Critical African Studies最新文献

{"title":"Worth the gamble? Access to information, risks and ethical dilemmas in undertaking research in authoritarian regimes: the case of Zimbabwe","authors":"A. Rusero","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074486","url":null,"abstract":"Undertaking ethnographic or phenomenological inquiry under a hovering cloud of dictatorship can often be a mammoth, some might even say life-risking, venture. In such circumstances, researchers are confronted with ethical dilemmas: the need to strike a balance between accessing credible first-hand information and playing it safe. It is against this background that this paper traces the challenges confronting researchers planning to conduct fieldwork in authoritarian regimes. Conducting research under a political culture of fear, polarization and censorship has proven to be something of a heinous task for my own research in my home country of Zimbabwe. Drawing from this experience, the paper discusses the risks, ethical dilemmas and apprehensions that underscore the challenge of carrying out fieldwork in authoritarian regimes. Specifically, the paper discusses how researchers, whose research might be perceived by governments as a threat to national security, can deal with risks, threats, and dangers regarding access to the gathering and retrieval of data.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81595585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Constructing Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy in South Africa: government v corporate discourse","authors":"M. Makgoba","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074485","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76200460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Truce and reconciliation in Zimbabwe: from Mugabe to Mnangagwa","authors":"Gift Mwonzora, Kirk Helliker","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2067069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2067069","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout history, truce-making has been an important mechanism to temporarily halt fighting between antagonistic forces. In some instances, national truces are used to usher in longer-term national reconciliation. In this regard, there is an important analytical distinction between a truce and a reconciliation. What is sometimes articulated publicly as a formal reconciliation is often merely a truce, at least from the perspective of the hegemonic party. Drawing on the theoretical work of Nir Eisikovits, we develop this argument in relation to what we identify as the three official episodes of state-centric national reconciliation in Zimbabwe, all taking place under Mugabe’s rule. In doing so, we demonstrate how ZANU-PF recalibrated the reconciliations as truces to pursue its strategic power interests. In this context, and more briefly, we analyse the post-coup Mnangagwa government’s discourse and acts of reconciliation (existing outside an official reconciliation pact) as another episode of truce-making, designed to benchmark what is unacceptable oppositional politics.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77638840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Tunisian university at the intersection of global-local conjunctures: knowledge, power and the struggle for liberation","authors":"Corinna Mullin","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2097932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2097932","url":null,"abstract":"This article adopts a longue durée approach to examining resistance around the Tunisian university, tracing current material and epistemological struggles back to the colonial era. To do so, it fuses theoretical insights from the growing bodies of literature concerned with how colonial-capitalist power is manifested and contested within and on the margins of institutions of higher education, including Marxist, social movement theory, and decolonial traditions. The article considers four important conjunctures in the development of the Tunisian academy as an institution where the connections between knowledge generation and (neo)colonial-capitalist power have been articulated and contested. The article will conclude by arguing that the sediments of resistance remaining from all four transformative moments have dialectically contributed to building alternative knowledge projects within and beyond the university. Whereas dominant modes of knowledge production enable and normalise the destructive and grossly unequal patterns of extraction and accumulation associated with (neo)colonial-capitalism, alternative knowledge projects instead seek to transform Tunisians’ relations with one another, with the state and with the land in ways that promote the forging of the collective and meaningful liberation.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80861442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cultural politics and cultural violence during Gukurahundi in Matabeleland","authors":"Nkululeko Sibanda","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2074487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2074487","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines and analyses the various instances where ‘performances’ of cultural violence by the state and Fifth Brigade were experienced during Gukurahundi in Matabeleland. This paper contends that cultural violence was used to stereotype Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) veterans, as well as Ndebele people. Cultural violence is used here to refer to the purposeful weakening and ultimate destruction of cultural values and practices of the Ndebele people. This paper argues that ZANU-PF created an anti-Ndebele thought collective through the use of emotive language, stylized news in media, and ‘expert opinions’ to block the creation of accurate contextual knowledge for the Shona nonlocals and ZANU-PF members. This paper further submits that this thought collective sits at the base of the disposition, segregation, dehumanization, near annihilation and framing of ZAPU, ex-ZIPRA veterans and the Ndebele people as ‘dissidents’ and ‘cockroaches’, infecting Ndebele language, identity and cultural practices. This paper, thus, argues that the deployment of cultural violence created a fertile ground for direct and structural violence that further undermined ZAPU, ZIPRA and Ndebele resistance against Gukurahundi. In conclusion, this paper proposes public multi-cultural remembrances and cultural cleansing ceremonies (nationally and communally) as possible solutions to diffusing the continuous perpetration of cultures of violence in Zimbabwe.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83419362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de Violence in the context of end-less post-colonialism","authors":"Isaac Joslin","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2097933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2097933","url":null,"abstract":"This paper outlines the problematic relationship between the enduring colonial legacy that persists, both in theories of the postcolonial and geo-political post-colonial state practices. Considering the ambivalent relationship between discourses of postmodern and postcolonial theorists, Yambo Ouologuem's seminal work, Le devoir de violence (1968), serves as a literal roadmap of the complicit power dynamics involved in postcolonial political and discursive practices. The implications of Ouloguem's tactical textual composition underscore a relationship of mutual culpability in a metaphorical chess game in which both sides ultimately compromise for the game to continue. Read in the context of contemporary post-colonial and post-modernist discourses on African literary productions, Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence embodies an aesthetic of ambiguity that not only reveals the extreme violence of colonial encounters, but also the subversive complicity of a sustained violence fundamental to discourses of a post-colonized condition vacillating between liberation and subservience.