Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Everyday Life in Postwar Sierra Leone

Africa Today 58.2, Special Issue: Everyday Life in Postwar Sierra Leone
Guest Editors: Aisha Fofana Ibrahim, Susan Shepler

Most scholarly observers of postwar societies focus at the level of the state, security apparatus, or legislative changes, or they evaluate the success of reconstruction programming. In contrast, with a focus on everyday life in postwar Sierra Leone, the essays in this special issue focus on changes at the level of people’s lived experiences, where the authors believe reconciliation and social reconstruction really take place. The central problematic of the essays is creativity in the formation of new identities and cultures and the remaking of gender, generational relationships, and urbanization. The essays in this issue interrogate the changes wrought by war in totality and examine the emergence of new cultural forms that challenge political, social, economic, and religious discourses and practices in postwar Sierra Leone.  They examine, on the one hand, the seemingly contradictory processes shaped by fissures and breaks, and on the other hand, the continuity that accompanies social life. The topics range from the tactics local Civil Society Organizations are using to cope with funding shortages as international flows dry up, to changes in the identity of people with disabilities, to food as a locus for memory of the war and in discourses of corruption and survival. A pair of articles discuss the phenomenon of okada (motorcycle taxi) drivers, a set of young men, assumed by many to be ex-combatants, navigating new livelihoods and new social identities in postwar Sierra Leone. The final article assesses the state of the so-called “youth crisis” ten years after the end of the war.  These essays provide multiple perspectives on social transformations in postwar Sierra Leone, acknowledging the shifting social and political landscape in which people draw on multiple discursive and material resources to make their everyday lives, and in the process, to remake their society. 

Memory studies and Gender studies link insights

JMEWS 8.1, Special Issue: Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes

While memory studies have long excluded the Arab Middle East, many Arab countries have recently started to come to terms with their violent pasts. This special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, entitled “Gendered Memory in the Middle East and North Africa: Cultural Norms, Social Practices, and Transnational Regimes,” presents five case studies from Lebanon, Morocco, and Iraqi Kurdistan, where spaces have opened up for the production of alternative or counter forms of remembering. The papers brought together in this issue tie in with two different fields of research—memory studies and gender studies—linking theoretical insights from both fields to gain a deeper understanding of the ongoing processes of societal and political change in the Middle East and North Africa. The papers explore the tensions and interactions between different forms of memory politics. They seek to answer the question: To what degree did officially controlled efforts to process primary experiences, historiography, public images, and debates into a unified and simplified make-up of narrative, iconic, and ritual elements catered to the wider audience change over time? Introduced and edited by Bettina Dennerlein and Sonja Hegasy, this special issue addresses the broad spectrum of rituals and material manifestations of memory culture, which are a form of representation that gradually changes social orders, particularly in situations of accelerated transformation. Iraq, Lebanon and—the countries dealt with in research articles by Bettina Dennerlein, Susan Slyomovics, Karin Mlodoch, Andrea Fischer-Tahir, and Sune Haugbolle—provide strong examples of how political change is mediated through competing views of the past that always also interpret the present and constitute and prescribe models for the future.

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The Lens of Black Camera

Michael T. Martin is the editor of the Black Camera: An International Film Journal. He is a Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and an adjunct professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He is the Director of the Black Film Center/Archive also at IU. Michael spoke to us about the value of black film studies and his enthusiasm for the journal Black Camera.  

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: What is it about black film studies that energizes you the most as a scholar?

MICHAEL T. MARTIN: That it is a lens—one among several—to gauge longstanding assumption s and changing perceptions about race in popular culture, as well as in society at large.
That it is engaging, instructive and provocative, mirroring life as it disrupts it.

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: Why do you think Black Camera is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?
 
MICHAEL T. MARTIN: Black Camera is the only scholarly journal devoted to the study of black filmmaking in the African diaspora and hence provides a platform for the comparative study of cinematic forms, traditions, genres, and practices unlike any other journal in the field.

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?
 
MICHAEL T. MARTIN: A testament to Black Camera’s influence is that it was selected by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) as the runner-up for the “2010 Best Journal Award." Our essays, interviews, manifestoes and programmatic statements, and archival and research notes are increasingly referenced by scholars, media professionals, researchers, and cineastes around the world. Moreover, selections of the published essays are increasingly being adopted for teaching.

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?
 
MICHAEL T. MARTIN: The benefits of interdisciplinary studies have been supported by numerous studies and by the significant increase of interdisciplinary research and academic programs, especially but not only in the social sciences and humanities. Today, the study of especially advanced societies and their interactions with ethnic, religious, diasporic, and racial formations is best understood within interdisciplinary frameworks and models. This is especially the case in world affairs during a period of renewed migration and globalization.

