Showing papers on "African studies published in 2017"

Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging

Abstract: When one thinks of African diasporas, it is likely that their mind will automatically drift to locations such as Europe and America. But how much is known about the African diaspora in East Asia and, in particular, within China, where race is such a politically sensitive topic? Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in China and Nigeria, Mapping the New African Diaspora in China explores a new wave of African migration to South China in the context of the expansion of Sino/African trade relations and the global circulation of racial knowledge. Indeed, grassroots perspectives of China/Africa trade relations are foregrounded through the examination of daily interactions between Africans and rural-to-urban Chinese migrants in various informal trade spaces in Guangzhou. These Afro-Chinese encounters have the potential to not only help reveal the negotiated process of mutual racial learning, but also to subvert hegemonic discourses such as Sino/African friendship and white supremacy in subtle ways. However, as Lan demonstrates within this enlightening volume, the transformative power of such cross-cultural interactions is severely limited by language barrier, cultural differences, and the Chinese state’s stringent immigration control policies. This book will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of China/Africa relations, race and ethnic studies, globalization and transnational migration, and urban China studies, as well as those from other social science disciplines such as political science, international relations, urban geography, Asian Studies, African studies, sociology, development studies, and cross-cultural communication studies. It may also appeal to policymakers and non-profit organizations involved in providing services and assistance to migrant populations.

Students with disabilities’ experience in South African higher education – a synthesis of literature

Abstract: This state of the art review paper offers a synthesis of published studies on students with disabilities’ experience in South African higher education since 1994, when a democratically elected government came to office. The article presents a review of published studies describing the experiences of students with disabilities in South African higher education (SAHE) in the period 1994-2017. In order to obtain a perspective on the experiences of students with disabilities in South African higher education institutions, a synthesis of the findings and implications of South African studies relating to students with disabilities in SAHE is provided. Three aspects will be discussed namely: (a) conceptualisation of disability; (b) access, inclusion and participation in higher education; and (c) supporting mechanisms for students with disabilities. From this, challenges, areas needing further studies, lessons learnt, approaches and policy implications for policy-practitioners and institutions are suggested.

Four (African) psychologies

Abstract: In “What is African psychology the psychology of?,” Augustine Nwoye asks a question that continues to trouble those with an interest in psychology in relation to African societies. This question, i...

A "Vortex of Identities": Freemasonry, Witchcraft, and Postcolonial Homophobia

Abstract: The recent moral panic in Cameroon about a supposed proliferation of “homosexuality” is related to a special image of “the” homosexual as un Grand who submits younger persons, eager to get a job, to anal penetration, and are thus corrupting the nation. This image stems from the popular conviction that the national elite is deeply involved in secret societies like Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism. The tendency to thus relate the supposed proliferation of homosexuality in the postcolony to colonial impositions is balanced by other lines in its genealogy—for instance, the notion of “wealth medicine,” which Gunther Tessmann, the German ethnographer of the Fang, linked already in 1913 to same-sex intercourse. This complex knot of ideas and practices coming from different backgrounds can help us explore the urgent challenges that same-sex practices raise to African studies in general. The Cameroonian examples confuse current Western notions about heteronormativity, GLBTQI+ identities, and the relation between gender and sex. Taking everyday assemblages emerging from African contexts as our starting point can help not only to queer African studies, but also to Africanize queer studies. It can also help to overcome unproductive tendencies to oppose Western/colonial and local/ traditional elements. Present-day notions and practices of homosexuality and homophobia are products of long and tortuous histories at the interface of Africa and the West.

Islam and Gender in Colonial Northeast Africa

Abstract: In Islam and Gender in Colonial Northeast Africa, Silvia Bruzzi provides a social history of the colonial encounter across the Red Sea and the Mediterranean region during the life and times of Sittī ‘Alawiyya (1892-1940), the ‘Uncrowned Queen’ of Eritrea.

