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The ArtsJanuary 2019Postcolonial African cinema
Ten directors
by David Murphy, Patrick Williams
This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines - film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies - in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background - personal or national, cultural or political - to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African cities and collaborative futures
Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
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The ArtsApril 2011Postnationalist African Cinemas
by Alexie Tcheuyap
Postnationalist African cinemas convincingly interrogates the ways in which African narratives locate postcolonial identities and forms beyond essentially nationalist frameworks. It investigates how the emergence of new genres, discourses and representations, all unrelated to an overtly nationalist project, influences the formal choices made by contemporary directors. By foregrounding the narrative, generic, discursive, representational and aesthetic structures of films, this book shows how directors are beginning to regard film as a popular form of entertainment rather than political praxis. Tcheuyap investigates filmic genres such as comedy, dance, crime and epic alongside cultural aspects including witchcraft, sexuality, pornography and oracles. ;
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Business, Economics & LawNovember 2024African perspectives in international investment law
by Yenkong Ngangjoh Hodu, Makane Moïse Mbengue
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017The South African War reappraised
by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie
The South African War was a catalyst in the creation of modern South Africa and was a major international event which had profound implications for British rule in other parts of their colonial empire. This was South Africa's own 'Great War' - the largest conflict waged by the British in the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. It shaped political discourse among South Africa's various communities and moulded the outlook of a generation of imperial administrators, soldiers and anti-colonial activists. The war launched South Africa as a moral issue of global significance, involving leading humanitarians, foreign 'pro-Boer' volunteers as well as pro-imperial contingents from various dominions and colonies of settlement, and would later find echoes in the campaign against apartheid. This volume includes a historiographical review of a century of writing on the war. It examines South Africa's place in the imperial structure and reappraises its impact on imperial defence and the political identities of Africans, Asians, Boer commandos and Cape Afrikaners. An analysis of the role of the media and the effects of the war on nationalists in India, Ireland and the Dominions is also included. The South African War reappraised will be of particular interest to students of imperialism, modern South Africa, nationalism and the media.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2024
A savage song
Racist violence and armed resistance in the early twentieth-century U.S.–Mexico Borderlands
by Margarita Aragon
This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality. Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press? Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as 'racial problems', investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality.
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The ArtsOctober 20174 saints in 3 acts
A snapshot of the American avant-garde in the 1930s
by Patricia Allmer, John Sears
Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson was a major avant-garde phenomenon of the 1930s, an experimental opera that nonetheless achieved remarkable popular success. Photography was a key element of that success, but its complex roles in the construction, representation and dissemination of the opera have hitherto received little critical attention. The photographic recording of the all-African American cast in particular affords a unique insight into the complexities of Four Saints in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the New York avant-gardes of the time. This book, published in collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, London, presents a wide selection of photographs of the cast, performances, and other material - many images reproduced for the first time - alongside essays by an international range of scholars exploring different aspects of the opera, including dance, fashion, music, and avant-garde writing, as well as photography.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African cities and collaborative futures
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
Guardians of Empire
The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, C.1700-1964
by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, David Killingray
For imperialists, the concept of guardian is specifically to the armed forces that kept watch on the frontiers and in the heartlands of imperial territories. Large parts of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean were imperial possessions. This book discusses how military requirements and North Indian military culture, shaped the cantonments and considers the problems posed by venereal diseases and alcohol, and the sanitary strategies pursued to combat them. The trans-border Pathan tribes remained an insistent problem in Indian defence between 1849 and 1947. The book examines the process by which the Dutch elite recruited military allies, and the contribution of Indonesian soldiers to the actual fighting. The idea of naval guardianship as expressed in the campaign against the South Pacific labour trade is examined. The book reveals the extent of military influence of the Schutztruppen on the political developments in the German protectorates in German South-West Africa and German East Africa. The U.S. Army, charged with defending the Pacific possessions of the Philippines and Hawaii, encountered a predicament similar to that of the mythological Cerberus. The regimentation of military families linked access to women with reliable service, and enabled the King's African Rifles to inspire a high level of discipline in its African soldiers, askaris. The book explains the political and military pressures which drove successive French governments to widen the scope of French military operations in Algeria between 1954 and 1958. It also explores gender issues and African colonial armies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Representing Africa
