front cover of Batman Saves the Congo
Batman Saves the Congo
How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development
Alexandra Cosima Budabin
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

How celebrity strategic partnerships are disrupting humanitarian space

Can a celebrity be a “disrupter,” promoting strategic partnerships to bring new ideas and funding to revitalize the development field—or are celebrities just charismatic ambassadors for big business? Examining the role of the rich and famous in development and humanitarianism, Batman Saves the Congo argues that celebrities do both, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development. 

In 2010, entertainer Ben Affleck, known for his superhero performance as Batman, launched the Eastern Congo Initiative to bring a new approach to the region’s development. This case study is central to Batman Saves the Congo. Affleck’s organization operates with special access, diversified funding, and significant support of elites within political, philanthropic, development, and humanitarian circuits. This sets it apart from other development organizations. With his convening power, Affleck has built partnerships with those inside and outside development, staking bipartisan political ground that is neither charity nor aid but “good business.” Such visible and recognizable celebrity humanitarians are occupying the public domain yet not engaging meaningfully with any public, argues Batman Saves the Congo. They are an unruly bunch of new players in development who amplify business solutions. 

As elite political participants, celebrities shape development practices through strategic partnerships that are both an innovative way to raise awareness and funding for neglected causes and a troubling trend of unaccountable elite leadership in North–South relations. Batman Saves the Congo helps illuminate the power of celebritized business solutions and the development contexts they create. 

[more]

front cover of The Beautiful Skin
The Beautiful Skin
Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa
Vlad Dima
Michigan State University Press, 2020
In this original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature, Vlad Dima investigates the way that football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies, and highlights where football and cinema converge and diverge with regard to neocolonial fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Moussa Touré, Safi Faye, Cheick Doukouré, and Joseph Gaï Ramaka, among others, the study asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question requires the exploration of body and identity issues, here through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has visual, aural, and haptic qualities. The neocolonial body is often depicted as suffering and in the process of being flattened or emptied. So frequently do African cinema and literature replicate this hollowed body, all skin as it were, that it becomes the very type of body that defines neocolonialism. Could the body of film—the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin—hold the key to moving into a post-neocolonial era, an era defined by “full” bodies and personal affirmation? This is the question Dima seeks to answer.
[more]

front cover of Beautiful/Ugly
Beautiful/Ugly
African and Diaspora Aesthetics
Sarah Nuttall, ed.
Duke University Press, 2006
In Cameroon, a monumental “statue of liberty” is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness.

Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans’ Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising “morality” plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly “African” aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope.

Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès

[more]

front cover of Bending the Bow
Bending the Bow
An Anthology of African Love Poetry
Edited by Frank M. Chipasula
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

From the ancient Egyptian inventors of the love lyric to contemporary poets, Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry gathers together both written and sung love poetry from Africa.

This anthology is a work of literary archaeology that lays bare a genre of African poetry that has been overshadowed by political poetry. Frank Chipasula has assembled a historically and geographically comprehensive wealth of African love poetry that spans more than three thousand years. By collecting a continent’s celebrations and explorations of the nature of love, he expands African literature into the sublime territory of the heart.


Bending the Bow traces the development of African love poetry from antiquity to modernity while establishing a cross-millennial dialogue. The anonymously written love poems fromPharaonic Egypt that open the anthology both predate Biblical love poetry and reveal the longevity of written love poetry in Africa. The middle section is devoted to sung love poetry from all regions of the continent. These great works serve as the foundation for modern poetry and testify to love poetry’s omnipresence in Africa. The final section, showcasing forty-eight modern African poets, celebrates the genre’s continuing vitality. Among those represented are Muyaka bin Hajji and Shaaban Robert,two major Swahili poets; Gabriel Okara, the innovative though underrated Nigerian poet; Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal and a founder of the Negritude Movement in francophone African literature; Rashidah Ismaili from Benin; Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar; and Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa. 


Ranging from the subtly suggestive to the openly erotic, this collection highlights love’s endurance in a world too often riven by contention. Bending the Bow bears testimony to poetry’s role as conciliator while opening up a new area of study for scholars and students.

[more]

front cover of Beyond Memory
Beyond Memory
An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction
Pauline Kaldas
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
This anthology brings together the voices of both new and established Arab American writers in a compilation of creative nonfiction that reveals the stories of the Arab diaspora in styles that range from the traditional to the experimental. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, and Syria explore issues related to politics, family, culture, and racism. Coming from different belief systems and cultures and including first- and second-generation immigrants as well as those whose identities encompass more than a single culture, these writers tell stories that speak to the complexity of the Arab American experience.
[more]

front cover of The Black Aesthetic Unbound
The Black Aesthetic Unbound
Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature
April C. E. Langley
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
During the era of the slave trade, more than 12 million Africans were brought as slaves to the Americas. Their memories, ideas, beliefs, and practices would forever reshape its history and cultures. April C. E. Langley’s The Black Aesthetic Unbound exposes the dilemma of the literal, metaphorical, and rhetorical question, "What is African in African American literature?" Confronting the undeniable imprints of West African culture and consciousness in early black writing such as Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative or Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, the author conceives eighteenth-century Black Experience to be literally and figuratively encompassing and inextricably linked to Africa, Europe, and America.

