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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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JMEWS, extremely timely and important

Marcia C. Inhorn, Ph.D,  William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University is the editor of the Journal of Middle East Womens Studies (JMEWS.) She spoke with us about the journal and its unique scholarly impact.

IU PRESS/Journals: What is it about JMEWS that energizes you the most as a scholar?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS is now the major scholarly site for Middle East gender scholars across the globe. The journal publishes the work of senior feminist scholars, as well as many young scholars, who are pushing Middle East gender studies in fascinating new directions. The new work in this area is extremely timely and important, especially given events in the Middle Eastern region during the past decade and, most notably, during the past year.

IU PRESS/Journals: Why do you think JMEWS is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make? 
 

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS highlights the importance of Middle Eastern women throughout history and in the contemporary period. In addition, JMEWS is the only journal that actively welcomes contributions on Middle Eastern masculinities and sexualities. So much is changing in the Middle Eastern region, in terms of gender, sexuality, politics, social media, and the like. The gender studies scholars who publish in JMEWS are capturing these transformations in very nuanced fashion. The journal offers its readers a wide spectrum of issues to consider, and is truly eye-opening for those who are unfamiliar with the Middle East region.

IU PRESS/Journals: What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Marcia Inhorn: For the past 25 years, I have been following the gender impacts of infertility and the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), in the Middle Eastern region. I have explored the transformative effects of these technologies on women’s lives, as they search for solutions to their childlessness. In addition, I have explored the impacts of the newest assisted reproductive technologies to overcome male infertility, a condition that is a highly prevalent but hidden across the region. Men’s engagement with these technologies is the theme of my new book, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton UP, 2012), which explores the dynamic transformation of masculinity in conjunction with these new technologies.  The book is a humanizing portrayal of the joys and sorrows of ordinary Middle Eastern men, as they engage in assisted reproduction with the women they love. It debunks many stereotypes of “hegemonic” masculinities in the Middle East, as brought to us by both Western media and some scholars.

IU PRESS/Journals: How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

Marcia Inhorn: At the current historical moment, there is no world region more important than the Middle East. Readers of JMEWS will realize that the Middle Eastern region is not monolithic in its history, languages, religions, cultures, and many other important social attributes.The transformations continuously occurring in Middle Eastern women’s and men’s lives are important, and are part and parcel of the revolutionary protests being enacted across the region today.

IU PRESS/Journals: Who do you hope will read the articles in JMEWS?

Marcia Inhorn: Scholars in Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Islamic Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Religious Studies, and History. Educated lay readers interested in empirically based knowledge about Middle Eastern gender.

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 the journal?

Marcia Inhorn: JMEWS has a fantastic new website, which provides visitors with excellent entrée into the journal, its editorial board, its authors, and its essays. Find it here: www.jmews.org.

Marcia also has a website: http://www.marciainhorn.com.

Jewish women and gender studies

Conversation with Deborah Greniman about the journal Nashim.

Why do you think Nashim is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?

When the idea of creating a journal of Jewish women’s and gender studies first occurred to me, my first thought was that this was such an obvious thing that such a journal must already exist. I checked, and it didn’t. We are still the only print journal in the field.

With our themed issues (an idea that came, if I recall correctly, from Shulamit Reinharz), we are creating important basic collections of articles in many areas relating to Judaism, Jews and gender – collections that can be used in course work or to help frame approaches to researching a particular area. Feminist and gender studies mandate an interdisciplinary approach, and we’ve leveraged that to create useful bodies of material in areas as diverse as spirituality, women in the economy, reproductive politics, book lore, poetry, the visual arts, sexuality, and halakhah. Our collections on Yemenite and Iranian Jewish women shed light on unique cultural worlds and on issues like migration and acculturation.

