Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa

Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa
Author: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 286978578X

In this book the author examines the current state of postcolonial Africa with a focus on the "liberation predicament" and the crisis of epistemological, cultural, economic, and political dependence created by colonialism and coloniality.

Different Shades of Green

Different Shades of Green
Author: Byron Caminero-Santangelo
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2014-07-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813936071

Engaging important discussions about social conflict, environmental change, and imperialism in Africa, Different Shades of Green points to legacies of African environmental writing, often neglected as a result of critical perspectives shaped by dominant Western conceptions of nature and environmentalism. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework employing postcolonial studies, political ecology, environmental history, and writing by African environmental activists, Byron Caminero-Santangelo emphasizes connections within African environmental literature, highlighting how African writers have challenged unjust, ecologically destructive forms of imperial development and resource extraction. Different Shades of Green also brings into dialogue a wide range of African creative writing—including works by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, Nuruddin Farah, Wangari Maathai, and Ken Saro-Wiwa—in order to explore vexing questions for those involved in the struggle for environmental justice, in the study of political ecology, and in the environmental humanities, urging continued imaginative thinking in effecting a more equitable, sustain¬able future in Africa.

The Dragonfly Sea

The Dragonfly Sea
Author: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Publisher: September Publishing
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2021-09-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1912836491

'One of the most unforgettable books I have read in the last few years... What a writer! What a thinker! What a woman!' Fiammetta Rocco From the award-winning author of Dust comes a magical, sea-saturated, coming-of-age novel that transports readers from Kenya to China and Turkey. On an island in the Lamu Archipelago lives a solitary, stubborn child called Ayaana and her mother, Munira. When a sailor, Muhidin, enters their lives, the child finds something she has never had before: a father. But as Ayaana grows into adulthood, forces of nature and history begin to reshape her life, leading her to distant countries and fraught choices. Selected as a descendant of long-ago Chinese shipwrecked sailors Ayaana is sent to study in China. Leaving her resourceful single mother, she is forced to grow up fast. Whether it's the scarred captain of the Chinese shipping container that transports Ayaana or the son of Turkish shipping magnate who trades in refugees, Owuor never loses a profound sense of empathy for her characters. She evokes a fascinating kind of beauty in this dangerous, chaotic world and its ever-shifting oceans and trade. Told with a glorious lyricism, The Dragonfly Sea is a transcendent story of love and adventure, and of the inexorable need for shelter in a dangerous world. 'One of Africa's most exciting voices ... The Dragonfly Sea is a continent-hopping novel of epic proportions.' Refinery29 'In its omnivorous interest in the world, The Dragonfly Sea is a paean to both cultural diffusion and difference . . . as much as [the novel] traces the globe, it also depicts an internal pilgrimage, its heroine in rose attar a broken saint.' New York Times 'Owuor continues to break ground among contemporary African writers.' Vanity Fair

China's Second Continent

China's Second Continent
Author: Howard W. French
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307946657

A New York Times Notable Book Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future. One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

When Sex Threatened the State

When Sex Threatened the State
Author: Saheed Aderinto
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252096843

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, When Sex Threatened the State illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria. As Saheed Aderinto shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's "civilizing mission". He details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, he reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike. The first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, When Sex Threatened the State combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.

Being Colonized

Being Colonized
Author: Jan Vansina
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299236439

What was it like to be colonized by foreigners? Highlighting a region in central Congo, in the center of sub-Saharan Africa, Being Colonized places Africans at the heart of the story. In a richly textured history that will appeal to general readers and students as well as to scholars, the distinguished historian Jan Vansina offers not just accounts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, but the varied voices of a colonized people. Vansina uncovers the history revealed in local news, customs, gossip, and even dreams, as related by African villagers through archival documents, material culture, and oral interviews. Vansina’s case study of the colonial experience is the realm of Kuba, a kingdom in Congo about the size of New Jersey—and two-thirds the size of its colonial master, Belgium. The experience of its inhabitants is the story of colonialism, from its earliest manifestations to its tumultuous end. What happened in Kuba happened to varying degrees throughout Africa and other colonized regions: racism, economic exploitation, indirect rule, Christian conversion, modernization, disease and healing, and transformations in gender relations. The Kuba, like others, took their own active part in history, responding to the changes and calamities that colonization set in motion. Vansina follows the region’s inhabitants from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, when a new elite emerged on the eve of Congo’s dramatic passage to independence.

Political Parties in Africa

Political Parties in Africa
Author: Sebastian Elischer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-09-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107033462

This book examines the effects of ethnicity on party politics in ten African countries. Sebastian Elischer finds that five party types exist: the mono-ethnic, the ethnic alliance, the catch-all, the programmatic, and the personalistic party. He uses these party types to show that the African political landscape is considerably more diverse than conventionally assumed.

Tracing memory

Tracing memory
Author: C. Faïk-Nzuji Madiya
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1772823651

This book contributes to our knowledge and understanding of African religious objects and opens new avenues of research in the field of African art. Artists themselves, both African and non-African will find inspiration in the union of beauty and meaning displayed in these signs. Similarly, those working in the fields of semantics and semiology will be able to draw upon the conceptual fields constituted by the signs which speak of a vision of the world unique to African peoples and of the universal principals that this vision binds together in numerous ways.

Poverty Knowledge in South Africa

Poverty Knowledge in South Africa
Author: Grace Davie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2015-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521198755

Poverty is South Africa's greatest challenge. But what is 'poverty'? How can it be measured? And how can it be reduced if not eliminated? In South Africa, human science knowledge about the cost of living grew out of colonialism, industrialization, apartheid and civil resistance campaigns, which makes this knowledge far from neutral or apolitical. South Africans have used the Poverty Datum Line (PDL), Gini coefficients and other poverty thresholds to petition the state, to chip away at the pillars of white supremacy, and, more recently, to criticize the postapartheid government's failures to deliver on some of its promises. Rather than promoting one particular policy solution, this book argues that poverty knowledge teaches us about the dynamics of historical change, the power of racism in white settler societies, and the role of grassroots protest movements in shaping state policies and scientific categories. Readers will gain new perspectives on today's debates about social welfare, redistribution and human rights, and will ultimately find reasons to rethink conventional approaches to advocacy.