Journal of African Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"From Guns and Steel to Germs: Malarial Detritus in New Sculptures by Gonçalo Mabunda","authors":"M. Iqani","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2023.2186382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2023.2186382","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses and theorises work by the celebrated Mozambican artist Gonçalo Mabunda, who is famed for his redeployment of scrap metal into striking sculptures. He is known for using various weapons components in his assemblages, as well as – more recently – industrial scrap items. This article considers the arrival of used, leftover and discarded items used in the Internal Residual Spray (IRS) campaign deployed by the NGO Tchau Tchau Malaria (Goodbye Malaria) into his works. The article first explores the role of waste from guns (what I term “war scrap”) and industrial steel (“modernity trash”), then turns to the significance of sculptures created with malaria-eradication infrastructure (what I term “malarial detritus”). The agents of malaria, usually invisible to the human eye, are combatted through IRS campaigns. Art can make this life-saving scientific intervention visible, and communicable, in innovative ways and can play a key role in communicating the science of malaria eradication.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"201 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48294332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revolutionary Mothering","authors":"Serawit B. Debele","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2023.2186383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2023.2186383","url":null,"abstract":"́ Oyěwùmí, Obioma Nnaemeka, Nkiru Nzegwu and Filomina Chioma Steady have written important works arguing that motherhood needs to be understood beyond the dichotomy (oppressive institution or creative and generative activity) often presented in Western feminist writings. The work of these African scholars foregrounds precolonial knowledge to grapple with (post)colonial gender relations on the continent. Their theoretical, epistemic and methodological approaches demonstrate that these intellectuals were politically committed to problematising the sometimes condescending discourses of global sisterhood in which some Western feminists were invested. African feminist scholars were writing against a particular ideology of the 1970s and 1980s that singled out motherhood as an oppressive institution built by patriarchy. Their work interrogated those strands of radical feminism determined to “emancipate” women from motherhood through what Nnaemeka (1997, 5) called a philosophy of evacuation. They challenged the stereotypical view that African women are inevitably subjugated to men and their lives confined to mothering the children that they were forced to birth. Amadiume refutes this paradigm by asserting that motherhood is culturally recognised as an autonomous unit (2005, 93). Elsewhere, she argues that motherhood is sacred and imbued with spiritual and mythological might which gives women authority (Amadiume 1987; 1997). In an important intervention, Oyěwùmí (1997) contested the domestication narrative, citing the example of Nigerian women whose socio-economic realities did not make it possible for mothers to be domesticated. Instead, she argues that “part of the Yoruba definition of motherhood was that mothers must provide for their children materially” (Oyěwùmí 1997, 73). In a situation where women have to provide for their children, the narrative of domestication contradicts the fact that mothers must have the possibility to be involved in various activities such as trade (Oyěwùmí 1997, 97). Following the same line of argument, Steady discusses motherhood as a source of leadership with the capacity to birth the nation and to humanise the state (Steady 2011). In so doing, she sidelines the meta-narrative that reduces womanhood to victimhood by emphasising mothers’ socio-political, spiritual and economic engagement. Nzegwu (2004) has written on how motherhood has been deployed as a powerful instrument against threatening powers such as those coming from the state. In her more recent work, she refers to these powerful women as public mothers who confronted the state authorities that threatened to confiscate the women’s thriving market. The women’s resistance drew its","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"135 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43095883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Campus Movements and Student Revolutionaries: Imagining Haile Selassie I University in Hiwot Teffera’s Memoir Tower in the Sky","authors":"Luleadey Tadesse Worku","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2151423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2151423","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 1974 revolution in Ethiopia has been the topic of many histories and novels set during this period which have portrayed these events for readers beyond Ethiopia. Hiwot Teffera’s autobiographical text, Tower in the Sky, tells the story of student revolutionaries in the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) and the 1974 revolution that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie. The revolutionaries’ untold stories of love, intense political optimism and suffering permeate the narrative and demonstrate the significance of memoirs in documenting individual experiences which are otherwise overlooked by other narrative forms despite their impact on political developments and outcomes. This article examines the ESM’s modes of mobilisation and engagement through an analysis of Teffera’s journey as a political activist and a revolutionary. In so doing, it shows how Teffera identifies her class relationship, her gender and her romantic relationship as the dominant factors behind her political coming to awareness and her lifelong commitment to the student movement and to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP). The article also argues that Haile Selassie I University has served the movement as a vital mental and physical space in shaping the students’ political consciousness.