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83032790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ECOWAS conflict prevention framework and the critical and emancipatory peacebuilding approach","authors":"M. A. Ateng, A. Musah","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2097931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2097931","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework from the perspective of the critical and emancipatory peacebuilding approach. The paper argues that the ECOWAS conflict prevention framework is largely guided by the principles of the liberal peacebuilding model which ignores the ‘local’ in peacebuilding. The framework represents a complete departure of the sub-regional body, from an emphasis on conflict resolution to transformative conflict prevention with the overarching objective of ensuring human security instead of state security. When subjecting the framework, however, to the philosophies of the critical and emancipatory peacebuilding approach and the social justice frame, one notices that, in its current form, the framework is inadequate to ensure sustainable peace and security within the sub-region. Its over-reliance on the state as the unit of focus together with its adoption of liberal conceptualization of human security, focus on direct violence, top-down approach, low engagement of local communities to ensure local ownership, and the way these have been implemented make it an apparent elite-based policy. For the framework to have an impact in the sub-region, it must be restructured to make it an empowering policy that engages local actors, communities, resources, and knowledge in the transformative conflict prevention agenda of the sub-region. The framework also needs to be anchored on local ownership and agency and must be made to act as an emancipatory and transformative tool aimed at empowering the people of the sub-region as peacemakers, peacebuilders, and transformative leaders.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90203811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chinese goods and mass consumption in Africa: cultural appropriation of Chinese motorcycles in Burkina Faso","authors":"Guive Khan-Mohammad","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2054839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2054839","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with the arrival of Chinese-made goods as one of the main vectors of African societies’ entrance into mass consumption logics. However, it proposes going beyond the dominant monocausal approach, which only relates the consumption of these goods to their low price. To do so, this paper emphasizes a careful observation of consumer practices to unveil the complex process of ‘domestication’ that African consumers carry out on these goods daily (Sahlins, M. D. 1993. “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History.” The Journal of Modern History 65 (1): 1–25; Warnier, J.-P. 1994. Le paradoxe de la marchandise authentique: Imaginaire et consommation de masse. Paris: L’Harmattan). To this end, we focus our attention on the case of Chinese motorcycles in Burkina Faso. Historically the most imported Chinese good in Burkina Faso, motorcycles are at the centre of a multitude of practices and social representations. After placing the arrival of these bikes in the historicity of the cyclo-distinction, this paper presents the many ways in which Chinese motorcycles – though less expensive – are socially and symbolically valued by Burkinabe consumers. Initially considered symbols of a new ‘modernity’, the aesthetic and technical characteristics of Chinese motorcycles gradually became a standard shared by all imported models. The multiplication of importers and models accompanied a growing complexity of symbolic values and distinction logics, in which the growing role of the ‘new figures of success’ (Banégas, R., and J.-P. Warnier. 2001. “Nouvelles figures de la réussite et du pouvoir.” Politique Africaine 82 (2): 5–23) was expressed. In the context of mounting uncertainty surrounding the new distinctive codes and an acceleration of the symbolic obsolescence of motorcycles, ‘novelty’ became the new reference value and frequently replacing possessions a key element of social value, and therefore a central rule of distinction. Thus, a focus on the process of ‘cultural appropriation’ of Chinese goods allows us to distance ourselves from a financially captive interpretation of African consumption to unveil the social determinants of Africa’s entry into mass consumption logics.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88957015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The moral economy of sex work in Mombasa, Kenya","authors":"Eglė Česnulytė","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2039732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2039732","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74232229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Infrastructures of Renaissance: tangible discourses in the EPRDF’s Ethiopia","authors":"Biruk Terrefe","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2039731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2039731","url":null,"abstract":"In late 2014, disputes around land, displacement and compensation related to the roll-out of big infrastructure projects across Ethiopia mutated into much deeper conflicts about the authoritarian nature of the state, the political marginalization of particular ethnic groups and the legitimacy of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). As security forces continued to quell mounting protests, the federal government imposed a state of emergency. This article explores how the EPRDF navigated this period of political fragility and why infrastructures were used as strategic vehicles for the party’s discourse. Drawing on the Addis-Djibouti Railway as an analytical lens, this research explores how the party strategically deployed posters, images and speeches centred around infrastructure to directly respond to protestors' grievances. This choice to deliberately embed visuals and rhetoric descriptions of such megaprojects in its political messaging about Ethiopia’s aspired ‘unity in diversity’, ‘democracy’, and ‘good governance’ illustrates how infrastructures were effective carriers of the party’s narratives. Roads, railways, and dams rendered EPRDF’s abstract ideas of political reform and economic renaissance tangible. At this critical juncture, these tangible discourses not only expose how the party attempted to restructure state-society relations in Ethiopia, but also how centrally anchored infrastructure was in the EPRDF’s self-styled developmental state project.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76001633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}