What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Before the advent of feminist studies, Jewish studies was by and large a men’s club, and even the few brilliant women who managed to enter the field found themselves almost exclusively studying the activities and writings of men. Feminist studies in Judaism broadens the field immensely, from the point of view not only of the subject matter but also of the perspectives brought to bear on it. As the leading focused scholarly organ in this field, we insist that the articles we publish reflect the use of rigorous feminist analytic methods and be well grounded in Jewish knowledge. Our goal is to create a useful body of knowledge, for academics in many fields and for Jewish life beyond the academic world.

We take pride in the integration of regular features on Jewish feminist art into our scholarly corpus. We hope thereby to expand the ways of thinking about and looking at the cultural and social issues raised in our pages. We believe deeply in the interaction of scholarship, art, and life, and in the mission of feminist studies not only to broaden the knowledge base, but to open minds, enrich our culture, and create a better world.

How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

If you’re in any field of the social sciences or the humanities, Nashim has probably published something in that field. Conversely, when you find an article in your field, you’ll probably find next to it an article bringing the perspective of another discipline to a related subject. Scholars need discipline to ground their work, but that doesn’t mean hacking the world of knowledge into disciplinary pieces.

*Deborah Greniman is the managing editor of Nashim.

Serious feminist scholarship in religious studies

 

 

Interview with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Why do you think JFSR is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?

In the mid 1980s when Prof. Judith Plaskow and I founded the JFSR as a peer-reviewed journal, established theological journals were not interested in publishing intellectual feminist work and feminist journals were not very much interested in serious feminist scholarship in Religious Studies and Theology. JFSR has filled that gap while also changing the field toward recognizing feminist work more broadly. Because of JFSR, feminist scholarship in religion is always visible on library shelves and online. The journal also remains the central cultivator of feminist conversations in diverse scholarly and praxis arenas. Because of our long history, we also serve as an archive, conveying the richness of feminist scholarship in religion to the next generation of scholars and activists.

From the beginning we invited critical contributions from feminists in different religions and global religious contexts as well as critical reflection on feminist practices. We invite not only scholarly contributions but also knowledge and reports of feminist arguments and praxis in different religions around the world. Thus the journal is not beholden to a specific academic discipline or religious community. JFSR’s conversation spans the disciplines and religious life around the globe. We hope to make diverse feminist scholarship available to American and international audiences.

The journal publishes the work of feminist scholars in the academy as well as teachers and activists. It understands itself as a forum for discussion and dialogue between wo/men from different religious and diverse feminist perspectives. We look for contributions that employ, not only gender critical- but also a race, class, and colonial critical-perspectives. We believe we are accountable not only to the academy but also to wo/men in religious communities around the world. We thereby hope to engender a critical constructive discussion about religion not only among feminist intellectuals but also among the wider public.

What influence or impact do you hope that your research has on the world and culture?

Since religion and culture are intertwined, critical feminist scholarship in religion seeks to change people’s mindsets internalized in and through cultural customs, religious education and preaching. It does so not only by critically analyzing malestream texts and scholarship but also by articulating religious visions and actions for social-cultural-religious change. In articles, roundtables, and special sections the JFSR attempts to open up new ways of thinking and new scholarship on religion. At the same time it seeks to give wo/men the intellectual tools to question established religious authorities that deny full citizenship to wo/men in religion.

How would it benefit scholars of different disciplines to read the work of scholars outside their field of expertise?

Since the JFSR is interdisciplinary we hope that feminist scholars in other disciplines will seriously engage the work done in feminist studies in religion. Millions of wo/men around the world define their identity and work in terms of their religion. Feminist scholars in other disciplines can no longer overlook this. At a time when religion is in the news every day, feminist scholarship may no longer ignore the work done by their feminist colleagues in religion. Any serious discussion on religion in classrooms across the country needs to seriously engage the research of scholars in religion. The JFSR seeks to be a bridge between feminist scholars in other disciplines and those in religious and theological studies.

Victorian Studies, a leader in multi-disciplinary approach

Contributed by Ivan Kreilkamp, editor, Victorian Studies

When Victorian Studies was founded in the 1950s, its interdisciplinary approach to the study of a particular period, publishing the work of scholars of literature, the fine arts, history, the history of science, political thought, among other topics -- was groundbreaking and influential, part of the birth of what became Cultural Studies. And although interdisciplinarity long ago become a buzzword and a familiar method in the academy, Victorian Studies remains a leader in offering an intellectual and institutional space for a creative, imaginative, and rigorous inter- and multi-disciplinary approach to the study of nineteenth-century Britain. Simply to scan the contents of a given issue's book reviews always sparks new lines of insight and connection for me, as work on poetry, popular science, utilitarian philosophical thought, media history, the Crimean War, Pre-Raphaelite painting, working-class ballads, music history, and so on, lies cheek by jowl. I was trained as a scholar of literature with a strong interest in cultural studies and other forms of interdisciplinary work, but editing Victorian Studies (and therefore reading each issue very carefully!) over the past decade has vastly enriched my understanding of the ways any given event, art work, cultural production, historical fact, or piece of discourse will variously signify within, to to the side of, and across traditional disciplinary categories.  Even as I retain a healthy respect for the specificity of disciplinary training and the value of focused expertise -- sometimes it does take a scholar of poetry to explicate a sonnet most resourcefully, or a historian to offer the deepest analysis of a cultural turning point -- I love the way Victorian Studies invites and generates opportunities for surprising and mind-expanding affiliations, crossing-points, conversations.

I'm especially proud of the book forums we occasionally organize, in the place of a more typical single review, for work of particular interest and importance. We recently asked, for example, a social historian, a political theorist, and a literary scholar to discuss Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain by Elaine Hadley, a literary scholar; and a historian of science, a historian who specializes in science and visual culture, and a philosophically-inclined literary critic to evaluate Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, two prominent historians of science. In such forums, the Victorian Studies ideal of cross-disciplinary exchange is especially visible, as a given book forum -- including a response by the book's authors -- always exceeds the sum of its parts by showing how variously a given methodology, argument, or interpretation will communicate in different disciplinary contexts.

A similar buzz is generated by our annual issues containing papers originally delivered at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference. For these, we typically ask two or three senior scholars from different fields and disciplines to choose three papers from the conference that they found especially strong and interesting, embodying emergent ideas and issues. We then publish these papers as a group along with a response from the senior scholar; the results have often been memorable, including major assessments of the state of the field by such eminent figures as Mary Poovey (English, NYU), James Vernon (History, UC Berkeley), and Tim Barringer (Art History, Yale). Part of what makes these forums so lively is their mixture of established and newer voices; it's always exciting to see a rising graduate student or new assistant professor step forward to make a compelling statement in this context, in conversation with some of the best-known scholars in his or her field (and elsewhere).

With the help of IUP, Victorian Studies is extraordinarily well-produced, with vivid cover art drawn from the contents of a given issue and, often, beautifully illuminating illustrations to articles. I like to think that the respect we pay to the visual, and to the production values of our print (and online) publication more generally, is one seemingly small but crucial element in our recognition of the richness and multivalence of scholarship and of culture itself. The Victorians certainly knew that no word, image, object, event, or statement contains or confers its own meaning in isolation: a rich interpretation or analysis of any aspect of art, thought, or culture needs to consider it in the widest context, as part of an endlessly complex totality.

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.

Jadaliyya: Middle East Masculinity Studies

NEW TEXTS OUT, PAUL AMAR

“Middle East Masculinity Studies: Discourses of ‘Men in Crisis,’ Industries of Gender in Revolution,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7.3 (Fall 2011): 36-71.

Jadaliyya: What made you write this article?

Paul Amar: I began drafting this article two years ago in order to seek ways out of the impasse in which the study of sexuality in the Middle East had become trapped. I was asking myself, how do we highlight aspects of coloniality, geopolitics, and power in the study of sexuality, without, on the one hand, reducing the social subjects of sexuality to the dupes, tools, or incitements of Empire or, on the other hand, celebrating “sexual minority identities” as the harbingers of emancipation or modernization? I felt both kinds of reductivism mirrored rather than challenged the legacies of domination, impoverishing the complexity of social history, the contentious nature of politics, and the creativity of culture. READ MORE.

