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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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Middle East Sexualities

JMEWS Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2011, Middle East Sexualities

This special issue of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies presents work representative of new studies of sexuality in the Middle East and highlights the fact that gender is an inescapable part of such studies. Introduced and edited by Dina al-Kassim and Lara Deeb, the issue includes research articles by Paul Amar, Pardis Mahdavi & Christine Sargent, and Jared McCormick, and a piece by Ghassan Makarem that bridges activist and scholarly writing to narrate the rise of HELEM, a Lebanese lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights organization. Amar’s article maps the discourses of masculininty studies in the Middle East, and tracks the ways that international human rights discourse has given rise to new instrumentalities of the security state. Mahdavi and Sargent draw on ethnographic research in the United Arab Emirates to provide a critique of global rhetoric on human trafficking and an analysis of the ways in which the assumptions of that rhetoric are taken up by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) directed to assist trafficked women, particularly in the context of the United Arab Emirates. Finally, McCormick provides an ethnographic investigation into the figure of the bear in Lebanon and Syria in order to analyze the ways in which hypermasculinity is deployed by various actors in relation to a growing gay tourism industry.  The issue also includes book reviews of recent works that have emerged in the field and collectively demonstrate the growing importance of sexuality studies.

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.

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Field Notes from the September 11 Moment

Race/Ethnicity 4.3–SPECIAL ISSUE

Race/Ethnicity 4.3 focuses on the impact of the decade following September 11, 2001 from the perspectives of Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian communities. Guest editor, Deepa Iyer, is the Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT). Given that the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 is occurring this year, this issue, entitled Field Notes from the September 11 Moment, presents a collection of first-person narratives from activists representing the Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian communities, as well as academic thought pieces about the range of national security and civil liberties issues that our country has been grappling with over the past decade.

The classic piece for this issue is Homeland Insecurities: Racial Violence the Day after September 11 by Muneer Ahmad, and serves to provide context for what follows. Activist Linda Sarsour recounts the intersection of personal choices and community need in Reflections of a Brooklyn-based Arab American Activist. Vijay Prashad’s The Day Our Probation Ended asks readers to consider the broader implications of imperialism. In Welcome Mat and Spiked Gate: Two Stories of Immigrants in the United States, Sayu Bhojwani urges a course correction in the face of immigrant backlash. Sabrina Alimahomed’s Generation Islam: Arab American Muslims and Racial Politics after September 11 draws on research and interviews with over sixty young adult Muslims living in Los Angeles, California. “Just Don’t Act Muslim:” Reflections from a Queens-based Community Organizer” by Annetta Seecharran describes how a community organization had to shift into crisis-mode post-September 11. Sue Veres Royal from U.S. In The World contributed an article about the “us vs. them” mentality of the United States in Fear, Rhetoric and the “Other.”  Soniya Munshi writes about the challenges faced by domestic violence survivors in Multiplicities of Violence: Responses to September 11 from South Asian Women’s Organizations. Amardeep Singh, the co-founder of the Sikh Coalition, writes of his journey towards activism in The Accidental Activist. Subhash Kateel writes about his personal response to September 11, and explores its impact on community members and activists in The Best of Times and Worst of Times ... in South Asian America. Azadeh Shahshahani shares Reflections on the Occasion of the Tenth Anniversary of September 11, which highlights the need for education about rights among immigrant communities. Monami Maulik’s Our Movement is for the Long Haul: Ten Years of DRUM’s Community Organizing by Working-Class South Asian Migrants provides a case-study in organizing success. Finally, Valarie Kaur describes her road-trip odyssey in Emerging from the Shadow of September 11.

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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.

 

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.”

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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.

Israel and International Humanitarian Law

In addition to other articles Israel Studies, 16.2 (fall 2011) has two special sections which should serve as important sources for scholars and students.

The first, Israel and International Humanitarian Law is especially pertinent to issues raised regarding the rules of engagement with hostile populations and in war zones. Amichai Cohen and Stuart A. Cohen focus on the growing influence within Israeli political and public life of several institutions, governmental and non-governmental, whose respect for international law is based on their perception of the intrinsic legitimacy of that corpus and examine the influence exerted by the IDF’s International Law Branch, especially with reference to targeted killings. Gerald M. Steinberg examines the influence of NGO activity in the political conflict, and on Israeli foreign and security policy in particular. Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen examines questions pertaining to whether Israel has a right to self-defense in Gaza or in the West Bank?, what legal regimes should apply in Gaza and in the West Bank? She discusses the differences and similarities of the legal status of these two territories.

The second, The Kibbutz, focuses on new perspectives marking the first century since the establishment kibbutz. Eliezer Ben-Rafael maintains that renewal has helped many kibbutzim from a sudden threat of economic and demographic catastrophe. At the same time, kibbutzim today represent a society at risk – not so much because of a threatening environment, but due to their dependence on themselves and their members. Raymond Russell, Robert Hanneman, Shlomo Getz provide an overview of the changes that have taken place in the kibbutzim since 1990 and assesses their significance. The number of kibbutz members has stagnated for decades, while nonmembers are the only portion of the kibbutz population that shows dynamic growth. Yael Darr analyzes the place of kibbutz children's literature in the internal kibbutz discourse during the fervent 1940s and 1950s. She demonstrates that alongside the expected glorification of communal ideology, some texts also evoked deliberations and frustrations – at times even piercing criticism – regarding the principles of communal upbringing, especially the marginalization of the family institution.

Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

Africa Today (57.3): Special Issue on Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

The articles in this special issue were part of a project that culminated in a major conference, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 23 and 24 October 2009. The conference attracted scholars from institutions of higher education in Eastern Africa, East African scholars in the diaspora, and scholars whose research is rooted in the literary and cultural imaginaries of the region. Built around a broad thematic structure, “Eastern Literary and Intellectual Landscapes,” the papers were aimed at providing a critical reflection on cultural and intellectual legacies of the region through history. Not all the papers presented at the conference have made it into this volume, nor are the papers published here necessarily representative of the issues that the conference’s deliberations explored, but they are a distinct and important voice, emerging out of a region where cultural and intellectual traditions remain understudied. This volume is therefore an important portal on the region.  

Although concerned with disparate and often distinct issues, at least superficially, the papers are connected through strikingly similar tropes and concerns, in a tortured postcolonial context, which has given shape to issues with which these papers grapple. We use the postcolonial context to mean the totality and effect of the colonial experience from the moment of colonial penetration to the aftermath of political independence. A striking contradiction about colonialism is that it needed both to “civilize” its “others,” and to fix them into perpetual “otherness.” It is therefore unsurprising that a theme running through these papers is the colonial subject’s engagement with colonial modernity, quite often to challenge attempts to fix and consign the colonized to the status of the “other,” but equally to negotiate its own agency by appropriating and redefining received notions of “civilization.” The appropriation of colonial institutional structures such as education and the print media were central to this attempt to find a voice. Even the transcultural impulse, which underpins some of the papers in this volume, is very much part of that attempt to show how difficult it was to police cultural boundaries between people and to reinforce the fixity of identity that the colonial social order sought to impose on the colonized subjects, but it was also about what postcolonial modernity really meant in practice—which is to suggest that it was about collapsing boundaries, motion, and trafficking ideas back and forth across different cultural and geographical scapes. This motion, in the case of East Africa, was initiated by the Indian Ocean fortune-seekers from the Indian subcontinent, long before classical colonial modernity found its way into the continent. These global currents, best captured in the metaphor of Indian Ocean dhows and sails, would be accentuated by the colonial experience in East Africa soon after the partition of the continent into European spheres of influence at the Berlin conference of 1885.

The Berlin conference created putative, if often artificial, nation-states, which have remained some of the most significant sites of dispute in postcolonial writing in Africa. The connection between postcolonial writing and nation is possible only when we realize that a nation itself can be a site of difference and tension—a site for the competing imaginings of different ideological and political interests. Again, some of the papers in this volume return to this site to engage with these differences and concerns that relate to gender, class, ethnicity, and other issues. How power is engaged and deflected through struggles that are manifestly gendered and ethnic is at the heart of some of these papers. The mobilization of oppressive gender structures rooted in patriarchy and the use of politicized ethnicity by the postcolonial political class in Africa is a stark reminder that the imaginings of national communities in Africa remain profoundly gendered and ethnic.

Papers in this volume continue to privilege “texts” as important sources for understanding and analyzing historical processes and practices, but they nevertheless help us extend the idea of texts beyond literary texts in English to include a range of other cultural productions, such as indigenous music and musical instruments, and indeed the vernacular press, as legitimate sources of postcolonial discourse. What this process does is to broaden our reach of the sites of contestation of colonial modernity beyond the texts and institutions we have come to associate with “legitimate” discourse. Local agency for colonial subjects in Eastern Africa was negotiated, not simply through mainstream texts in English, but through cultural metaphors and signs that had their roots in local cultures and traditions. These metaphors and signs work through the process of translation and appropriation, which defies attempts to fix them, and by extension to fix the bodies and minds that use them. This is where the authority of texts as narrative comes in: to inhabit and colonize spaces that may be alien to it through translation and transformative strategies only open to narrative.

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