Consequently, this book has three aims: to locate the eighteenth century as the genesis of the cultural and historical movements which mark twentieth-century black aestheticism—known as the Black Aesthetic; to analyze problematic associations of African identity as manifested in an essentialized Afro-America; and to study the relationship between specific West African modes of thought and expression and the emergence of a black aesthetic in eighteenth-century North America. By exploring how Senegalese, Igbo, and other West African traditions provide striking new lenses for reading poetry and prose by six significant writers, Langley offers a fresh perspective on this important era in our literary history. Ultimately, the author confronts the difficult dilemma of how to use diasporic, syncretic, and vernacular theories of Black culture to think through the massive cultural transformations wrought by the Middle Passage.
[more]

front cover of Black and White in Colour
Black and White in Colour
African History on Screen
Vivian Bickford-Smith
Ohio University Press, 2007

Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen considers how the African past has been represented in a wide range of historical films. Written by a team of eminent international scholars, the volume provides extensive coverage of both place and time and deals with major issues in the written history of Africa. Themes include the slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial resistance. Many of the films will be familiar to readers: they include Out of Africa, Hotel Rwanda, Breaker Morant, Cry Freedom, The Battle of Algiers, and Chocolat.

This collection of essays is a highly original and useful contribution to African historiography, as well as a significant addition to the growing body of work within the emerging subdiscipline of “film and history.” It will appeal to those interested in African history and the ways in which films use the past to raise questions about the present.

Contributors: Mahir Saul, Ralph A. Austen, Robert Baum, Robert Harms, Nigel Worden, Carolyn Hamilton and Litheko Modisane, Richard Mendelsohn, Shamil Jeppie, Bill Nasson, Nigel Penn, Ruth Watson, Patrick Harries, David Moore, Teresa Barnes, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Mohamed Adhikari, and David Philips.

[more]

front cover of Black Cultural Life in South Africa
Black Cultural Life in South Africa
Reception, Apartheid, and Ethics
Lily Saint
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Under apartheid, black South Africans experienced severe material and social disadvantages occasioned by the government’s policies, and they had limited time for entertainment. Still, they closely engaged with an array of textual and visual cultures in ways that shaped their responses to this period of ethical crisis. Marshaling forms of historical evidence that include passbooks, memoirs, American “B” movies, literary and genre fiction, magazines, and photocomics, Black Cultural Life in South Africa considers the importance of popular genres and audiences in the relationship between ethical consciousness and aesthetic engagement.

This study provocatively posits that states of oppression, including colonial and postcolonial rule, can elicit ethical responses to imaginative identification through encounters with popular culture, and it asks whether and how they carry over into ethical action. Its consideration of how globalized popular culture “travels” not just in material form, but also through the circuits of the imaginary, opens a new window for exploring the ethical and liberatory stakes of popular culture. Each chapter focuses on a separate genre, yet the overall interdisciplinary approach to the study of genre and argument for an expansion of ethical theory that draws on texts beyond the Western canon speak to growing concerns about studying genres and disciplines in isolation. Freed from oversimplified treatments of popular forms—common to cultural studies and ethical theory alike—this book demonstrates that people can do things with mass culture that reinvigorate ethical life.

Lily Saint’s new volume will interest Africanists across the humanities and the social sciences, and scholars of Anglophone literary, globalization, and cultural studies; race; ethical theories and philosophies; film studies; book history and material cultures; and the burgeoning field of comics and graphic novels.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Black, French, and African
A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor
Janet G. Vaillant
Harvard University Press, 1990

Black, French, and African is the first biography in English of the extraordinary poet, politician and intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor. As a prizewinning poet in French, Senghor was the first African to be elected to the Académie Française for his contribution to French culture; as a statesman, he was the first president of independent Senegal from 1961 to 1980, a nation still among the most democratic in Africa; as an intellectual, he was an originator of the theory of Négritude—a term that to him meant “the manner of self-expression of the black character, the black world, black civilization”—and a leader of West African independence.

Through her sleuthing, interviewing, and ferreting out details over a period of years, Janet Vaillant has drawn a captivating multi-dimensional portrait of this unusual man. She introduces us to Senghor the child, through descriptions of his family, the traditional culture of the Serer people of Senegal, and the system of French colonialism that gave him his contradictory sense of “place”; then to Senghor the young man, as he pursued his academic and literary education in Paris of the late 1920s. Finally, she moves on to his involvement in this special fraternity of “men of color” that crystallized in Paris in the mid 1930s and that fostered the theory of Negritude for which Senghor became such an articulate spokesman.