The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies

Abstract: This essay locates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced in the mid-2000s by Achille Mbembe and Taiye Selasi, inside a longer historiography on cosmopolitanism in Africa. Used to describe the multifarious ways that Africa is enmeshed in the world, today ‘Afropolitanism’ connects Africa’s global metropolises, transnational cultures and mobile populations under a single analytic term, signifying the radical diversity that Africa possesses now and has throughout history. This essay argues that the idea of Afropolitanism has impacted theory on Africa in two ways. First, instead of regarding pluralism as a threat to state stability, Africa’s cosmopolitan cities and zones are now thought to be harbingers of a new post-racial political future; rather than supposing that states will progressively coalesce into defined nations, as per the organic analogy, ethnically heterogeneous states are increasingly upheld as ‘modern’. Second, Afropolitanism marks a radical shift from a longer history of black emancipatory thought. Contra 20th century Pan-African and Afrocentrist endeavours to create a civilization based on the ‘African Personality’, proponents of Afropolitanism instead propose a world in which there can be no centre for Africa, no cultural integrity, only networks and f lows. Following the 1980s turn to cultural history, scholars of African cities and societies have paid increasing attention to the complex ways that Africans manufacture their identities and lives, worlds and socialities. In the 1990s, a rising interest in global connections (also known as ‘the global turn’) occurred at the same time as Africa’s topography was radically transformed by the end of the Cold War, the fall of numerous state dictatorships, and the increased mobility of people and business in and out of Africa. The concept of cosmopolitanism, used by scholars to describe these changes, coalesced a number of interrelated ideas: urbanism, pluralism, globalization and a universalism similar to Immanuel Kant’s use of the term. The ‘cosmopolitan turn’, coinciding with the new wave of optimism generated by media on Africa in the early 2000s, signalled a shift in longstanding attitudes towards the diversity of people and cultures within Africa’s states. Whereas during the era of decolonization from the 1950s–70s, scholars often looked at the numerous tribes in Africa as a risk to the nation-state’s stability, today’s scholarship on cosmopolitanism advances Africa’s pluralistic societies as vanguards of potentially postracial futures. The term Afropolitanism, which now encompasses a large subset of cosmopolitan studies, was effectively invented twice in the mid-2000s. Although scholars have typically attributed the neologism to the Ghanaian novelist Taiye Selasi’s 2005 essay ‘Bye-Bye Babar’, scholarship inside South African circles saw the term circulating earlier. In a conversation between scholar Sarah Nuttall and anthropologist Mark Gevisser in 2004, for example, Gevisser remarked that Johannesburg could be called ‘an Afropolitan city... a place where you can eat fufu or Swahili curry or pap en vleis’. This use of the term, meaning a pluralism of African cultures in one geographical space, was later expanded by theorist Achille Mbembe in a 2007 essay ‘Afropolitanism’ wherein he described Afropolitanism as ‘the presence of the elsewhere in the here’, the ‘interweaving of © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd worlds’ caused by the movement of Black and non-Black people in, out and throughout Africa. There could be no such thing, he argued, as African authenticity in a continent so connected physically and historically to other parts of the world. In this sense, Johannesburg was ‘the centre of Afropolitanism par excellence ... a metropolis built on ... multiple racial legacies’. Taiye Selasi’s use of the term, by contrast, was to name a generation of the diaspora whose parents had left Africa in the 1960s–70s and who had consequently grown up between several global metropolises, speaking multiple languages, engaging with both African and non-African cultures. Yet because she and Mbembe deployed a similar vocabulary to describe Afropolitanism as a new form of transnational ‘African modernity’, scholars have treated them as if they were in conversation, although this was not likely the case. Nevertheless, both figures created an image that scholars and artists have together found alternately provocative and objectionable: an African modernity that seeks to let go of an essential ‘Africanness’, to dissolve ‘Africa’ into the world. This essay argues two points: first, that the turn to cosmopolitanism initiated by scholars in the 1990s has, in African studies, reversed an important train of thought towards pluralism and the state. The organic analogy, which posited that states slowly coalesce from many multifarious elements into one nation (as built off the European model of feudalism to statehood), has turned around to uphold a state which, beginning as a homogenous germ, steadily grows more complex, heterogeneous and worldly. The result is that cosmopolitan societies are thought to be more politically sophisticated, a form of universalism believed to develop from the close elision of cultures. Second, the concept of Afropolitanism advanced by Mbembe and Selasi has been a radical break with a longer intellectual history of emancipatory politics in African studies. Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism, two important movements in Black politics since at least the 19th century, found their power and sustenance in a racial solidarity underpinned by a determinedly non-European epistemology – a way of seeing, being and thinking through the world that was uniquely ‘African’. In its most principled form, Afrocentrism contended that a common humanity could only be created if the Other, in this case the Black or African, was so radically Other, so uncompromisingly themselves, that engaging themwouldmean surmounting seemingly unsurmountable difference. Afropolitanism, by contrast, is in Mbembe’s words, ‘the ability to recognize one’s face in that of a foreigner... to domesticate the unfamiliar’. It imagines a future where difference is so superf luous that abject difference, the Other, breaks down entirely. It is in this sense that Afropolitanism marks a radical turn in the history of Black emancipatory thought. Cosmopolitan Africa: A Historiography to 1990 In the 1990s, the study of African cosmopolitanism grew out of, and against, the legacy of the African ‘tribe’ – politically primitive, ahistorical and self-perpetuating, determinedly local. It was assumed by early anthropologists that tribes reproduced the same social configurations from generation to generation, and that by studying them, scholars could gain insight into the elementary building blocks of human society. Famed structural-functionalist A.R. RadcliffeBrown was pioneering to argue in the 1950s that a multiracial city ought to be studied as one structural system rather than separate systems conjoined by diffusion. But in general, the possibility of studying Africa’s multiethnic communities, even cities like Nairobi or Dakar, was precluded by the myopic approach of early ethnographers who surveyed what appeared to them as bounded communities, transcending both time and change. The 1940s, however, called several of these suppositions into question. For both colonial officers and anthropologists, it became increasingly impossible to ignore the effect that the 2 of 11 The Afropolitan Idea © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd History Compass 15/2 2017:e12362, 10.1111/hic3.12362 colonial economy had on Africans’ social structures. Indirect rule, installed by figures such as Lord Lugard and Donald Cameron, had cleaved village from city, rural from urban and sequestered so-called tribes into ‘ethnic homelands’ whose migrations were tightly controlled by the colonial government. The effect was a veritable set of transformations in the socio-spatio relationships of kinship – or what anthropologists had called ‘social change’ and what colonial planners feared was ‘detribalization’. The multi-ethnic city was conceptualized by colonists not as estuaries of coexisting pluralism but as a domain in which ethnicity would gradually erode, imperilling the colonial project by transforming its exploited labourers into a unified class. It is only in more recent scholarship, since the 1990s, that colonial cities have been investigated as cosmopolitan spaces. Certainly, they were not universalist in any moral sense. But as nexuses for migrant labourers, imperial officers, families and immigrant diaspora, they were undeniably multiethnic, multiracial spaces where people constantly bridged colour lines to undermine the biopolitical order of colonial rule. For this reason, Mahmood Mamdani refers to civil law in cities (contrasted with customary law in villages) as a type of ‘settler cosmopolitanism’ – a set of legal strictures which were continuously retailored to maintain difference and control over people.With the rise of interest in the African city in the early 2000s, scholars have looked back on colonial cities and frontiers as areas for the study of pluralism. Yet it was not until the decolonization era that African pluralism took centre stage in scholarship, but then as a threat to state security. The independence era in Africa coincided with the outbreak of many civil conf licts, notably the BiafranWar in Nigeria, the Shifta war in Kenya and the campaign for Katanga’s secession in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a testament to the political-mindedness of that era’s scholars that much of their work, from the 1960s–70s, focused on the anatomy of the state. One effect was a body of theory which explored the necessity of a unified nation. Pioneering in this vein were Leo Kuper andMichael Smith’s 1969 volume Pluralism in Africa, Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth Shepsle’s Politics in Plural Societies and Crawford Young’s 1979 The

