider how far these served to promote the interests of European companies. Together these case studies constitute an important contribution to our understanding of both business and development in post-colonial Africa, redressing an imbalance in existing histories of both business and development which focus predominantly on the colonial period. This volume breaks new ground as one of the very first to bring the study of foreign companies and development aid into the same frame of analysis

Convening Black Intimacy

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 082144784X
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Convening Black Intimacy by : Natasha Erlank

Download or read book Convening Black Intimacy written by Natasha Erlank and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality. Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity. In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.

Acholi Intellectuals

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821442376
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Acholi Intellectuals by : Patrick William Otim

Download or read book Acholi Intellectuals written by Patrick William Otim and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick William Otim argues that the Acholi people of northern Uganda, who helped Europeans spread colonial rule and Christianity, were far more politically savvy than previously understood.

The Politics of Disease Control

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446916
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Disease Control by : Mari K. Webel

Download or read book The Politics of Disease Control written by Mari K. Webel and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of epidemic illness and political change, The Politics of Disease Control focuses on epidemics of sleeping sickness (human African trypanosomiasis) around Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika in the early twentieth century as well as the colonial public health programs designed to control them. Mari K. Webel prioritizes local histories of populations in the Great Lakes region to put the successes and failures of a widely used colonial public health intervention—the sleeping sickness camp—into dialogue with African strategies to mitigate illness and death in the past. Webel draws case studies from colonial Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda to frame her arguments within a zone of vigorous mobility and exchange in eastern Africa, where African states engaged with the Belgian, British, and German empires. Situating sleeping sickness control within African intellectual worlds and political dynamics, The Politics of Disease Control connects responses to sleeping sickness with experiences of historical epidemics such as plague, cholera, and smallpox, demonstrating important continuities before and after colonial incursion. African strategies to mitigate disease, Webel shows, fundamentally shaped colonial disease prevention programs in a crucial moment of political and social change.

Ambivalent

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446886
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Ambivalent by : Patricia Hayes

Download or read book Ambivalent written by Patricia Hayes and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Going beyond photography as an isolated medium to engage larger questions and interlocking forms of expression and historical analysis, Ambivalent gathers a new generation of scholars based on the continent to offer an expansive frame for thinking about questions of photography and visibility in Africa. The volume presents African relationships with photography—and with visibility more generally—in ways that engage and disrupt the easy categories and genres that have characterized the field to date. Contributors pose new questions concerning the instability of the identity photograph in South Africa; ethnographic photographs as potential history; humanitarian discourse from the perspective of photographic survivors of atrocity photojournalism; the nuanced passage from studio to screen in postcolonial digital portraiture; and the burgeoning visual activism in West Africa. As the contributors show, photography is itself a historical subject: it involves arrangement, financing, posture, positioning, and other kinds of work that are otherwise invisible. By moving us outside the frame of the photograph itself, by refusing to accept the photograph as the last word, this book makes photography an engaging and important subject of historical investigation. Ambivalent‘s contributors bring photography into conversation with orality, travel writing, ritual, psychoanalysis, and politics, with new approaches to questions of race, time, and postcolonial and decolonial histories. Contributors: George Emeka Agbo, Isabelle de Rezende, Jung Ran Forte, Ingrid Masondo, Phindi Mnyaka, Okechukwu Nwafor, Vilho Shigwedha, Napandulwe Shiweda, Drew Thompson

Internal Frontiers

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 082144610X
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Internal Frontiers by : Jon Soske

Download or read book Internal Frontiers written by Jon Soske and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious new history of the antiapartheid struggle, Jon Soske places India and the Indian diaspora at the center of the African National Congress’s development of an inclusive philosophy of nationalism. In so doing, Soske combines intellectual, political, religious, urban, and gender history to tell a story that is global in reach while remaining grounded in the everyday materiality of life under apartheid. Even as Indian independence provided black South African intellectuals with new models of conceptualizing sovereignty, debates over the place of the Indian diaspora in Africa (the “also-colonized other”) forced a reconsideration of the nation’s internal and external boundaries. In response to the traumas of Partition and the 1949 Durban Riots, a group of thinkers in the ANC, centered in the Indian Ocean city of Durban and led by ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli, developed a new philosophy of nationhood that affirmed South Africa’s simultaneously heterogeneous and fundamentally African character. Internal Frontiers is a major contribution to postcolonial and Indian Ocean studies and charts new ways of writing about African nationalism.

Seeing Like a Citizen

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446894
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Seeing Like a Citizen by : Kara Moskowitz

Download or read book Seeing Like a Citizen written by Kara Moskowitz and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world. Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

Emergent Masculinities

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446851
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Emergent Masculinities by : Ndubueze L. Mbah

Download or read book Emergent Masculinities written by Ndubueze L. Mbah and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Emergent Masculinities, Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through their local ideologies and practices. The gendered struggles over the means of social reproduction conditioned the Bight of Biafra region’s participation in Atlantic systems of production and exchange, and defined the demography of the region’s forced diaspora. By looking at male and female constructions of masculinity and sexuality as major indexes of social change, Emergent Masculinities transforms our understanding of the role of gender in precolonial Africa and fills a major gap in our knowledge of a broader set of theoretical and comparative issues linked to the slave trade and the African diaspora.

A Country of Defiance

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Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821426028
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis A Country of Defiance by : Mark W. Deets

Download or read book A Country of Defiance written by Mark W. Deets and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal. This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of counter-mapping below that of the separatist leaders like Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor and Mamadou “Nkrumah” Sané. The Casamance conflict began on December 26, 1982. After an oath-taking ceremony in a sacred forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, hundreds of separatists from the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) marched into the town to remove the Senegalese flag in front of the regional governor’s office and replace it with a white flag. The marchers were met by gendarmes who quickly found themselves outnumbered. Government surveillance, arrests, and interrogations followed into the next year, when gendarmes went to the sacred forest to stop another MFDC meeting. This time, the separatists greeted the gendarmes with a burst of violence that left four dead, their bodies mutilated. Senegalese security responded with force, driving the separatists—armed only with improvised rifles, bows and arrows, and machetes—into the forest. The Casamance conflict continues to the present day, so far having left more than five thousand dead, four hundred killed or maimed by land mines, and another eight hundred thousand living in a state of insecurity, with limited possibility for economic development. Ordinary Casamançais—on the Casamance River, in the rice fields, in the forests, in the schools, and in the sports stadiums—have demonstrated a diversity of opinions about the separatist project. Whether by the Senegalese state or by the separatists, these ordinary Casamançais have refused to be mapped. They have made the Casamance “a country of defiance.”