Textual Cultures 6.1

Figure 3, page 60, Textual Cultures 6.1 (2011)*

 

Textual Cultures 6.1 (2011) is out, in the mail, and online. I confess that it was for me a “special issue”. Tom Tanselle’s touching tribute to Jo Ann Boydston, who was one of the Society for Textual Scholarship’s early moving forces and a voice of inclusion, and David Greetham’s remembrance of Trevor Howard-Hill, a stalwart defender of all things bibliographic and a fellow editor, are unique additions to this issue. Beyond their exemplary scholarly contributions, Boydston and Howard-Hill gave selflessly to colleagues and to our field. Once you read Tom’s and David’s essays you will understand why they appear at the beginning of the issue.

What might draw some criticism, the diversity of the essays in this issue, especially in light of the number devoted to W. W. Greg (4.2 [2009]), is one of the things that made 6.1 such a delight to edit. Donald McKenzie, Nicolaus Maniacutius, Max Beerbohm, Henry Lawson, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Ole Worm, and Thomas Percy made informative and wonderfully cross-referential issue-fellows in a remarkably “visual” collection of essays that depended on the careful scholarship of Peter Schillingsburg, Marie Thérèse Champagne, Sarah Davison, Paul Eggert, Nicolas Valazza, and Robert W. Rix. An essential part of this issue depended especially on the skills of our compositor, Tony Brewer, who made text and image flow together in magical ways — a syntagm one seldom sees in journals devoted to philology and textuality. READ MORE.

Wayne Storey, Editor, Textual Cultures

*Figure 3. The title-page of Beerbohm's copy of Yeats, Poems (1909), reprinted in Sotheby, Illustrated Catalogues ofthe Library and Literary Manuscripts of the Late Sir Max Beerbohm: Removed from Rapallo (1960a), 71.

Anthropomorphic Taxidermy and Fantasies about Imperial Expansion

Fig. 1. Photograph of Walter Potter’s “The Kittens’ Wedding” (1890) from Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious Taxidermy, by Pat Morris. Ascot: MPM, 2008. Used by permission of Pat Morris.

Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010) includes essays by Conor Creaney, Michelle Weinroth, and Aaron Worth. Creaney explores the anthropomorphic taxidermy of Walter Potter — think kitten weddings and elaborate bird funerals, all staged with actual animal carcasses — using Potter’s disquieting tableaux as a way of thinking through the fantasies of representation at work in Victorian fiction, most notably in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Weinroth reconsiders William Morris’s Kelmscott Press—founded to refashion Victorian typography and to create beautiful books on the model of medieval manuscripts — in order to question the truism that political activism need be incompatible with beautiful art oriented toward the past. She argues for an understanding of Morris's work at the Kelmscott Press as a new form of socialist praxis rather than, as it’s usually seen, as a break with radicalism. Worth examines the role of information technologies in Victorian imaginings of imperial systems, using the fiction of H. G. Wells (with its heliographs, transport cylinders, and kineto-tele-photographs) as a test case for the anxieties and fantasies about imperial expansion that media helped enable.

In a review forum organized around James Belich's Replenishing the Earth, Dror Wahrman, Peter J. Cain, and Saree Makdisi each consider the implications of Belich’s account of the Settler Revolution — the process that brought huge numbers of Europeans to non-Europeans lands in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — and also of the model for interdisciplinary history that Belich’s book represents. In his response to these critical analyses, Belich addresses both the centrality of the nineteenth century to any critical narrative of modernity and the new models for constructing such narratives afforded by digital technologies. This issue also features 34 book reviews, including Matt Houlbrook on Anna Clark’s Desire: A History of European Sexuality, Leslie A. Hall on Charles Upchurch’s Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform, and Anne Janowitz on Mike Sanders’ The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History.

For more information and to subscribe to Victorian Studies visit our IUP/Journals site on JSTOR.