Research Africa News: August 25th, 2021

Research Africa News: August 25th, 2021

Writing Ourselves into Existence with the Collective for Black Iranians
Forthcoming in MER issue 299 “Race—Legacies and Challenges” Beeta Baghoolizadeh, Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda 06, 29, 2021

Six Black and Afro-Iranians based in Canada, Germany, France and the United States launched the Collective for Black Iranians in August 2020 out of the necessity to be seen, to be heard and to be understood. As of May 2021, the Collective for Black Iranians has developed a lively audience of over 20,000 followers from all over the world.

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Tigray conflict calls for African solutions for African challenges Sunday,
By Macharia Kamau & Martin Kimani ,August 01, 2021

The maxim ‘African solutions for African challenges’ is a profound assertion of independence and responsibility. Its application to preventing and resolving violent conflicts in Africa is key to our independence and prosperity.

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Rethinking Whiteness in Turkey Through the AKP’s Foreign Policy in Africa South of the Sahara
By Ezgi Güner In: 299 (Summer 2021)

There is a new investment in whiteness in contemporary Turkey, and it is not by those who have traditionally been identified as “White Turks,” but by their long-standing critics, the so-called Black Turks. In the 1990s, whiteness and Blackness entered the Turkish political lexicon as racialized metaphors of privilege and subordination.

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One Island, But Different Worlds: The History Of Haiti And The Dominican Republic Dominican Republic.
By Haiti Parker Diakite Parker Diakite,Jun 28, 2021

Haiti and the Dominican Republic (DR) may occupy the same island of Hispaniola on the Caribbean Sea with nearly the same populations hovering around 10 million people, but the similarities between the two stop there. “Culturally, we’re different,” said Frantz G, who was born and raised in Haiti for 15 years until moving to the United States and settling in the Midwest with his family. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that we were colonized by the French and the Dominican Republic was colonized by the Spanish. We speak more of a French creole in Haiti and people from the Dominican Republic speak Spanish.”.

Read the research article here.

NEW BOOKS ‫كتب جديدة

Democracy and the Discourse on Relevance Within the Academic Profession at Makerere University.
[الديمقراطية وخطابات التنوع داخل المهنة الأكاديمية في جامعة ماكيريري]
Author: Andrea Kronstad Felde, Tor Halvorsen, Anja Myrtveit

Drawing on interviews with over ninety academics at Makerere University, from deans to doctoral students, the authors provide first-hand accounts of the pressures and problems the reforms have created. Disempowered, overworked and under-resourced, many academics are forced to take on consultancy work to make ends meet. The evidence presented here stands in stark in contrast to the successes claimed by the university. However, as the authors also show, local resistance to the neoliberal model is rising, as academics begin to collaborate to regain control over what knowledge is considered relevant, and wrestle with deepening democracy.
Publisher: African Minds Publishers, South Africa, 2021.

Embodied Engineering Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
[ نقاشات حول الهندسة المجسدة، والعمل المشترك بين الرجال والنساء، والأمن الغذائي والمذاق
والطعم في مالي القرن العشرين]
Author: Laura Ann Twagira

By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies. Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women’s embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2021.

Towards Sustainable Peace in Ghana: Essays in Memory of Francis Kojo Azuimah
[نحو سلام مستدام في غانا: مقالات في ذكرى فرانسيس كوجو أزويما]
Author (Editor): Stephen Bugu Kendie

This book was conceived as a testament to the life and times of Mr. Francis Kojo Azuimah – the first Executive Secretary of the National Peace Council (NPC) of Ghana. The late Executive Secretary worked tirelessly not only to pre-empt and manage conflicts, but also drew attention of policy makers to the underlying causes of conflict. Consequently, in all the peace-building efforts that the NPC engaged in during his tenure, the fundamental issues of poverty, inequality and justice were driving concerns.
Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Ghana, 2021.

Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
[عسكرة الزواج: التقاليد الزوجية لجنود غرب إفريقيا في الإمبراطورية الفرنسية الحديثة]
Author: Sarah J. Zimmerman

Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire. These conjugal behaviors became military marital traditions that normalized the intimate manifestation of colonial power in social reproduction across the empire. Soldiers’ cross-colonial and interracial households formed at the intersection of race and sexuality outside the colonizer/colonized binary. Militarizing Marriage uses contemporary feminist scholarship on militarism and violence to portray how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule.
Publisher: Ohio University Press, 2020.

Birthing Black Mothers
[تجربة الولادة عند الأمهات من أصول أفريقية]
Author: Jennifer C. Nash

In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category. “Mothering while Black” has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death—especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence—Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers’ self-representations and public performances of motherhood—including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama—that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood..
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2021.

The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary: Photography between France and Africa 1900-1939
[ اللوحة الفوتوغرافية والخيال الاستعماري: تاريخ التصوير الفوتوغرافي بين فرنسا وأفريقيا 1900-1939]
Author: Simon Dell

French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century..
Publisher: Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020.

This Body is an Empty Vessel
[هذا الجسم الهاوي مثل سفينة فارغة]
Author: Beaton Galafa

Here is poetry that is personal yet spreading to have its tentacles struggling to grip into other equally slippery facets of life. In brief, Beaton writes his poetry to assuage his personal feelings yet in so doing he ends up massaging our shared experience – as Malawians, Africans and just as humans. Beaton has observed, learnt, and is growing in the Malawian poetry space. Thus, he also comes to the stage bearing the Malawian influence on his poetry.
Publisher: Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Zimbabwe, 2021.

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