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Author: Michel Leiris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857423771
Category : Africa, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the "secretary-archivist" for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, documenting the team's acquisitions, and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is "a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal," as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.
Author: Michel Leiris
Publisher: Africa List
ISBN: 9780857427007
Category : Africa, Sub-Saharan
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
One of the towering classics of twentieth-century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the 'secretary-archivist' for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the mission, documenting the team's acquisitions and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is 'a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal', as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.
Author: Aija Poikāne-Daumke
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 9783825896126
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 150
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Book Description
This book investigates the development of Afro-German literature in the context of the African American experience and shows the decisive role of literature for the emergence of the Afro-German Movement. Various Afro-German literary and cultural initiatives, which began in the 1980s, arose as a response to the experience of being marginalized - to the point of invisibility - within a dominant Eurocentric culture that could not bring the notions of "Black" and "German" together in a meaningful way. The book is a significant contribution to the understanding of German literature as multi-ethnic and of the the transatlantic networks operating in the African Diasporas.
Author: Seloua Luste Boulbina
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253041937
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Even though many of France's former colonies became independent over fifty years ago, the concept of "colony" and who was affected by colonialism remain problematic in French culture today. Seloua Luste Boulbina, an Algerian-French philosopher and political theorist, shows how the colony's structures persist in the subjectivity, sexuality, and bodily experience of human beings who were once brought together through force. This text, which combines two works by Luste Boulbina, shows how France and its former colonies are haunted by power relations that are supposedly old history, but whose effects on knowledge, imagination, emotional habits, and public controversies have persisted vividly into the present. Luste Boulbina draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant to build a challenging, original, and intercultural philosophy that responds to blind spots of inherited political and social culture. Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa offers unique insights into how issues of migration, religious and ethnic identity, and postcolonial history affect contemporary France and beyond.
Author: Philip Caputo
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307822079
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
When Vietnam veteran and foreign correspondent Charlie Gage is recruited by the shadowy Thomas Colfax to assist with something called Operation Atropos, he has no idea he is about to be enlisted for guerilla warfare in northeast Africa. Once he realizes he’s a mercenary, however, he is not at all concerned. Ever since his young secretary was killed by a grenade at their bureau office in Beirut a couple of years before, he has lost all volition. Which is why he so readily capitulates not only to Colfax, but also, and more dangerously so, to every command of Jeremy Nordstrand, the mystical megalomaniac determined to achieve greatness on their seemingly suicidal mission. Set in the forsaken yet exotic deserts of Ethiopia, Horn of Africa is a vividly detailed and masterfully plotted novel chronicling a broken man’s struggle for salvation and inner freedom in the midst of a broken nation’s fight for stability and peace.
Author: Emily O Wittman
Publisher: Amherst College Press
ISBN: 1943208301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and "authentic" experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter. "This book offers a valuable account of literary activity in a genre still inadequately covered in literary-critical history. Emily Witt- man organizes her material through pairings and contextualizing that are instructive and illuminating and often exciting . . . This is comparative literature at its best." --Vincent Sherry, Washington University
Author: Artwell Nhemachena
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956550930
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Tracing recent bouts of globalised Mugabephobia to Robert Mugabes refusal to be neoimperially penetrated, this book juxtaposes economic liberalisation with the mounting liberalisation of African orifices. Reading land repossession and economic structural adjustment programmes together with what they call neoimperial structural adjustment of African orifices, the authors argue that there has been liberalisation of African orifices in a context where Africans are ironically prevented from repossessing their material resources. Juxtaposing recent bouts of Mugabephobia with discourses on homophobia, the book asks why empire prefers liberalising African orifices rather than attending to African demands for restitution, restoration and reparations. Noting that empire opposes African sovereignty, autonomy, and centralisation of power while paradoxically promoting transnational corporations centralisation of power over African economies, the book challenges contemporary discourses about shared sovereignty, distributed governance, heterarchy, heteronomy and onticology. Arguing that colonialists similarly denied Africans of their human essence, the tome problematises queer sexualities, homosexuality, ecosexuality, cybersexuality and humanoid robotic sexuality all of which complicate supposedly fundamental distinctions between human beings and animals and machines. Provocatively questioning queer sexuality and liberalised orifices that serve to divert African attention from the more serious unfinished business of repossessing material resources, the book insightfully compares Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Thomas Sankara and Julius Kambarage Nyerere who emphasised the imperatives of African autonomy, ownership, control and sovereignty over natural resources. Observing Africans interest in repossessing ownership and control over their resources, the book wonders why so much, queer, international attention is focused on foisting queer sexuality while downplaying more burning issues of resource repossession, human dignity, equality and equity craved by Africans for whom life is not confined to sexuality. With insights for scholars in sociology, development studies, law, politics, African studies, anthropology, transformation, decolonisation and decoloniality, the book argues that liberal democracy is a faade in a world that is actually ruled through criminocracy.