Building research capacity for African institutions: confronting the research leadership gap and lessons from African research leaders

Abstract: This study explores the meaning and competencies of ‘research leadership’ in the African context and investigates strategies for developing it. Data for the study were gathered through an online survey that targeted recipients of research grants/support from key research funders to selected African institutions. The recipients of these grants were either research leaders or team members. The study employs a mixed methodology approach with empirical data drawn from focus group discussions and online surveys of English-speaking research leaders and research teams whose research work was supported by the selected funding institutions. In line with literature of leadership styles in Africa, our results suggest that preferred research leadership style for African researchers is different in some ways, especially with its attention to the ‘human touch’. Respondents preferred ‘people/relationship orientated’, ‘task­orientated’ and ‘democratic/participative’ styles of leadership, all of which have strong elements...

The difference that ‘capitalism’ makes: on the merits and limits of critical political economy in African Studies

Abstract: SUMMARYThe goal of this Briefing is to weigh in carefully on the respective merits and limits of critical political economy perspectives in African Studies (and beyond) and to make a case for ontological and theoretical modesty. Rather than taking African capitalist societies for granted, we should unpick how particular social entities are being made.

Copper, borders and nation-building : the Kantagese factor in Zambian political and economic history

Abstract: This book is based on Enid Guene Master's thesis 'Copper, Borders and Nation-building: The Katangese Factor in Zambian Economic and Political History', runner-up in the African Studies Centre, Leiden's 2014 African Thesis Award. This annual award for Master's students encourages student research and writing on Africa and promotes the study of African cultures and societies. The Copperbelt has, for about a century, formed the economic backbone of the two countries that host it: the Republic of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Zambian and Congolese Copperbelts share long-standing economic, social and political ties, resulting in their histories being peppered with points of interconnections. Yet, there exists no integrated history of the Copperbelt. This tendency to see the Copperbelt as not one but two entities has to do with several factors, at the root of which is the Copperbelt’s distribution over two countries. This created an artificial division in the eyes of many observers, a division which, crucially, was reflected in academic research. The Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt have traditionally belonged to two distinct academic traditions, one English-speaking and the other French-speaking. As a result, there has been a tendency to overlook the actual interplay that existed between them. This interplay is what the present narrative proposes to investigate, going from pre-colonial linkages to the circumstances in which the border was set up and the patterns of migrations that the appearance of two competing and neighbouring mining centres engendered. The influence of these processes on Zambian political development will also be considered.

Performing asylum : theatre of testimony in South Africa

Abstract: This book is based on Pedzisai Maedza's Master's thesis 'Theatre of testimony: An investigation in devising asylum', winner of the African Studies Centre, Leiden's 2014 African Thesis Award. This annual award for Master's students encourages student research and writing on Africa and promotes the study of African cultures and societies. The use of testimonies in performance is enjoying increased artistic and critical popularity and has a long and rich tradition on South African stages. Both internationally and locally, emerging and established playwrights working on migration and refugee issues are seeking to incorporate the testimony of asylum seekers into their work. This necessitates a critical reflection of the influences that shape and structure the staging of these testimonies. This study argues that increased migration and the growing number of asylum seekers arriving on South African shores, has motivated at times violent interaction between host communities and the newcomers. These incidents have inspired a distinct trend of testimonial performances around the concept of asylum. This study uses narrative analysis to read examples of contemporary theatre of testimony plays that examine this phenomenon. It examines how playwright positioning informs the structuring of asylum testimonies on stage, in addition to contextualizing the ethical and moral complexities the playwright’s positionality places on their practice. Through three case studies, the study interrogates how playwright positioning informs notions of authorship, authenticity, truth, theatricality and ethics. Furthermore, it investigates the challenges that speaking for ‘self’ and speaking for the ‘other’ place on testimonial playwrights.

New World Order Neo-Colonialism: A Contextual Comparison of Contemporary China and European Colonization in Africa