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: Who do you hope will read the articles in Black Camera?
 
MICHAEL T. MARTIN: Media professionals, scholar/researchers, teachers, students, and the general public.

IU PRESS/JOURNALS: Is there anything else you would like to say to students in your area of research that would entice them to explore the articles in Black Camera?
 
MICHAEL T. MARTIN: Reading about black film is at once entertaining and informative, illuminating this complex art form and its take on the world we live and imagine.

Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet: An Evening with Transition

50th Anniversary Event at the New Museum, NYC

Thu, Dec 8, 2011, 7:00 PM, FREE

Transition is a unique forum for fresh perspectives on global issues, literature and art, cultures and people, with an emphasis on Africa and the Diaspora. Founded in 1961, in Uganda, by the late Rajat Neogy, Transition’s current series carries on the original’s tough-minded, far-reaching criticism, both cultural and political. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, editors, and contributors will consider the potential of this radical Black periodical by reflecting on its past with an evening of readings and music.

Diverse voices of emerging African Scholars: ACPR 1.2

ACPR Volume 1 Issue 2 is a special issue showcasing the works of African-based scholars. It is unique not only for its rich and diverse voices of young and emerging African scholars who directly experience the everyday African realities but also for their refreshing perspectives on how old African ways of making peace at the inter-personal and communal levels can provide real lessons for addressing some of the conflicts we face today in the continent.

The essays in this issue were presented in Dakar, Senegal, in December 2009 at the “Peacemaking in West Africa: Historical Methods and Modern Applications” conference, a part of the Peace Initiative in West Africa project of the West African Research Association (WARA). The conference brought together young scholars from Africa (especially across West Africa), Europe, and America and provided a unique opportunity for American and European scholars and policy experts to hear authentic African intellectual and scholarly voices; it also provided promising young scholars in Africa with an opportunity to make their mark on Western intellectual and policy debates on peace and conflict in Africa.

It is this spirit of making African voices on African issues heard beyond Africa that fostered the strong collaboration between Johns Hopkins University Professor Emeritus I. William Zartman, Co-Academic Coordinator of the WARA conference in Dakar, and several young emerging scholars based in Africa that resulted in this issue, and ACPR is honored to have Professor Zartman serve as guest editor of it.
Each of the articles included in the issue address traditional methods of peacemaking rooted in the rich and ancient cultures of the peoples of West Africa while also bringing unique perspectives to the conversation. The essays by Ken Ahorsu and Robert Ame, Tanto Richard Ndi, Henry Kam Kah, Moses Aluaigba, and David Udofia describe the peacemaking activities of senior councils among the Ewe in Ghana, the Bagam, and Bamenyam in Cameroon, the Cross River peoples in Nigeria and Cameroon, and the Tiv and Ibibio regions of Nigeria, respectively. The two-part paper by Felicia Ohwovoriole and Oluwaseum Foluso Phillips addresses micro and meso level marital conflicts among the Urhobo and Yoruba peoples of Nigeria. Three other papers examine present-day national level conflicts where traditional peacemaking practices are relevant. Kim Mahling Clark, an American-based Africanist, addresses Senegal’s secessionist revolt in Casamance, and Ogu Sunny Enemaku provides an illuminating analysis of Nigeria’s handing of the conflicts associated with public health policies to eradicate the avian influenza. Finally, Kehinde Bolaji’s paper examines the ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework.

ACPR Volume 1 Issue 2 will be live on our website mid November.

Fifty Years • Transition celebrates its storied history

 


How is it possible to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a magazine that has spanned three countries, two continents, and several long stretches of silence? Transition 106 provides many answers. Rather than telling a seamless story about the journey from Africa to the Diaspora, this issue has called upon generations of remarkable contributors to define what the magazine has meant to them. The diversity of responses is astonishing: Henry Finder describes it as “the internationalization of the African mind,” Ilan Stavans fancifully dubs it “the Jewish journal of blackness,” and for Wole Soyinka it has been nothing short of a “universal mission.” If there shall be “no birth without miscegination,” as founder Rajat Neogy memorably declared, there shall be no remembrance without it either.

The other half of this celebratory issue is devoted to Uganda, Transition's birthplace. It returns less to pay homage to the past than to imagine the future. Elizabeth Palchik Allen introduces exciting work from David Kaiza, Okello Ogwang, Richard Ssebaggala, and many others, all of whom explore their country’s “postcolonial identity” and call into question the easy coupling of those words.

