Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon
Author: Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2019-10-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472125249

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

Aso Ebi

Aso Ebi
Author: Okechukwu Charles Nwafor
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-05-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472128663

The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.

Filtering Histories

Filtering Histories
Author: Drew A. Thompson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472054643

Highlights the role of photography and other forms of aesthetic practice in processes of state formation and bureaucratic transition

The Rise of the African Novel

The Rise of the African Novel
Author: Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 047205368X

Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon

Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon
Author: Mark Dike DeLancey
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810873990

Cameroon is a country endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals, substantial forests, and a dynamic population. It is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. Although Cameroon has made economic progress since independence, it has not been able to change the dependent nature of its economy. The economic situation combined with the dismal record of its political history, indicate that prospects for political stability, justice, and prosperity are dimmer than they have been for most of the country's independent existence. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon has been updated to reflect advances in the study of Cameroon's history as well as to provide coverage of the years since the last edition. It relates the turbulent history of Cameroon through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Cameroon history from the earliest times to the present.

World Report 2018

World Report 2018
Author: Human Rights Watch
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 810
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1609808150

The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken in 2016 by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.

The Women Went Radical

The Women Went Radical
Author: Oladejo, Mutiat Titilope
Publisher: Book Builders
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2019-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789211791

Woman in twentieth century colonial Africa experienced a loss of power in their social-economic status. The Women Went Radical provides a narrative of radical expressions extracted from the numerous petitions written to advance and advocate the cause of Yoruba women through individual and collective action. This analyses the impact and implication of petition writing on the administration of traditional and modern governments in colonial Yorubaland. The political context accurately projects the roles of women in influencing, resisting, negotiating and counteracting policies within the political system. The research argues that petition writing is a form of politics and radicalism that is not limited to national issues but also to their manifestation from the actions of the citizens—that is ‘politics from the grassroots’.

Militant Islam

Militant Islam
Author: Stephen Vertigans
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2008-10-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134126395

Militant Islam provides a sociological framework for understanding the rise and character of recent Islamic militancy. It takes a systematic approach to the phenomenon and includes analysis of cases from around the world, comparisons with militancy in other religions, and their causes and consequences. The sociological concepts and theories examined in the book include those associated with social closure, social movements, nationalism, risk, fear and ‘de-civilising’. These are applied within three main themes; characteristics of militant Islam, multi-layered causes and the consequences of militancy, in particular Western reactions within the ‘war on terror’. Interrelationships between religious and secular behaviour, ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’, popular support and opposition are explored. Through the examination of examples from across Muslim societies and communities, the analysis challenges the popular tendency to concentrate upon ‘al-Qa’ida’ and the Middle East. This book will be of interest to students of Sociology, Political Science and International Relations, in particular those taking courses on Islam, religion, terrorism, political violence and related regional studies.