Abstract: Introduction This research attempts to answer the research question of "how current Chinese engagement with Africa compares with past European colonialism of the continent?" It achieves this via a historical comparison of European colonialism, using the British and French colonial models against the ongoing Chinese engagement in Africa. Thus, a critical assessment of the aforementioned factors, leads to the logical characterization of China's engagement with Africa as neo-colonialism, devoid of the unbridled territorial control and its attendant direct political and economic control of African countries. This is not because of Chinese altruism but rather a pragmatic response to a new world order shaped by international norms and institutions that guard statehood and sovereignty. Hence, a research perspective that is important because it puts the increased Chinese attention for Africa in a proper context to demonstrate that while the rationale for foreign interest in Africa has not changed, the circumstances and modus operandi of foreign power engagement in Africa has. And in this mix, this work provides a literature review about Chinese and European engagement in Africa; theoretical and conceptual framework; method; similarities and differences in Chinese and European engagements in Africa; observations, and conclusions. Literature Review Contrary to the current media narrative about China's engagement in Africa as a recent phenomenon, China has been engagement with Africa for centuries. Hence, Power et al (2012) debunks this "presentism" narrative and argues that contemporary Sino-Africa relations are anchored on a "longer history of interaction and cooperation". They also reject the portrayal of China's engagement in Africa as a recent and random opportunistic phenomenon. In fact, China's interaction with Africa dates back to over two thousand years ago via the indirect exchange of products when Chinese officials were first sent to Africa, and the latter welcomed an African magician. Contemporary Sino-African diplomatic relations can be traced to the late 1950's with the signing of the first bilateral trade agreements between China and Egypt, Algeria, Guinea, Somali, Morocco and Sudan. This was followed up with a ten-country African tour by Zhou Enlai in 1963 and 1964 which culminated in increased Chinese economic, technical and military assistance to newly independent African countries and liberation movements (Muekalia 2012). The Bandung Conference of 1955 is viewed as the "seminal" moment" in Sino-African relations as it brought together China and newly independent African and Asian countries to establish the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in order to withstand the turbulence of the Cold War. This relationship shifted from that of equal partners to one based on power relations with the formation of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization which saw the beginning of Chinese economic aid to Africa (Achberger 2010:369). The strength of Sino-African relations proved pivotal to African support for China membership and securing the United National Security Council seat in place of Taiwan in 1971 (Chang, 2006). The volume of trade between China and Africa increased 700% in the 1990s (Servant, 2005) and currently, China is Africa's largest trading partner, surpassing traditional Western trading partners of the continent (Chen et al 2015). China's engagement with Africa has generated a polarizing binary debate among scholars and policy makers along the lines of the positive as well as the negative impact of the relationship. Oshodi (2012) terms this dichotomy as "Sino-Optimism" and "Sino-pessimism. On the "Sinopessimism" front are scholars and major Western policy actors who talk of a Chinese colonization of Africa. These analysts argue that Chinese policies in Africa are set to economically and/or politically colonise Africa. China's engagement is seen as nothing but a second scramble for Africa's resources, and an eventual colonisation (Lee 2006; Nwoke 2007). …

The African middle class(es) - in the middle of what?

Abstract: SUMMARYThis Briefing/Debate article critically engages with the middle class phenomenon, which emerged as a prominent focus in Development Studies a decade ago and has more recently also become the subject of more informed African Studies, adding necessary and more nuanced analysis.1 It critically examines the background and assumptions of the debate, pointing out the lack of class analysis, and suggests that the current focus still partly distracts from the underlying issues.

Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa: 16 turning 17

Abstract: Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa interrupts the relative silence around teenage constructions of love in South Africa. Against the backdrop of gender inequalities, HIV and violence, the book situates teenage constructions of love and romance within the wider social and cultural context underwritten by the histories of apartheid, chronic unemployment, poverty, and the endless struggle to survive. By drawing on focus group discussions with African teenage men and women, the book addresses teenage Africans as active agents, providing a more nuanced picture of their desires and their dilemmas through which sexuality and love are experienced. The chapters in the book conceptualise desiring love, material love, pure love, forced love and fearing love. It argues that love is intrinsically linked to cultural practices and material realities which mold particular formations of teenage masculinities and femininities. This book will be of interest to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in sociology, HIV, health and gender studies, development and postcolonial studies and African studies.

Diedrich Westermann and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Inter-War Era

Abstract: Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956) was a key figure in the establishment of African studies in Germany and Britain. He was a pioneer German linguist and member of the founding generation of German Africanists (Afrikanistik) who played a significant role in the field. As professor at Berlin University, the co-director of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture (IIALC) in London from 1926 and an adviser to Lord Hailey’s research team for the monumental ‘An African Survey’ (1938), he was central to the promotion of policy research in the African colonial context during the inter-war era. His own work focused on the phonetics and orthography of the Sudanic languages and the methodologies he pioneered were widely adopted in West Africa. As editor of the journals Koloniale Rundschau (Berlin) and Africa (London), with links to Rockefeller research funding, he was able, with Malinowski and J. H. Oldham, to wield considerable influence over the shape of anthropological and linguistic rese...

China's Aid to Africa: Does Friendship Really Matter?