Transition came into being in 1961, in the midst of independence movements and breaks with colonial rule across the African continent. What was needed then was a forum for intellectual debate and cultural exchange about this simultaneously ancient and emerging continent. A half-century later, this forum is still vital to our understanding of the richness and complexity of the African world, both within the continent’s borders and beyond. This has never been an easy journal to produce because the ideas contained in it are so fast-moving and so alive. But we look forward to the challenge for at least another fifty years and remain steadfast in carrying out its original mission: to provide a space for the exchange of all manner of thinking on the far-reaching African world.
—HENRY LOUIS GATES

Read more about Transition’s history here: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine

INSIDE THE ISSUE

Fifty Years • Transition celebrates its storied history  (Side A) 

Featuring

“A Literature Which Can Stand by Itself” 

A year after its launch in Uganda, Rajat Neogy’s Transition is already causing category confusion: “Could you tell us something about the racial composition of the writers who appear in this journal?” Our founding editor defends ambitious ambiguity.

 More than a Magazine

Paul Theroux takes us to Kampala, “small and green,” and between the pages of a “clumsily designed, poorly financed” magazine published by a boy barely a man. Soon enough, Chinua Achebe, Milton Obote, and the CIA are all involved.  

Spaces in Between

Henry Finder on Transition’s global ambulation.

Arrival

Long-time contributor Ilan Stavans credits Transition with setting him on the path towards cultural criticism. He calls Transition a “Jewish journal of blackness.” What? Let him explain.

Plus:
Wole Soyinka, Michael Adams, Jeffrey D. Brown, George Dillon Slater, Barbara Lapcek, F. Abiola Irele, Dayo Olopade, Michael C. Vazquez, Rene Belance translated by Adrianne M. LaFrance, Jack Hamilton, Onwubiko Agozino, Manning Marable, Tolu Ogunlesi, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Ali Mazrui

Reflections from Contemporary Uganda • A selection of writing, artwork, and photography (Side B)

Featuring

Yea, Let Us Also Praise Famous Men!

Many forces conspired to end Transition’s tumultuous tenure in Africa. But as Okello Ogwang reflects upon the incredible promise of the revolutionary period, he wonders whether or not the magazine’s relocation is yet another example of brain drain.

Settling the Buganda Question

This isn’t the first time Uganda’s most powerful precolonial monarchy has presided over our pages. Fifty years later, the question of its status in the modern-day state is far from settled. Frederick Golooba-Mutebi calls for a national conversation.

Straight Talk on the Gay Question in Uganda
The Western world roiled when a member of Uganda’s parliament proposed to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, and now the bill is off the table (at least for now). Richard Ssebaggala gives us the inside story, while delivering some tough love to the current crop of gay rights activists in Uganda.

But Why, Father?

For half a century, the African Writers Series was the publisher of record when it came to African literature (whatever that means). But did the quality of the writing usually meet the mark? Or was Wole Soyinka right when he called the imprint an “orange ghetto”? Growing up in the shadow of the AWS, David Kaiza tells us why the next generation of writers is less concerned with salvaging black pride than with the craft of fiction itself.

Plus:
Elizabeth Palchik Allen, Susan Kiguli, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Angelo Izama, Rodney Muhumuza, Edward Echwalu, Doreen Baingana

TRANSITION 106 will be released in October. Subscribe NOW to begin your subscription with this important anniversary issue. Visit our website at http://jstor.org/r/iupress.

Print single issues may be ordered directly from IU Press by calling customer service at 812-855-8817 (toll-free USA) or 800-842-6796 (outside USA).

A New Journal About Black Men

Despite the growth of black studies over the last few decades, no academic journal has sought to look across the full range of the contemporary lives and experiences of black men.

That is the thinking behind an ambitious new periodical, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men. The new journal is set to debut in March, as a twice yearly publication from Indiana University Press. Developments in modern American life, and in the lives of black men around the world, make Spectrum timely, says one of its two editors, Judson L. Jeffries, a professor of African American and African studies at the Ohio State University.   READ MORE.

