Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Popular Arts in Contemporary Africa

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 43, No. 4
Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Everyday Africa
Onookome Okome and Stephanie Newell, Guest Editors

The essays in this volume celebrate the depth, scope and ambition of Karin Barber’s 1987 essay, “Popular Arts in Africa, “which sets out to open and solidify the study of popular arts in Africa."

Barber’s essay continues to be regarded as groundbreaking, incisive, decisive, and the most influential work on African popular arts in African studies scholarship. A cursory database search proves this fact: it is one of the most referenced essays within African studies and perhaps the most eloquent essay to date on the subject.

The essay’s foundation was built on solid field research and thoughtful, inspired analysis, the kind of which we can only compare to a few other scholars in the field. It brought order and some measure of respectability to the study of African popular performance in its broadest sense.

Published twenty-five years ago, “Popular Arts in Africa” has influenced the work of a generation of Africanists in Africa and all over the world. Going back to this essay reminds us that a lot may have changed since it was published, but the desires and methods of expressing want, deprivation, happiness, hope, and aspiration on the streets of the continent are more or less the same as they were twenty-five years ago.

The contributors therefore implicitly testify without exception that the definitional ground has been adequately covered by Barber’s essay. What these contributors do bring newly to the table as they examine the cultural changes and social transformations that matter to popular Africa—especially those that have to do with the transition from old media to new forms is their interrogations and novel interpretations of the modalities of change in the popular arts that have emerged or are emerging since the publication of Barber’s essay. They show how new technologies have helped to recast and rephrase narrative styles, themes, audiences, and the city in these art forms.

The essays in this volume also demonstrate how media interacts with new modes of artistic production and consumption in contemporary Africa. It means then that the first major aspect we find in these essays is that they proclaim the veracity of Barber’s argument in all its complex manifestations. It is used to read and probe the saliencies of the new art forms that have emerged in the last twenty five years. This makes the eloquent point that Barber’s intervention was as relevant when it was first published as it is now.

Excerpts from the Introduction by the guest editors.

For more information on Karin Barber: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/cwas/barber-karin.aspx

To subscribe to Research in African Literatures or to purchase a single issue, visit http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=reseafrilite.

Persona, Transition 109

Transition 109: Persona  |  October 2012

Many of the artists featured in Transition 109 make their livings making themselves up—Renée Stout buying new potions for her “shop” as the root worker Madam Ching, or Rashaad Newsome drawing on “the equalizing force of sampling” to create his own language and title in the heraldic tradition. 
 
But even for these performance artists, persona shades into personality, and their theatrics don’t seem so different from the daily wardrobe decisions of metalheads in Botswana, or, at the other end of the spectrum, the highly tuned persona, personality, and apotheosis of personhood that is Oprah herself. As Ms. Winfrey might say, you are your hardest role yet.

The craft of the self is unmasked in this issue, revealing the sleight of hand at play in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous words: “We wear the mask.” There’s a special ring to it in the African diaspora.

Visit the Transition website to learn more about the magazine: http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine.

To subscribe to Transition visit http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress.

Everyday Life in Postwar Sierra Leone

Africa Today 58.2, Special Issue: Everyday Life in Postwar Sierra Leone
Guest Editors: Aisha Fofana Ibrahim, Susan Shepler

Most scholarly observers of postwar societies focus at the level of the state, security apparatus, or legislative changes, or they evaluate the success of reconstruction programming. In contrast, with a focus on everyday life in postwar Sierra Leone, the essays in this special issue focus on changes at the level of people’s lived experiences, where the authors believe reconciliation and social reconstruction really take place. The central problematic of the essays is creativity in the formation of new identities and cultures and the remaking of gender, generational relationships, and urbanization. The essays in this issue interrogate the changes wrought by war in totality and examine the emergence of new cultural forms that challenge political, social, economic, and religious discourses and practices in postwar Sierra Leone.  They examine, on the one hand, the seemingly contradictory processes shaped by fissures and breaks, and on the other hand, the continuity that accompanies social life. The topics range from the tactics local Civil Society Organizations are using to cope with funding shortages as international flows dry up, to changes in the identity of people with disabilities, to food as a locus for memory of the war and in discourses of corruption and survival. A pair of articles discuss the phenomenon of okada (motorcycle taxi) drivers, a set of young men, assumed by many to be ex-combatants, navigating new livelihoods and new social identities in postwar Sierra Leone. The final article assesses the state of the so-called “youth crisis” ten years after the end of the war.  These essays provide multiple perspectives on social transformations in postwar Sierra Leone, acknowledging the shifting social and political landscape in which people draw on multiple discursive and material resources to make their everyday lives, and in the process, to remake their society. 

Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

Africa Today (57.3): Special Issue on Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

The articles in this special issue were part of a project that culminated in a major conference, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, on 23 and 24 October 2009. The conference attracted scholars from institutions of higher education in Eastern Africa, East African scholars in the diaspora, and scholars whose research is rooted in the literary and cultural imaginaries of the region. Built around a broad thematic structure, “Eastern Literary and Intellectual Landscapes,” the papers were aimed at providing a critical reflection on cultural and intellectual legacies of the region through history. Not all the papers presented at the conference have made it into this volume, nor are the papers published here necessarily representative of the issues that the conference’s deliberations explored, but they are a distinct and important voice, emerging out of a region where cultural and intellectual traditions remain understudied. This volume is therefore an important portal on the region.  

Although concerned with disparate and often distinct issues, at least superficially, the papers are connected through strikingly similar tropes and concerns, in a tortured postcolonial context, which has given shape to issues with which these papers grapple. We use the postcolonial context to mean the totality and effect of the colonial experience from the moment of colonial penetration to the aftermath of political independence. A striking contradiction about colonialism is that it needed both to “civilize” its “others,” and to fix them into perpetual “otherness.” It is therefore unsurprising that a theme running through these papers is the colonial subject’s engagement with colonial modernity, quite often to challenge attempts to fix and consign the colonized to the status of the “other,” but equally to negotiate its own agency by appropriating and redefining received notions of “civilization.” The appropriation of colonial institutional structures such as education and the print media were central to this attempt to find a voice. Even the transcultural impulse, which underpins some of the papers in this volume, is very much part of that attempt to show how difficult it was to police cultural boundaries between people and to reinforce the fixity of identity that the colonial social order sought to impose on the colonized subjects, but it was also about what postcolonial modernity really meant in practice—which is to suggest that it was about collapsing boundaries, motion, and trafficking ideas back and forth across different cultural and geographical scapes. This motion, in the case of East Africa, was initiated by the Indian Ocean fortune-seekers from the Indian subcontinent, long before classical colonial modernity found its way into the continent. These global currents, best captured in the metaphor of Indian Ocean dhows and sails, would be accentuated by the colonial experience in East Africa soon after the partition of the continent into European spheres of influence at the Berlin conference of 1885.

The Berlin conference created putative, if often artificial, nation-states, which have remained some of the most significant sites of dispute in postcolonial writing in Africa. The connection between postcolonial writing and nation is possible only when we realize that a nation itself can be a site of difference and tension—a site for the competing imaginings of different ideological and political interests. Again, some of the papers in this volume return to this site to engage with these differences and concerns that relate to gender, class, ethnicity, and other issues. How power is engaged and deflected through struggles that are manifestly gendered and ethnic is at the heart of some of these papers. The mobilization of oppressive gender structures rooted in patriarchy and the use of politicized ethnicity by the postcolonial political class in Africa is a stark reminder that the imaginings of national communities in Africa remain profoundly gendered and ethnic.

Papers in this volume continue to privilege “texts” as important sources for understanding and analyzing historical processes and practices, but they nevertheless help us extend the idea of texts beyond literary texts in English to include a range of other cultural productions, such as indigenous music and musical instruments, and indeed the vernacular press, as legitimate sources of postcolonial discourse. What this process does is to broaden our reach of the sites of contestation of colonial modernity beyond the texts and institutions we have come to associate with “legitimate” discourse. Local agency for colonial subjects in Eastern Africa was negotiated, not simply through mainstream texts in English, but through cultural metaphors and signs that had their roots in local cultures and traditions. These metaphors and signs work through the process of translation and appropriation, which defies attempts to fix them, and by extension to fix the bodies and minds that use them. This is where the authority of texts as narrative comes in: to inhabit and colonize spaces that may be alien to it through translation and transformative strategies only open to narrative.

Subscribe to AFRICA TODAY by visiting IU Press/Journals on JSTOR.

Black Camera Volume 1 Number 2 now available!

The newest issue of Black Camera: An International Film Journal is now available online and in print. The issue features articles by Terri Francis of Yale University on Black independent film and Matt Guterl of Indiana University on Josephine Baker as well as an interview by Michael T. Martin and Marissa Moorman, both from Indiana University, with Angolan filmmaker Ondjaki. The issue also introduces a new section featuring essays from prominent French film critic and founder of Africultures,  Olivier Barlet. The essays focus on key concerns of the African film industry. Posters highlighted in the issue are from African films dating from 1985 to the present.

Africa’s Spaces of Exclusion

The five papers in Africa Today 56:3 (Special Issue) were part of two sessions on "Africa’s Spaces of Exclusion" at the meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2009. The AAG meeting brings together thousands of geographers from around the world and this issue includes papers from authors based in North America, Europe, and Africa. The idea for these sessions actually goes back to 2008 when the editors — Sarah Smiley and Francis Koti — chatted about their research. They realized that a common theme in their research projects was exclusion and, more importantly, they discussed the absence of conference sessions explicitly focused on exclusion. Certainly the topic pops up in papers and debates, but it is rarely the main theme of sessions. They organized these sessions as a way to engage seminal geographical works on exclusion – especially those by David Sibley – with Africa.

This special issue provides a broad overview of exclusion in Africa. It does not have a regional focus: the authors cover Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. Nor does the issue have a methodological focus: the papers use both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and in some cases use both methods together. The common theme throughout the issue is the importance of exclusion in understanding both historical and contemporary African issues. The topics covered in this issue are of great importance to scholars, policy makers, and the excluded. Belinda Dobson’s article uses personal stories of migrants in Cape Town, South Africa to provide insights into experiences of xenophobia and exclusion. Sarah Smiley’s article demonstrates that expatriates in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania consciously create social and spatial exclusion as a reaction to perceptions of fear. Muriel Yeboah’s article links poverty and exclusion using a case study of porters in Accra, Ghana, demonstrating the presence of gender-based discrimination. Francis Koti’s article brings a technical approach to exclusion by using participatory geographic information systems to show how peri-urban residents of Nairobi, Kenya are excluded from urban planning. Pádraig Carmody and Godfrey Hampwaye’s article focuses on the presence of Chinese businesses in Zambia, demonstrating how these businesses negatively affect the country in terms of job creation for non-Zambians.

To purchase a single issue, the articles or to subscribe to Africa Today visit our website, INscribe.

Cultural Globalization

English Faculty Begin Journal's Third Year Responding to Literary, Cultural Globalization
Written by Edwin Smith  
09/15/2009

http://news.olemiss.edu/index.php/Ole-Miss-News/News-Releases/The-Global-South.html

OXFORD, Miss. - A scholarly movement addressing the impact of globalization on Southern societies around the world continues at the University of Mississippi with the research journal The Global South beginning its third year of publication. The interdisciplinary journal, started in 2007 by faculty in UM's Department of English, is published once each semester by Indiana University Press. It focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization.

The journal's editor, Adetayo Alabi, UM associate professor of English who teaches courses in Caribbean, African and African-American literatures, said the university is the ideal locale for the journal's headquarters.

"Being a major university in the South, we're located where the action is," Alabi said. "Also, having the Center for the Study of Southern Culture here on campus fits very well with what we do. The two entities complement each other well."

"Having The Global South (journal) here has helped put the university at the center of an important scholarly movement that studies the American South from multiple and transitional perspectives," said Ted Ownby, CSSC director. "Taking a global perspective is part of a movement that involves new conferences, new courses and new ways of teaching, along with some inspired and exciting recent scholarship."

Addressing such themes as the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and post-colonialism, and transatlantic encounters, the journal has experienced rapid readership growth. Each peer-reviewed volume logs approximately 1,700 subscribers to either its online or print version.

"Since assuming sole editorship of The Global South, Professor Alabi has kept the journal on the cutting edge of academic scholarship," said Ivo Kamps, UM chair and professor of English.

Other members of the journal's staff include Assistant Professor of English Sarah Lincoln, who serves as assistant editor, and graduate assistant James Christopher O'Brien of Memphis, who works as an editorial assistant.

Advisory editorial board members include faculty at the University of New South Wales, University of London, University of Macau, University of Nottingham, Delhi University, University of Wollongong and University of Western Australia, as well as those at several state and private universities in the United States.

Alabi said that from the North American South to the European South, Latin and Central America, Africa, Asia and Australia, the various Souths share comparable experiences that differentiate them from mainstream cultures.
"Findings indicate that while expansion and trade are generally beneficial for those living outside the South, those in the South don't always get the best of the pie," he said.

For example, globalization directs mass production of items manufactured by various industries, a change that usually causes the production of materials indigenous to the local citizenry to significantly dwindle, Alabi said. In another instance, the influx of textiles from China into Nigeria has adversely affected that country's own textile industry.

"The research shows that many of the Souths have not had a completely positive experience of globalization," Alabi said. "While they may not necessarily share a common wealth, they do intersect over various issues of marginalization and inadequate access to means of production and amenities under globalization.