Abstract: Although China has rapidly increased foreign aid to Africa and is now a relatively major player in the developmental assistance regime, little is still known regarding how China delivers its foreign aid, and even less about how this foreign aid actually works in the recipient countries. This book, extensively utilising Chinese sources, much of which have not been available before, examines the effectiveness and sustainability of China's foreign aid in Africa, as well as the political, economic and diplomatic factors that influence Chinese aid disbursement policies. The book argues that a nebulous notion of "friendship", however ill-defined, is a key factor in Chinese aid, something which is often overlooked by Western scholars. Through a detailed examination of both the decision-making process in Chinese aid disbursements, as well as an examination of specific case studies in West Africa, this book improves our understanding of China's foreign aid policies towards Africa. It finds that there are profound shortcomings in China's foreign aid at present which, despite the protestations of "friendship" and solidarity, undermine Beijing’s effectiveness as an actor in the developmental assistance enterprise in Africa. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of development studies, African studies, China-Africa relations and more broadly to international relations.

Addressing Sexual Violence in South Africa: ‘Gender activism in the making’

Abstract: “What would it really mean to study the world from the standpoints of children [adolescent girls] both as knowers and as actors?” asks sociologist Ann Oakley (1994, 24). To this we add the questions: What approaches, mechanisms and structures would make it possible for girls and young women, as knowers and actors, to influence social policy and social change in the context of sexual violence? To what extent might this work deepen an understanding of gender activism amongst youth? This chapter seeks to deepen an understanding of girls and young women’s political activism in relation to sexual violence by studying what we term here ‘gender activism’ and ‘in the making’ in relation to a group of 14 girls and young women from rural South Africa enrolled at a university in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The young women participated in a project, Girls Leading Change, which aimed to address sexual violence on campus. We use the term ‘activism in the making’ as a way to signal the nature of our own involvement as adult researchers, but also to problematize the public face of activism in the area of sexuality and sexual violence carried out in a mainstream institutional environment. While Girls Leading Change builds on a number of different components of community involvement in relation to sexual violence, in this chapter we focus on the ways that the young women engaged with a number of different campus-based policy makers in looking at sexual violence. In so doing, we consider the significance of gender and political activism as critical to altering the policy landscape for addressing sexual violence in institutions. As has been highlighted in numerous studies, South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world, and while absolute numbers are unreliable because of under-reporting, adolescent girls and young women are particularly at risk. Compounding the under-reporting of sexual assault is the fact that rates of prosecution are low; a 2005 study indicates that fewer than 1 per cent of cases actually result in a conviction. According to the anc

A Decade of Ethiopia: Politics, Economy and Society 2004-2016

Abstract: The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has gone through a decade of significant economic change and political contestation since 2004. The ruling EPRDF party has redefined the country as a?developmental state? and has tried to increase its presence on the African and world stage. Preceded by a new Introduction casting a broader perspective on some underlying trends, this monograph presents a chronology for 2004 to 2016, compiling the chapters on Ethiopia previously published in the 'Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara.' A list of further reading suggestions is also added

Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa

Abstract: This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the obser...

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

Abstract: This paper is a re-assesses anthropological methods and frames broad epistemological question on knowledge production and distribution. Sampling published materials, it argues that the fundamental question African scholarship faces in the African Studies is the recourse to an outdated epistemology of comparative methods meant to serve the western views of otherness. Using Anthropological Hermeneutics would help lighten problems of comparison and lead other forms of knowledge. With that background and questioning the fundamentals of the intellectual property right, the paper concludes that knowledge is to be a public good, paid by society and should be accessible to all.

(Mis)Representation among U.S. Study Abroad Programs Traveling to the African Continent: A Critical Content Analysis of a Teach Abroad Program.

Abstract: As study abroad programs continue to increase and expand the places they send students, it is important for colleges and universities to pay close attention to the depictions of the African continent in promotional materials. While existing literature in the field of tourism, social work, and African studies have analyzed images of the cultural Other in study abroad text, there is a paucity of higher education and student affairs research that utilizes postcolonial theory to analyze representations of teach abroad programs. To address this gap, this research undertakes a critical content analysis of promotional material of a teach abroad program and finds that promotional materials remain fixated on representing the African continent in a hegemonic way that reinforces white savior complex, culturalism, and the poverty porn discourse. Ultimately, we argue colleges will need to make purposeful efforts in order to achieve new visions of African countries by deconstructing mainstream stereotypes.

A Proposal for Expanding Endarkened Transnational Feminist Praxis Creating a Database of Women’s Scholarship and Activism to Promote Health in Zimbabwe

Abstract: Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women’s health activism in Zimbabwe cannot happen without this prel...

Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power, and Violence in the Black Americas

Abstract: Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power, and Violence in the Black Americas. By Caroline Shenaz Hossein. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 209pp. ISBN 9781442616240.The commentary on microfinance is polarized, with some viewing it as the solution to poverty, and others viewing it as a neo-liberal swindle that has become highly commercialized with usurious interest rates. It is therefore refreshing to find Caroline Shenaz Hossein's analysis of microfinance that offers a powerful critique but also sees some value in microfinance, offering a vision of how it is best accomplished.Hossein's book is set in the Caribbean region, particularly in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti, Grenada, and Guyana. She undertook painstaking research between 2007 to 2013, including field research plus hundreds of interviews that extended to Barbados, Panama, Canada, and the United States. No doubt, the book will be of interest to microfinance researchers and practitioners, students of the social economy and community development, to colonial and decolonizing historians, policymakers, and those interested in Caribbean socioeconomic affairs. Thoroughly researched and appropriately sub-divided into six chapters that move from the history and theory of microfinance and Black communities, to contextualizing the national case studies, to the intersection of culture and politics in microfinance, to the relations between borrowers and lenders, and finally to analyzing alternative and indigenous banking systems, Hossein's book is also an excellent resource for those teaching courses on the social economy, African studies, or Caribbean issues.In brief, Hossein's critique of what went wrong with microfinance in the Caribbean is grounded in a political analysis of the region. In that respect, her critique of microfinance differs from others in that most focus on the commercialization of microfinance (see, in particular, Dichter & Harper, 2008) or on its ineffectiveness in accomplishing its goals (for instance, Karim, 2011). Professor Hossein's critique, by comparison, focuses on how microfinance in the Caribbean has become a political tool or form of patronage. Although the analysis varies by nation, the gist of the critique-particularly in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago-is that microfinance has become a tool of a very divisive political system, the divisions often based on race but also nuanced by the additional intersections of class and gender.Rather than being a means to economic independence and greater prosperity, mainstream microfinance, as the book underscores, has become a tool of domination through which political elites extract loyalty from the poor and control them. As Hossein writes: "Opposing administrations in Trinidad have used microfinance as a form of appeasement and patronage to their party's racial base" (p. 87). This is not simply benign patronage. It is based on racial discrimination, depending on whether the party in power is predominantly of Afro or Indian origin. For example, Hossein points out that "[s]ince the 1995 shift in political power to Indo-Trinidadians, poor AfroTrinidadians have been left in the slums without access to economic resources" (p. 88). Similar racialized dynamics are true for Guyana. Moreover, violence can be used to obtain repayments: "Violence was so ingrained in the origins of these countries that structural violence in society has permeated the microbanking arena" (p. 93). In Jamaica, Hossein shows how some microfinance is controlled by gangsters or Dons, who loan at usurious rates and who can use violence if repayments are tardy. She refers to the Jamaican system of microfinance as "Big Man," a form of patronage to the poor.The most heartening feature of Politicized Microfinance is that it is not simply a critique; the book also presents a vision about how the system can operate more effectively. In the book's acknowledgements, Hossein signals her intention by dedicating the book to her Guyanese grandfather who was a micro entrepreneur and her Grenadian grandmother who was a banker and who practised traditional or non-formal banking called susu, originating in Western Africa. …

Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town: Ghetto Chameleons

Abstract: Cape Town has some of the highest figures of violent crime in the world, but how is it that young men avoid and enact physical aggression and navigate stressful and dangerous situations? Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town offers an ethnographic study of young men in Cape Town and considers how they stay safe in when growing up in post-apartheid South Africa. Breaking away from previous studies looking at structural inequality and differences, this unique book focuses instead on the practices and interactions between 47 young men, and what they do to become a "ghetto chameleon". Indeed, exploring in detail what young men do to survive conflicts and what is at stake, Lindegaard depicts how they must become flexible in who they are in order to fit in and be safe when they move between "black" or "coloured" township areas and the "white" suburbs of Cape Town. Opening the reader’s mind to the relational aspect of violence, Surviving Gangs, Violence and Racism in Cape Town will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as African Studies, Qualitative Criminology, Sociology, Gang Violence and Anthropology.