Senghor’s biography contributes to an understanding of postindependence African leadership as well as French and African-American intellectual history and literature. Vaillant examines links between his personal experience, his political work, and his poetry, and the effects of his political ideology on state-building. She also provides us with larger context in which Senghor worked—his debts and contributions to the writing and thinking of blacks in America and France, and his importance as a leader of a colonized people dealing with the industrialized West.

[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
The Black Mind
A History of African Literature
O.R. Dathorne
University of Minnesota Press, 1974

The Black Mind was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The comprehensive account of the development of African literature from its beginnings in oral tradition to its contemporary expression in the writings of Africans in various African and European languages provides insight, both broad and deep, into the Black intellect. Professor Dathorne examines the literature of Africans as spoken or written in their local languages and in Latin, French, Portuguese, and English. This extensive survey and interpretation gives the reader a remarkable pathway to an understanding of the Black imagination and its relevance to thought and creativity throughout the world.

The author himself lived in Africa for ten years, and his view in not that of an outsider, since it is as a Black man that he speaks about Black people. Throughout the book, a major theme is the demonstration that, despite slavery and colonialism, Africans remained very close to their own cultures. Professor Dathorne shows that African writers may be, like some Afro-American writers, "marginal men," but that they are Black men and it is as Black men that they feel the nostalgia of their past and the corrosive influences of their present.

The chapters are divided into sections: Tradition; Heritage; The Presence of Europe; and Crosscurrents. In the final chapters the author extends the thread of continuity to the New World—Africa as present in the work of Black writers in the United States and in the Caribbean.

[more]

front cover of Blank Darkness
Blank Darkness
Africanist Discourse in French
Christopher L. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 1986
"Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French is a brilliant and altogether convincing analysis of the way in which Western writers, from Homer to the twentieth century have . . . imposed their language of desire on the least-known part of the world and have called it 'Africa.' There are excellent readings here of writers ranging from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sade, and Céline to Conrad and Yambo Ouologuem, but even more impressive and important than these individual readings is Mr. Miller's wide-ranging, incisive, and exact analysis of 'Africanist' discourse, what it has been and what it has meant in the literature of the Western world."—James Olney, Louisiana State University
[more]

front cover of The Blueness of the Evening
The Blueness of the Evening
Selected Poems of Hassan Najmi
Mbarek Sryfi
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
This selection of Hassan Najmi’s poems, translated by Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of Morocco’s foremost poets and to a school of modern verse emerging in the Arab World. Scenes of late night cityscapes, lonely interiors, awe-inspiring desert wastes, and seaside vistas are found within the exquisitely subtle lyric moods and nuances of Najmi’s ars poetica, providing insight into the geographical, political, and linguistic ferment that have made Morocco an exciting hub of creative activity in the twenty-first century.
[more]

front cover of Broken English
Broken English
An Amish Country Mystery
P. L. Gaus
Ohio University Press, 2000

Broken English  is a tale of honor, deception, and revenge, one in which circumstances and the search for justice test the mettle of the closest of friends and reveal the desperate measures of the strongest of foes. Following on the critical and popular success of P. L. Gaus’ acclaimed Amish mystery series, this new edition of Broken English includes an exclusive interview with the author, discussion questions for reading groups, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.

The peaceful town of Millersburg, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country, is rocked by the vicious murder of a woman at the hands of an ex-convict. When a local reporter covering the story turns up dead, while the convict is already behind bars, suspicion falls on David Hawkins, the first victim’s father. With Hawkins nowhere to be found among the protective Amish community that had taken him in as one of its own, Professor Michael Branden, Sheriff Bruce Robertson, and Pastor Cal Troyer set out to uncover the elusive truth in this otherwise quiet corner of the world.

[more]

front cover of Broken Lives and Other Stories
Broken Lives and Other Stories
Ris Af#79
Anthonia C. Kalu
Ohio University Press, 2003
In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself. Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland. Written in response to the Nigerian Civil War, known on the Igbo side as Ogu Biafra—the Biafran War—this collection focuses on the everyday conditions of the local people and how their personal situations became entangled in national crises. The stories capture a diversity of issues, from the implications of self-rule and the presence of soldiers among civilians, to masquerades, air raids, and rape. Through her riveting narratives, Kalu draws the reader into the depths of some of Africa’s most troubling issues, such as the concern for safety during the frequent outbreaks of hostilities, which can range from civil unrest to armed combat. How do young people, women, and the elderly cope during those crises? Are the struggles for national political power greater than the everyday struggle for decent living by the person on the street? While conveying the vitality and joy of Africa’s women and youth, Broken Lives and Other Stories also examines the impact of the brain drain caused by wars and instability within the continent itself. Both the war against women and women’s constant war to survive in contemporary Africa are brought into sharp focus throughout these stories. For readers interested in the last thirty-five years of unrest across Africa, this collection is essential reading.
[more]

front cover of Bulletproof
Bulletproof
Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond
Jennifer Wenzel
University of Chicago Press, 2009

In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in Bulletproof.

Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter