Kings of Disaster

Kings of Disaster
Author: Simon Simonse
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1628953330

The long-awaited, revised, and illustrated edition of Simon Simonse’s study of the Rainmakers of the Nilotic Sudan marks a breakthrough in anthropological thinking on African political systems. Taking his inspiration from René Girard’s theory of consensual scapegoating, the author shows that the longstanding distinction of states and stateless societies as two fundamentally different political types does not hold. Centralized and segmentary systems only differ in the relative emphasis put on the victimary role of the king as compared with that of enemy. Kings of Disaster proposes an elegant and powerful solution to the vexed problem of regicide.

Gender, Race, and Sudan's Exile Politics

Gender, Race, and Sudan's Exile Politics
Author: Nada Mustafa Ali
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2015-07-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498500501

Gender, Race, and Sudan’s Exile Politics examines the gendered and racialized discourses and practices of the Sudanese opposition in exile through the opposition movements of the 1990s and early 2000s, and discusses the history through which these discourses evolved. The military coup that brought the National Islamic Front (NIF)—now National Congress Party (NCP)— to power in 1989 not only forced most political parties, trade unions, and activists in Sudan into either exile politics or underground activism; it also urged many of Sudan’s political forces and activists to rethink the meaning of belonging and of the “Old” Sudan. In the mid-1990s, this involved a rethinking of the relationship between religion and politics, acknowledging Sudan’s diversity, acknowledging the need to restructure Sudan’s economy and politics to ensure equal access and participation for the historically marginalized, and committing to self-determination for the people of South Sudan. The concept of the New Sudan broadly captured this rethinking. This book interrogates the relationship between women’s organizations and activisms in exile on one hand, and nationalist, transformative, and other political movements and processes on the other. It further discuses transnational coalition building across difference, including racial difference, between women’s organization seeking to transform gender relations in Sudan and South Sudan.

Writing as Material Practice

Writing as Material Practice
Author: Kathryn E. Piquette
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2013-12-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1909188263

Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

The Trans-Saharan Book Trade

The Trans-Saharan Book Trade
Author: Graziano Krätli
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2011
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9004187421

Concerned with the history of scholarly production, book markets and trans-Saharan exchanges in Muslim African (primarily western and northern Africa), as well as the creation of manuscript libraries, this book consists of a collection of twelve essays that examine these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan

Networks of Knowledge Production in Sudan
Author: Sondra Hale
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-09-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498532136

This is the first book of its kind on Sudan, and arguably one of the first in North Africa. We are part of an emerging, more cosmopolitan approach that calls for a reassessment of ideas about not only the concept of identities, but also about migration and technology, especially social media. Our essayists engage in redefinitions, the broadening of our key variables, the linking and intersecting of concepts, and the investigations of methods and ethics, and opt for an approach that is, at once, culturally specific to Sudan (one of the most fluid social landscapes in the world) and transnational. Our essays address the narrowness of studies of migration and note the almost total neglect in the broader Sudan literature of the rise of technology—mobile telephony and social media, in particular. Furthermore, our essayists address the near neglect in the Sudan literature of certain categories of people, such as youth, or certain diverse spaces, such as neighborhoods or gold mines. We have also been attempting to move away from the nearly stereotypic descriptions of Sudan to deal with topics that align Sudan with transnational issues and themes, knowledge production among them. This multidisciplinary collection of essays is the first comprehensive work to grapple explicitly with the question of knowledge production in such a diverse social landscape. We discuss the impact of current trends in information technology and contemporary forms of identity and mobility on knowledge production. These issues are pertinent for different sectors such as academia, government or business, and, as we demonstrate, reveal a myriad of possibilities for studying diverse population groups like youth, women, diaspora, or specific political contexts such as conflict or oppression.

Africanizing Knowledge

Africanizing Knowledge
Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 466
Release:
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781412816588

Nearly four decades ago, Terence Ranger questioned to what extent African history was actually African, and whether methods and concerns derived from Western historiography were really sufficient tools for researching and narrating African history. Despite a blossoming and branching out of Africanist scholarship in the last twenty years, that question is still haunting. The most prestigious locations for production of African studies are outside Africa itself, and scholars still seek a solution to this paradox. They agree that the ideal solution would be a flowering of institutions of higher learning within Africa which would draw not only Africanist scholars, but also financial resources to the continent. While the focus of this volume is on historical knowledge, the effort to make African scholarship "more African" is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The essays in this volume employ several innovative methods in an effort to study Africa on its own terms. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Africanizing African History," offers several diverse methods for bringing distinctly African modes of historical discourse to the foreground in academic historical research. Part 2, "African Creative Expression in Context," presents case studies of African art, literature, music, and poetry. It attempts to strip away the exotic or primitivist aura such topics often accumulate when presented in a foreign setting in order to illuminate the social, historical, and aesthetic contexts in which these works of art were originally produced. Part 3, "Writing about Colonialism," demonstrates that the study of imperialism in Africa remains a springboard for innovative work, which takes familiar ideas about Africa and considers them within new contexts. Part 4, "Scholars and Their Work," critically examines the process of African studies itself, including the roles of scholars in the production of knowledge about Africa. This timely and thoughtful volume will be of interest to African studies scholars and students who are concerned about the ways in which Africanist scholarship might become "more African." Toyin Falola, a leading historian of Nigeria and a distinguished Africanist, is the Frances Higginbothom Nalle Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His numerous publications include Yoruba Historiography, African Historiography, and Nationalism and African Intellectuals. Christian Jennings is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. He has contributed chapters on environmental history to the five-volume series on Africa published by Carolina Academic Press, and is co-editing a forthcoming book on historical methods.

African Languages/Langues Africaines

African Languages/Langues Africaines
Author: Various Authors
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2017-09-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351597094

Volume 1 of African Languages include articles originally published in 1975 and written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on African oral literature, the standardization of languages and education in Nigeria and a description of Shona spelling.

The Colours of the Empire

The Colours of the Empire
Author: Patrícia Ferraz de Matos
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857457632

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.