The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring

The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring
Author: Charles Villa-Vicencio
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2015-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1626161976

The hope and despair surrounding the Afro-Arab Spring in North Africa has only begun to be played out in regional and global politics. And the call for an African renaissance that followed the miraculous political transition in South Africa is, twenty years later, viewed with similar ambiguity. What is clear is that current developments in Africa, north and south, promise something markedly different from what has prevailed at any point since the dawn of the African independence movements of the 1950s and 60s. But the continent's own identity remains unresolved, posing the question whether and how its multiple and divergent experiences can be understood and perhaps woven into a basis for unity. Contributors to this volume explore whether or not events north of the Sahara and on the southern tip of Africa can be catalysts for change in other parts of the continent. Chapters assesses the nature of political resistance, revolution, and transition in North and Southern Africa, addressing critical factors--economics, culture, gender, theology--that reveal the promises and perils of African reform. Includes a foreword by former South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Geographies of Liberation

Geographies of Liberation
Author: Alex Lubin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469612887

Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary

A Muslim American Slave

A Muslim American Slave
Author: Omar Ibn Said
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2011-07-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0299249530

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Queer Times, Black Futures

Queer Times, Black Futures
Author: Kara Keeling
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814748325

Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center Black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and Black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and Black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

The Arabs & Africa

The Arabs & Africa
Author: Khair El-Din Haseeb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2012-05-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0415623952

This set re-issues 4 volumes originally published between 1985 and 1991. They Examine the historical process of social formation that gave rise to the communal consciousness of the Arab nation and determined its sense of identityPresent detailed analysis of resources in the Arab world, including population, employment, oil and water suppliesDiscuss dimensions of Afro-Arab co-operation and the future of Afro-Arab RelationsAnalyse the relations between state and society in the Arab World.

The January Children

The January Children
Author: Safia Elhillo
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0803295987

The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan's history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several of the poems speak to the late Egyptian singer Abdelhalim Hafez, who addressed many of his songs to the asmarani--an Arabic term of endearment for a brown-skinned or dark-skinned person. Elhillo explores Arabness and Africanness and the tensions generated by a hyphenated identity in those two worlds.

Afro-Fabulations

Afro-Fabulations
Author: Tavia Nyong'o
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479856274

Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960’s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong’o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

Political and Social Thought in Africa

Political and Social Thought in Africa
Author: Sharawy, Helmi
Publisher: CODESRIA
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 2869785860

The essays collected together in this book reflect the author's varied experiences in the realms of politics and social struggle; he notes that they cannot be separated from his other experiences in his country, Egypt, over the years. These experiences extend from popular culture or folklore, through the wider political world of African liberation politics, to the Committee for the Defense of National Culture. This book is like a long trip through African culture from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century. These essays will most likely provoke a lot of memories, sweet and bitter; with maybe the bitter ones as the more lasting. The author notes that it appears as if the only relationship that seems to have mattered, for a long time, for the Egyptians with the rest of Africa was the river Nile, which joins the country to ten other countries, while a vast desert stands in-between. Such separation ignores the ancient relations between Pharaonic Egypt and the rest of Africa, and the role of Egypt in supporting many liberation movements on the continent. The author has set himself some tough questions in this book: Is it legitimate today to use race to sub-divide the African continent? Can this, moreover, be simply done as if race is ahistorical or an idealistic concept of identities? Or are we going to talk about Arabism in Egypt, Libya or Maghreb as if it were an identity gained with the advent of the Arabs, implying that these were 'lands with no people' - a sort of 'No Man's Land?' Or was this a fragile space that could not confront the invading empire? Or will Arabism equate with Bantuism or negroism sometimes, and Hausa and Swahili cultures at other times? These are the types of issues that Helmi Sharawy examines in this very important book. Experiences that inform this book began with the author's first encounter in March 1956, with some African youths who were in Cairo for higher studies or as representatives of liberation movements with whom he worked as an intermediary with the Egyptian national state, which work left on him an everlasting impression.

When We Were Arabs

When We Were Arabs
Author: Massoud Hayoun
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1620974584

WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.