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"7 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48800849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Campus as War Zone: Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Post-Independence Civil War, and the African University","authors":"Anne W. Gulick","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2158789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2158789","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how a set of contemporary Anglophone African novels critically engage the relationship between universities and war. Dinaw Mengestu’s 2014 All Our Names, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, and Aminatta Forna’s 2010 The Memory of Love are war novels that chronicle the collapse of the postcolonial state in the face of military coups and authoritarian rule in the late 1960s; in all three texts, the university takes on a stealthy significance as the institutional backdrop for that collapse. The transformation of university campuses into war zones in these novels occasions material devastation and both individual and collective trauma. It also exposes deep and longstanding entanglements between war, education, and knowledge production in the postcolony, and invites nuanced reflection on the ambivalent legacy of the 1960s for the present. Beyond these novels’ sober and bleak assessments of post-independence conflict lies an invitation to imagine how war might also serve as a source of knowledge, a means of building and improving upon the anticolonial aspirations that were never fully achieved in the era of independence.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"37 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47105920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lyrical Renegades: Reframing Narratives of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Kenyan Urban Margins Through Hip-Hop","authors":"F. Ndaka","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2023.2169910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2023.2169910","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The outbreak of Covid-19 in Kenya saw a resurgence of state policing, violence and repression as the state sought ways of decisively containing the spread. This was accompanied by a discourse of “being at war” with a novel and invisible enemy. As a result, terms such as shutdown, lockdown, curfew and isolation were mobilised by state agents and organs not only to refer to the concerted efforts of dealing with the pandemic; they also served to show the state’s reach and to justify the excessive exercise of power and control. Through the analysis of two hip-hop songs, “Pandemic” by Kitu Sewer featuring Robah, and “Pandemik” by the Ochungulo Family, this article examines the artists’ representation of the state’s idioms of closure and pandemic-mediated violence, while at the same time necessitating a reimagination of sociality, freedom and resistance in Kenya’s urban margins. Analysing the songs’ recourse to Kenyan anti-colonial struggles and ratchetness, I argue that the artists present Nairobi’s margins as war zones where several pandemics intersect. In addition, I contend that the artists invite a rethinking of a collapsing world in the face of multiple pandemics as offering the possibility of regeneration and transformation.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"89 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46616571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Locus of Struggle: The African Campus and Contemporary Protest Forms","authors":"Krystal Strong, Jimil Ataman","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2158788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2158788","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, we begin from the presupposition that the university campus – historically, in the popular imagination, and in any possible futures worth fighting for – is a terrain of struggle. Drawing from our ongoing study, which has documented and digitally mapped more than 700 campus protest events occurring over the past 20 years across Africa, we explore protest as a lens for interpreting the experience and continued renegotiation of the very idea of the contemporary African university. In our analysis, we trace protest in two ways: (1) as a tactical form, to explore the major catalysts, political strategies, and institutional and state responses to campus protests today; and (2) as a spatial form, to examine spatialities of struggle through which campus geographies are produced, contested and remade. Ultimately, we argue that attention to campus protests confirms the continued importance of the university to popular struggles in Africa.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"53 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45646300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“fokkol graad vi jou nie” [Fuck All Degree for You]: Black Afrikaans Poets, Critical University Studies, and Transcripting the Afrikaans University","authors":"Luan Staphorst","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2154199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2154199","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of #Rhodesmustfall and calls for the decolonisation of the South African academy, #Afrikaansmustfall arose specifically targeting the continued use of Afrikaans as a language of teaching and learning. This article investigates the ways in which young, Black Afrikaans speakers – the often invisible members of the Afrikaans community – are critiquing and reimagining the hegemonic form of the Afrikaans language and university. The analysis centres on poems from the debut anthologies of Ashwin Arendse and Veronique Jephtas, namely Swatland (2021) and Soe Rond Ommie Bos (2021) – both of which are written in Kaaps, a non-standardised variant of Afrikaans. Critical university studies and James Scott’s notion of transcripts are the central frames through which the article speculates as to what a future form of the Afrikaans university, namely the African-Afrikaans university, could look like. The new script for this university includes being anti-racist, anti-neoliberal, and affective – whilst a concretely broadened form of Afrikaans grounds it.