Naturalizing Africa

Naturalizing Africa PDF Author: Cajetan Iheka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107199174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa. It is a multi-disciplinary text, for both researchers and scholars of African Studies, the environment and postcolonial literature.

Naturalizing Africa

Naturalizing Africa PDF Author: Cajetan Iheka
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107199174
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This book analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa. It is a multi-disciplinary text, for both researchers and scholars of African Studies, the environment and postcolonial literature.

Naturalizing Inequality

Naturalizing Inequality PDF Author: Michela Marcatelli
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816539502
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The book discusses the reproduction and legitimization of racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. She documents how calls to save nature have only deepened and naturalized inequality.

Maize and Grace

Maize and Grace PDF Author: James C. McCann
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Sometime around 1500 AD, an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world’s most influential crops—one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa’s experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world’s most cultivated crop. James C. McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale, from the medieval to the modern, as he explains the science of maize production and explores how the crop has imprinted itself on Africa’s agrarian and urban landscapes. Today, maize accounts for more than half the calories people consume in many African countries. During the twentieth century, a tidal wave of maize engulfed the continent, and supplanted Africa’s own historical grain crops—sorghum, millet, and rice. In the metamorphosis of maize from an exotic visitor into a quintessentially African crop, in its transformation from vegetable to grain, and from curiosity to staple, lies a revealing story of cultural adaptation. As it unfolds, we see how this sixteenth-century stranger has become indispensable to Africa’s fields, storehouses, and diets, and has embedded itself in Africa’s political, economic, and social relations. The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann’s compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world’s food supply.

History After Apartheid

History After Apartheid PDF Author: Annie E. Coombes
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
DIVHow should post-apartheid South Africa present its history - in museums, monuments, and parks./div

Questioning Misfortune

Questioning Misfortune PDF Author: Susan Reynolds Whyte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521595582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Some of the most interesting ethnographies of experience are concerned to highlight the indeterminate nature of life. Questioning Misfortune is very much within this tradition. Based on a long-term study of adversity and its social causes in Bunyole, eastern Uganda, it considers the way in which people deal with uncertainties of life, such as sickness, suffering, marital problems, failure, and death. Divination may identify causes of misfortune, ranging from ancestors and spirits to sorcerers. Sufferers and their families will then try out a variety of remedial measures, including pharmaceuticals, sorcery antidotes, and sacrifices. But remedies often fail, and doubt and uncertainty persist. Even the commercialisation of biomedicine, and the peril of AIDS can be understood in terms of a pragmatics of uncertainty.

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination PDF Author: Chielozona Eze
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367708573
Category : African literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa's robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003148272, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination

Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination PDF Author: Chielozona Eze
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000376257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination is an interdisciplinary reading of justice in literary texts and memoirs, films, and social anthropological texts in postcolonial Africa. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s robust achievements in human rights, this book argues that the notion of restorative justice is integral to the proper functioning of participatory democracy and belongs to the moral architecture of any decent society. Focusing on the efforts by African writers, scholars, artists, and activists to build flourishing communities, the author discusses various quests for justice such as environmental justice, social justice, intimate justice, and restorative justice. It discusses in particular ecological violence, human rights abuses such as witchcraft accusations, the plight of people affected by disability, homophobia, misogyny, and sex trafficking, and forgiveness. This book will be of interest to scholars of African literature and films, literature and human rights, and literature and the environment.

Colonialism and Genocide

Colonialism and Genocide PDF Author: Dirk Moses
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317997530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice, this is the first book to link colonialism and genocide in a systematic way in the context of world history. It fills a significant gap in the current understanding on genocide and the Holocaust, which sees them overwhelmingly as twentieth century phenomena. This book publishes Lemkin’s account of the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanians for the first time and chapters cover: the exterminatory rhetoric of racist discourses before the ‘scientific racism’ of the mid-nineteenth century Charles Darwin’s preoccupation with the extinction of peoples in the face of European colonialism, a reconstruction of a virtually unknown case of ‘subaltern genocide’ global perspective on the links between modernity and the Holocaust Social theorists and historians alike will find this a must-read.

The Precolonial State in West Africa

The Precolonial State in West Africa PDF Author: J. Cameron Monroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This volume examines political life in the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in the Republic of Bénin.

The Disposition of Nature

The Disposition of Nature PDF Author: Jennifer Wenzel
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Finalist, 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Shortlisted, 2020 Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.