Landscape, exploration and empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870
by John McAleer, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie
Southern Africa played a varied but vital role in Britain's maritime and imperial stories: it was one of the most intricate pieces in the British imperial strategic jigsaw, and representations of southern African landscape and maritime spaces reflect its multifaceted position. Representing Africa examines the ways in which British travellers, explorers and artists viewed southern Africa in a period of evolving and expanding British interest in the region. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, contemporary travelogues and visual images, many of which have not previously been published in this context, this book posits landscape as a useful prism through which to view changing British attitudes towards Africa. Richly illustrated, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British, African, imperial and exploration history, art history, and landscape and environment studies.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2019African security in the twenty-first century
by Stephen Emerson, Hussein Solomon
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017Ordering Africa
Anthropology, European imperialism and the politics of knowledge
by Helen Tilley, Robert Gordon
African research played a major role in transforming the discipline of anthropology in the twentieth century. Ethnographic studies, in turn, had significant effects on the way imperial powers in Africa approached subject peoples. Ordering Africa provides the first comparative history of these processes. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, the transnational features of knowledge production, and the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. Specific chapters examine French West Africa, the Belgian and French Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian Northeast Africa, Kenya, and Equatorial Africa (Gabon) as well as developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A major collection of essays that will be welcomed by scholars interested in imperial history and the history of Africa.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
Travellers in Africa
British travelogues, 1850-1900
by Timothy Youngs
Works of travel have been the subject of increasingly sophisticated studies in recent years. This book undermines the conviction with which nineteenth-century British writers talked about darkest Africa. It places the works of travel within the rapidly developing dynamic of Victorian imperialism. Images of Abyssinia and the means of communicating those images changed in response to social developments in Britain. As bourgeois values became increasingly important in the nineteenth century and technology advanced, the distance between the consumer and the product were justified by the scorn of African ways of eating. The book argues that the ambiguities and ambivalence of the travellers are revealed in their relation to a range of objects and commodities mentioned in narratives. For instance, beads occupy the dual role of currency and commodity. The book deals with Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, and attempts to prove that racial representations are in large part determined by the cultural conditions of the traveller's society. By looking at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it argues that the text is best read as what it purports to be: a kind of travel narrative. Only when it is seen as such and is regarded in the context of the fin de siecle can one begin to appreciate both the extent and the limitations of Conrad's innovativeness.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2013The African presence
Representations of Africa in the construction of Britishness
by Graham Harrison
This book considers the ways that representations of Africa have contributed to the changing nature of British national identity. Using interviews, photo archives, media coverage, advertisements, and web material, the book focuses on major Africa campaigns: the abolition of slavery, anti-apartheid, 'Drop the Debt', and 'Make Poverty History'. Using a hybrid theoretical framework, the book argues that the representation of Africa has been mainly about imagining virtuous Britishness rather than generating detailed understandings of Africa. The book develops this argument through a historical review of 200 years of Africa campaigning. It also looks more closely at recent and contemporary campaigning, opening up new issues and possibilities for campaigning: the increasing use of consumer identities, electronic media, and aspects of globalisation. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in postcolonial politics, relations between Britain and Africa, and development studies. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2011Destined for a Life of Service
Defining African–Jamaican womanhood, 1865–1938
by Henrice Altink, Pamela Sharpe, Penny Summerfield, Lynn Abrams, Cordelia Beattie
Based on a wide range of original sources, including folktales, anthropological studies, court statements, poetry and speeches, this book sheds new light on the struggle of people of African descent for full and equal citizenship in the post-emancipation British Caribbean. It examines the messages that African-Jamaican women were given about their place and roles from within and outside their own community, the extent to which these messages intersected with class and colour ideologies, and African-Jamaican women's attempts to realise these ideals of femininity amidst various constraints. Incorporating the full realm of African-Jamaican women's experiences, exploring not just their sexuality and reproduction but also their roles as labourers, citizens and freedom fighters, the book also links shifting gender ideologies to citizenship, race and nation. Essential reading for undergraduates and graduates interested in gender within the British Caribbean during the critical transformative period between 1865 and 1938, it will also interest political scientists and other scholars working on questions of nationalism, transnationalism and the gendered nature of citizenship. ;
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MedicineDecember 2020African nurses and everyday work in twentieth-century Zimbabwe
by Clement Masakure, Jane Schultz
