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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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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.

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Women in the Responsa Literature

NASHIM NO. 21: Women in the Responsa Literature, Consulting Editor: David Golinkin

The responsa literature – compilations of legal opinions written by rabbis in response to specific queries or cases – is one of the largest branches, if not the largest branch of Jewish literature. With their descriptions of actual cases that came before the rabbis, starting from about 500 CE and continuing right up to the present day, responsa are a fount of information about Jewish women on a host of topics, such as marriage, divorce, agunot (women who remain “chained” to missing husbands in the absence of a religious divorce), widows, fertility issues and child-rearing, women in the synagogue and women in business. This issue of Nashim includes articles about women in the responsa literature, focusing on a broad topic, a specific geographical area or a specific set of responsa. How are women portrayed? What can we learn about their lives? How were they viewed by rabbis and by their societies? Can we hear their own voices in the testimony they gave before religious courts (batei din)? How did and do these rulings affect their lives?

The articles that appear in this issue of Nashim can be conveniently divided into four categories. The first two articles, by Debby Koren and Julie Lieber, analyze responsa by two famous meshivim (responders): Rabbi David b. Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (Spain, Israel and Egypt, 1479–1573), in a case of a woman who had lost her get (writ of divorce) as a result of the expulsion from Spain; and Rabbi Eleazar Horowitz (Vienna, 1803–1868), in two very unusual cases of women who had sex with men other than their husbands but claimed it was innocent (sic!).

The next three articles deal with the participation of Jewish women in public rituals and Torah study in the modern era. My own article is a timeline of 41 events related to this topic from 1845–2010, offering seven general conclusions that can be derived from it. Norma Joseph translates and analyzes a well-known 1976 responsum by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Lithuania–New York, 1895–1986) regarding the permissibility of women wearing prayer shawls in the synagogue.  Jessica Rosenberg analyzes and compares three more recent teshuvot by Rabbis Mendel Shapiro, Gidon Rothstein and Shlomo Riskin regarding aliyot for women.

The following section features two debates relating to sensitive issues in the realm of medical ethics: abortion, and the use of hormones for religious rather than medical purposes. Alan Jotkowitz responds to a Hebrew article by Ronit Ir-Shai about abortion and maternal need in the responsa literature, with a brief response from Ir-Shai. Tova Ganzel and Dina Zimmerman write about the ethics of using hormones to delay ovulation in order to overcome “halakhic infertility” caused by the observance of the laws of nidah, with a response by Rabbi Haviva Ner-David.

Finally, Michael Pitkowsky offers a preliminary study relating to the effect of the internet on the responsa literature as a whole, by comparing the number and type of questions which women asked of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, of the Sefardic responder Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi (Israel, 1924–1998) and of the Hebrew website www.kipa.co.il.

These new studies barely scratch the surface of the topic of “women in the responsa literature,” but it is hoped that they will serve as a catalyst for future articles, dissertations and books on this neglected corpus, which can serve as a goldmine for Jewish women’s and gender studies.

David Golinkin is President of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where he holds the Jerome and Miriam Katzin Chair in Jewish Studies and is also director of the Center for Women in Jewish Law. He has published some 40 monographs and edited volumes and 200 articles, including his book The Status of Women in Jewish Law: Responsa (Hebrew) and the volume Za‘akat Dalot: Halakhic Solutions for the Agunot of our Time (Hebrew), of which he is co-editor.

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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Chinua Achebe and the birth of African literature

Research in African Literatures 42.2  honors Chinua Achebe and features a cluster of essays on Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God, his early novels. With African literature marking its 50^th institutional year, it is appropriate that RAL commemorates the outstanding creative interventions—also starting a half-century ago—of the man rightly characterized by Nadine Gordimer as Africa’s modern literary “father.” Thanks to Achebe, RAL is able continuously to draw its sustenance as a journal from, and contribute to the reproduction of, the institutional life of African literature.

African literature’s institutional life emerged in and out of the fortuitous historical conjuncture in the late 1950s and early 1960s of determined literary creators on the African continent; the promotional work of local and international publishing houses; the birth and growth of Africanist traditions of literary criticism and exegesis; and the pedagogical legitimizations of African studies in schools and universities both inside and outside Africa. The late 1950s was also a time when decolonization in Africa was at its most intense. It was a time when pan-Africanist ideology and affect were widespread on the continent and made fertile ground for the cultivation of pan-African institutions of literary and scholarly culture.

If the coming together of these circumstances made room for the birthing of a literature that is African, it would take Achebe’s special genius to write Things Fall Apart, immediately acknowledged both far and near as the seminal text qualified to stand at the defining head of a new tradition emergent in world literature. It would be Achebe’s good fortune also to have been chosen by the publishing house Heinemann to inaugurate its influential African Writers Series, a position he occupied from 1962 to 1972. The Series influenced the course of African literary canon formation, a development owed in significant part to Achebe’s authoritative and able editorial direction. Achebe’s influence would not only be decisive as a seminal writer and canonizing editor; as a self-described “novelist as a teacher,” he would insinuate his authority as a writer also into a determination of the literary-critical commonplaces, the exegetical unfolding, and the pedagogical framing of what was emergent in African institution as a new branch of (world) literature.

These are some of the outstanding reasons RAL has considered it proper to honor an influential pioneer with the essays gathered in 42.2. The issue is edited and introduced by the RAL editor Kwaku Larbi Korang, who, in his Introduction, sees Achebe’s achievement in terms of his ability to answer successfully the demand made on him to invent a literary Africanism, on the other one hand, and to reconcile it with a literary humanism, on the other. As well, Korang, in “Making a Post-Eurocentric Humanity: Tragedy, Realism and Things Fall Apart,” emphasizes that Achebe’s humanism is profitably read off the tragic-realist aesthetic the author utilizes in his first novel. Ato Quayson, in “Self-Writing and Existential Alienation in African Literature,” contributes a reading of Arrow of God that unusually places Achebe’s second “village novel” in a venerable global tradition of existential literature. Tejumola Olaniyan, in “A Paddle that Speaks English: Africa, NGOs and the Deep Archaeology of an Unease,” proposes that we read in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease an allegory of an Africa for which the heritage of European social-cum-cultural engineering has been the colonial institution and postcolonial perpetuation of “elite” social factions that live at a troubling structural and psychic remove from their “subaltern” counterparts. If Achebe’s vision is tragic, Sofia Samatar, for her part, suggests in “Charting the Constellation: Past and Present in Things Fall Apart” that this tragic vision can be interpreted in terms of, and in humanistic fraternity with, Walter Benjamin’s optimistic historical materialism. Adeleke Adeeko, in “Okonkwo, Textual Closure and Conquest,” raises critical questions about how satisfactory Achebe’s tragic vision is as expressed in the resolution of his first novel by comparing Things Fall Apart, on the one hand, with Achebe’s Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, on the other. In Nicholas Brown’s assessment, Achebe is self-consciously political in the way he formally positions the reader of Arrow of God. As the novel is cast, it refuses to grant the reader the position of pure outsider gazing at a distant exotic. Instead, to the extent that Arrow of God’s action and contradictions unfold under the aegis of a capitalist world history—which is a universal history—Achebe’s politics of form forces the reader to acknowledge his/her sharing a commonality of world-historical setting, situation, and condition with those he/she encounters in the novel.

Secret talks between Israel and Jordan

 

The Making of Israeli Foreign Policy
Special Issue: Israel Studies 15.3

The articles in “The Making of Israeli Foreign Policy” examine and shed new light on issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of special interest is Moshe Shemesh’s groundbreaking article, “On Two Parallel Tracks—The Secret Jordanian-Israeli Talks (July 1967-September 1973).” It provides a detailed account and analysis of some 30 previously unpublished secret talks between Israel and Jordan that will serve as a vital source for scholars and students of Israel, Israel-Jordanian relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Of equal interest is Pnina Lahav’s “A Small Nation Goes to War: Israel’s Cabinet Authorization of the 1956 War,” which also includes previously unpublished materials, in this case the recently declassified protocol of the formal process of the Cabinet’s authorization to go to war. It examines the legal questions surrounding a nation’s dilemma regarding its security interests and its decision to wage war.