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"22 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44488417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Spaces of Protest: Seydina Issa Sow's Campus Graphic Novel Sidy","authors":"Mahriana Rofheart","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2154200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2154200","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Seydina Issa Sow's comic Sidy (2019) depicts a young man from the countryside who travels to Dakar, Senegal to study law at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD). When the eponymous character arrives, he is disappointed to find overcrowded dormitories and lecture halls. As students protest these conditions, Sidy's friend Abdou supports him and leads a fight against injustice. Although protest has been portrayed negatively in earlier comics such as Goorgoorlou and can lead to violence and harm, Sow's text suggests the generative possibilities of protest under certain conditions. In recent decades, scholars have examined UCAD students’ attempts to create spaces of belonging on campus, whether through protest or other means. Sow uses French with occasional Wolof, as well as recognisable campus iconography, to differentiate the university from the rest of the city, thus distinguishing between students and other groups of young people. Shifts in the comic's panel transition strategies indicate that protest can alter students’ relationships to space. This article examines the text's representation of language, iconic structures, and movement through campus and urban locations to insist that protest creates productive but limited spaces of inclusion.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"73 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47821193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa","authors":"Mapule Mohulatsi","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2023.2169909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2023.2169909","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Mami Wata is a water spirit venerated across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In South Africa, a water spirit who is a mermaid figure goes by many names and is either feared or revered for her other-wordly powers. This mermaid figure, I argue, functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water. I analyse artistic representations of the figure of the “watermeisie” (water maiden/water girl), a kind of mermaid creature who is half-human and half-fish. I discuss how this figure functions as a discursive site for South African women artists’ investigations into the before- and afterlives of slavery. I argue that the watermeisie as nomadic figure provides us with a speculative re-mapping of slave memory in Southern Africa. The article examines how the ocean and the figure of the mermaid appear in works by Koleka Putuma, Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba, artists who have brought the watermeisie with all its complexity in South African waters and discourse into focus, by charting a map of slave genealogies using the roots/routes of slavery in and out of water.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"121 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47047067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“That Is Still our Tradition but in a Modern Form, but it Still Tells our Story”: Transitions in Buildings in Northern Ghana","authors":"Irene Appeaning Addo","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2151422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2151422","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Traditional building practices, which are typically regarded as repositories of heritage and material culture, are undergoing significant transitions in northern Ghana. This transition is evident in the use of building materials other than locally accessible traditional materials. These transitions are driving creativity and innovation as households strive for continuity of tradition, while at the same time ensuring the sustainability of their buildings. This article analyses the architectural traditions and building practices in northern Ghana using the building work and commentaries of the people of Gbabshe in peri-urban Tamale as a case study. The results show that building practices are transitioning because of environmental changes, migration, wealth accumulation and access to modern building materials and technology. As the peri-urban community becomes urbanised, the people encounter “modern” building styles which are appropriated into their traditional architecture, resulting in a hybridisation of architecture. The innovative tendencies and philosophical continuities of these builders, and the desire to achieve sustainable buildings and the hybridisation of architecture, has implications for the future of earth buildings’ relevance, resilience, sustainability, and sociocultural significance in people’s everyday lives.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"104 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42683532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}