Author: Robert D. Hamner
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826211521
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Hamner describes Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed because each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. Regardless of whether their ancestry is traced to the classical Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, or confined to the Americas, they are transplanted individuals whose separate quests all center on the fundamental human need to strike roots in a place where one belongs.
Author: Virginia Cowles
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1848849648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
An action-packed biography of “one of the legitimate storybook heroes of World War II” and the special forces regiment he founded (The New York Times). In the dark and uncertain days of 1941 and 1942, when Rommel’s Afrika Korps was sweeping toward Egypt and the Suez Canal, a small group of daring raiders made history for the Allies. They operated deep behind German lines, driving hundreds of miles through the deserts of North Africa. They hid by day and struck by night, destroying aircraft, blowing up ammunition dumps, derailing trains, and killing many times their own number. These men were the Special Air Service. The SAS was the brainchild of David Stirling, a deceptively mild-mannered man with a brilliant idea. Under his command, small teams of resourceful, highly trained men penetrated beyond the front lines of the opposing armies and wreaked havoc where the Germans least expected it. From Virginia Cowles, whose biographies have been praised as “splendidly readable” (Sunday Times) and “fascinating” (Kirkus Reviews), this is a classic account of these raids, an amazing tale of courage, impudence, and daring packed with action and high adventure. Her narrative, based on the eyewitness testimony of the men who took part, gives a compelling insight into the early years of the SAS.
Author: Carsten Stahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192868128
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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Book Description
The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Author: George Steinmetz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691237433
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 576
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Book Description
A new history of French social thought that connects postwar sociology to colonialism and empire In this provocative and original retelling of the history of French social thought, George Steinmetz places the history and development of modern French sociology in the context of the French empire after World War II. Connecting the rise of all the social sciences with efforts by France and other imperial powers to consolidate control over their crisis-ridden colonies, Steinmetz argues that colonial research represented a crucial core of the renascent academic discipline of sociology, especially between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Sociologists, who became favored partners of colonial governments, were asked to apply their expertise to such “social problems” as detribalization, urbanization, poverty, and labor migration. This colonial orientation permeated all the major subfields of sociological research, Steinmetz contends, and is at the center of the work of four influential scholars: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu. In retelling this history, Steinmetz develops and deploys a new methodological approach that combines attention to broadly contextual factors, dynamics within the intellectual development of the social sciences and sociology in particular, and close readings of sociological texts. He moves gradually toward the postwar sociologists of colonialism and their writings, beginning with the most macroscopic contexts, which included the postwar “reoccupation” of the French empire and the turn to developmentalist policies and the resulting demand for new forms of social scientific expertise. After exploring the colonial engagement of researchers in sociology and neighboring fields before and after 1945, he turns to detailed examinations of the work of Aron, who created a sociology of empires; Berque, the leading historical sociologist of North Africa; Balandier, the founder of French Africanist sociology; and Bourdieu, whose renowned theoretical concepts were forged in war-torn, late-colonial Algeria.