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Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry

Guest Edited by Banu Gökarıksel and Ellen McLarney

This special issue of the Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, examines the intersection of consumer capitalism, women, and the newly emergent “Islamic” culture industry. In this consumerist Islamic culture industry, a series of images, practices, knowledges, and commodities are marketed specifically to “Muslim women.” How does this industry, as well as the objects, meanings, and performances that circulate within it, shape the expression and constitution of femininity and piety? This issue addresses this question through the geographically wide-ranging research of an interdisciplinary group of scholars. The articles analyze advertisements of beauty products (Egypt), Muslim women’s new lifestyle magazines (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Kuwait, and Indonesia), fashionable Islamic clothing catalogues (Turkey), and Muslim women’s literature translated into English.

The results reveal that the increasing mediation of contemporary Muslim femininities through market forces impacts women’s piety, identity, and belonging in complex ways. The Islamic culture industry uses—and creates—networks to circulate signifiers of Islamic identity while also reconfiguring Islamic practice according to the exigencies of the capitalist market and its power structures. This entails the fashioning of gendered Islamic subjectivities.

As Muslim women stake out their positions vis-à-vis consumer capitalism and the Islamic culture industry, they actively engage with given Islamic practice and knowledge as well as with modalities of capitalism. They often navigate between certain Orientalist stereotypes that marketed images sometimes challenge and sometimes reify. The continuing centrality of the veil epitomizes the simultaneous challenge to and reification of stereotypes, as it becomes a marker of agency, self-expression, and empowerment. At the same time, representations of self-determined, independent, and professional Muslim women conform to images of the ideal consumer. While the veiled images reinscribe Islamic norms and identifications by emphasizing particular ways of being Muslim for women, they also transform the very content and contours of Islamic piety and femininity. The essays in this issue also reveal how Muslim women’s bodies circulate in the market, turning into commodities themselves. Muslim women are not only targeted as a consumer niche, but their bodies constitute a territory on which capitalism stakes its claims.

Western theories of the development of capitalism traditionally assume that a new, secular rationality will take hold in society, undermining or limiting the role of religion. This issue, on the contrary, demonstrates the mutual capitalization of religion and the market. The points where they diverge—in the tensions and oppositions between capitalism and piety—cause anxiety about virtue traded for commercial value. Here we explore both the benefits and the costs of that mutual capitalization.

Special Issue JMEWS 6.3 will be available online and in print in August 2010.

Peter Hare, at the crossroads of contemporary American scholarship

For nearly 40 years Peter Hare stood at the crossroads of contemporary American scholarship. In his roles
as author, critic, and editor, he was responsible for helping to shape the issues that would occupy the attention of leading thinkers. Issue 46:1 of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society is a memorial symposium in honor of Hare’s impressive career. For the first time in print many of Peter’s closest colleagues reflect on his unique contribution to the history of American thought.

The symposium is highlighted by essays from Charlene Haddock Seigfried (Purdue University), John McDermott (Texas A&M University), and Vincent Colapietro (Penn State University), each of whom discuss Hare’s lengthy engagement with American pragmatism. Having been on the front lines of the revival of interest in William James’s philosophy, all three provide stellar commentary on aspects of Hare’s masterful reading of James.

While many are familiar with Hare’s work in the history of American thought, just as important to him was the task of relating philosophy’s history to its present. Thus, issue 46:1 also addresses Hare’s contribution on numerous contemporary matters. Part holist, part contextualist, the naturalism he fashioned was decisively antireductionist and particularly sensitive to the potential for acquiring wisdom in a diversity of human experiences. Essays by Joseph Margolis (Temple University), John Shook (Center for Inquiry), and John Corcoran (SUNY Buffalo) do well to capture this spirit. Still other essays focus on the pragmatic naturalism that permeated Hare’s philosophical approach, his views on the ethics of belief, the problem of evil, as well as newer views that he was developing at the time of his death.

This symposium is much more than a fitting tribute to Hare’s philosophical legacy. It also indicates exciting research that is being done in the spirit of that legacy by connecting Hare’s work to emerging scholarly trends. As many of its contributors attest, Hare brought a unique perspective to nearly every issue he addressed. At his best he was an original thinker and incomparable force for the promotion and dissemination of American pluralism. This issue, then, is an important contribution to the development of these themes.