 

Asian African Literatures

Research in African Literatures Volume 42 Number 3, Asian African Literatures, Special Guest Editor, Gaurav Desai

Citing the long history of the presence of peoples from the Indian sub-continent in Africa, the National Museums of Kenya sponsored, in 2000, a special exhibit on the "Asian African Heritage."  This special issue of Research in African Literatures follows the lead of this exhibition by bringing together new essays by some of the leading scholars who have written on Asian African literatures in East and South Africa. The articles engage both with writers who are now considered canonical, such as M.G. Vassanji from Tanzania and Ahmed Essop from South Africa, as well as newer voices that have emerged over the past decade. A significant emphasis in the volume is on women writers who have traditionally been marginalized in such discussions. The volume is also interested in extending the discussion of Asians in Africa to include a consideration of Asian slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony which has, of late, received attention in the writings of Rayda Jacobs and Ishtiyaq Shukri. The editor’s introduction includes a genealogy of Asian African literary activity in the first half of the twentieth century as well as a bibliography of literary works by Asian African writers that will be of interest to readers new to the subject. Also included is an e-conversation between the guest editor, Gaurav Desai, and the award winning writer M.G. Vassanji.

Published nearly forty years after the world witnessed the mass expulsion of Asians by Idi Amin from Uganda, and a political context in which the Indian Ocean is increasingly seen to have become a center stage for international maritime policy, this special issue not only critically evaluates the historical and cultural legacies of Asians in East and South Africa, but also asks pertinent questions about citizenship, nationalism and diaspora.

Reworking Race and Labor

John Trumpbour, guest editor of “Reworking Race and Labor” (Race/Ethnicity 4.2), is research director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. For this special issue, he has assembled essays that address the challenges of race and labor from a global as well as an American perspective and show how race mattered historically and still matters in the world of labor.

The classic piece, one of the distinguishing features of Race/Ethnicity and one that provides some grounding and familiarity for readers, is from Caste, Class and Race (1948) by the Trinidad-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox. Included as well are essays that fall into three parts: a focus on race matters in the rural world of work; an interview with Bill Fletcher, a long-time labor leader and former president of TransAfrica; and a historical and sociological analysis of African-American political, labor-market, and cultural interventions.

New Delhi-based economist Jayati Ghosh’s “Fear of Foreigners: Recession and Racism in Europe” is an overview of developments in Italy and the EU, and University of Calabria sociologist Alessandra Corrado’s “Clandestini in the Orange Towns” examines social structure and migration in Calabria’s countryside and Mediterranean Europe. Latin Americanist Aviva Chomsky reports on and provides an analysis of the US-Mexican border in “Today’s Deportees.”

San José State University historian Margo McBane takes up a critical moment in labor and race relations in Southern California in “Whitening a California Citrus Company Town.” Sharit K. Bhowmik, dean of the School of Management and Labor Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Studies in Mumbai, examines the persistence of bonded labor in India in “Ethnicity and Isolation: Marginalization of Tea Plantation Workers.”

In addition, Trumpbour interviews Bill Fletcher, long-time activist and the author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Towards Social Justice.

The last third of the issue tries to make sense of the African-American labor experience. Independent scholar Susan Roth Breitzer explores what is sometimes called Black Nativism: African-American antipathy to immigrants in “Race, Immigration, and Contested Americanness: Black Nativism and the American Labor Movement 1880-1930.” 

In “Black Professionals in Racialized and Community-Oriented Occupations,” University of Connecticut sociologist Maya Beasley argues that African-American professionals remain heavily concentrated in racialized service-sector jobs of modest remuneration. Finally, Binghamton University sociology student Matthew Birkhold delivers a cultural materialist exploration of the rise of hip hop in “ ‘If You Don’t Move Your Feet Then I don’t Eat’: Hip Hop and the Demand for Black Labor.”

SUBSCRIBE at our website.

 

Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film

Black Camera Vol. 2, No. 2, Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video provides a collection of essays that assesses the way some black filmmakers have used the camera to disrupt representations of normative sexualities and Western ideals of eroticism. Contributing scholars include Greg Thomas, Terry Rowden, L.H. Stallings, Samuel Park, Marlo D. David, Matt Richardson, Babacar M’Baye, and Oliver Bartlet.  These critics engage the work of filmmakers Djibril Diop Mambéty, Bill Gunn, Kathleen Collins, Rodney Evans, Cheryl Dunye, Tina Mabry, and Joseph Gaye Ramaka, as well as subjects such as black women's ecstasy and eroticism, black masculinity in gay porn, documentary filmmaking and sexuality, visual aesthetics and black eroticism, queer interracial desire, and eroticism and modernity in African cinema. In addition to critical essays, the issue also has an interview conducted with black lesbian filmmaker Tina Mabry, and a poster section with commentary and reviews on recent films and book.

BLACK CAMERA: Call for Papers

Precious and the Novel Push/Fall 2012

Afrosurrealism in Film/Video/Fall 2013

For details on submitting to these special issues see more on our blog at this page: http://iupjournalsblog.iupress.org/inscribe_journal/2010/11/black-camera-call-for-papers.html.