For more information, call Alabi at 662-915-6948 or visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/gso/

Engaging Christianities: Negotiating HIV/AIDS, Health, and Social Relations in East and Southern Africa

Special Issue: Christianity and HIV/AIDS in East and Southern Africa   
Africa Today VOLUME 56, ISSUE 1

From the introduction by Ruth Prince, Philippe Denis, Rijk van Dijk:

The purpose of this special issue is to explore and analyze the ways in which Christianity is becoming one of the most influential factors in the engagement of AIDS in some African countries. This special issue addresses the consequences of this rapidly expanding Christian engagement with AIDS and the questions it raises. These questions can be grouped into three main themes: first, those concerning the ways people are dealing with illness and death, treatment and care for the sick, and questions of morality, kinship, gender relations, and sexuality; second, those concerning the place of religion in the public sphere, in relation to civil society and government, development, and public health; third, those concerning transformations within Christian practices and worldviews in Africa. This special issue explores not only some diverse responses of African churches to AIDS, but also the place of Christianity in (inter)national AIDS programs and initiatives, and the Christianization of public discourse and debate about AIDS and its effects on other institutions, practices, and debates in African societies experiencing the AIDS epidemic.

This special issue thus offers recent research and timely reflections on the interrelationships of Christianity, AIDS, and society in African countries. As the studies presented here encompass East and Southern Africa (specifically, Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), this collection does not claim to present an overview of research in the whole continent, nor of the relations between Christianity and AIDS in Africa today; rather, it offers insights into the sometimes surprising relationships between AIDS and Christianity at particular moments and places over the last ten years.

Special Issue: Christianity and HIV/AIDS in East and Southern Africa   
Africa Today VOLUME 56, ISSUE 1

Introduction to Special Issue: Engaging Christianities: Negotiating HIV/AIDS, Health, and Social Relations in East and Southern Africa
Ruth Prince, Philippe Denis, Rijk van Dijk

Faith and the Intersubjectivity of Care in Botswana
Frederick Klaits

The “Failures of Culture”: Christianity, Kinship, and Moral Discourses about Orphans during Botswana's AIDS Crisis
Bianca Dahl

“Keep Holy Distance and Abstain till He Comes”: Interrogating a Pentecostal Church's Engagements with HIV/AIDS and the Youth in Kenya
Damaris Seleina Parsitau

HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches, and the “Joseph Generation” in Uganda
Alessandro Gusman

Doing Better? Religion, the Virtue-Ethics of Development, and the Fragmentation of Health Politics in Tanzania
Hansjörg Dilger

BOOK REVIEWS

The Pitfalls of Liberal Democracy and Late Nationalism in South Africa. Mueni wa Muiu
E. Ike Udogu

Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960–1974. Messay Kebede
Christopher R. Green

Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa. Dambisa Moyo
Ama Biney

To subscribe or order a special issue visit http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/aft.

IU Press/Journals to Publish Black Camera

In partnership with the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive (BFCA), IU Press/Journals will publish Black Camera, edited by Michael T. Martin, beginning in the fall of 2009.  

Black Camera is devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience and is the only scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States. Published twice a year, it features essays and interviews that engage film in social as well as political context and in relation to historical and economic forces that bear on the reception, distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.

In addition, Black Camera includes research and archival notes, editorials, reports, interviews with emerging and prominent filmmakers, and book and film reviews and addresses a wide range of genres—including documentary, experimental film and video, diasporic cinema, animation, musicals, comedy, and so on. It challenges received and ensconced views and assumptions about the traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, where new and longstanding cinematic formations are in play. While its scope is interdisciplinary and inclusive of all of the African diaspora, the journal devotes issues or sections of issues to national cinemas, as well as independent, marginal, or oppositional films and cinematic formations.

Please check our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org for more information on Black Camera and on Film History, which has been published by IU Press since 2004 and is now in its twentieth volume.

The Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive, directed by Michael Martin, was established in 1981 as a repository of films and related materials by and about African Americans. Included in its collection are hundreds of movie posters.  Black Camera will regularly include four-color samples of this impressive collection in every issue.  

Alain Mabanckou’s Blog

Each month we give you the opportunity to sample content from our journals at no cost.

December Read for Free

Research in African Literatures • Volume 39 Number 4
New Technologies and the Popular: Alain Mabanckou’s Blog

From the abstract by Dominic Thomas:

New technologies are gradually and systematically transforming the process of information dissemination and retrieval. The implications are wideranging,and the virtual cartographies and landscapes delineated by these new technologies are largely uncharted. The distribution and marketing of print culture has been historically uneven, and whereas inequities continue to exist and disproportionately impact francophone sub-Saharan Africa, accessibility to information and participation in cultural, political, and social dialogue has been enhanced as a result of certain internet mechanisms. The interview that follows explores how the blog held by the critically acclaimed Congolese novelist and poet Alain Mabanckou operates as a new forum for conversation, debate, and exchange between people located in different parts of the world.

To read this article, click here.

You can read Alain Mabanckou’s Blog at:

http://www.alainmabanckou.net/
http://www.lecreditavoyage.com/

For more information on the journal Research in African Literatures, see http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/ral.