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The Question of 'Race' in the Pre-Colonial Southern Sahara
The Question of ‘Race’ in the Pre-colonial Southern Sahara BRUCE S. HALL One of the principle issues that divide people in the southern margins of the Sahara Desert is the issue of ‘race.’ Each of the countries that share this region, from Mauritania to Sudan, has experienced civil violence with racial overtones since achieving independence from colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. Today’s crisis in Western Sudan is only the latest example. However, very little academic attention has been paid to the issue of ‘race’ in the region, in large part because southern Saharan racial discourses do not correspond directly to the idea of ‘race’ in the West. For the outsider, local racial distinctions are often difficult to discern because somatic difference is not the only, and certainly not the most important, basis for racial identities. In this article, I focus on the development of pre-colonial ideas about ‘race’ in the Hodh, Azawad, and Niger Bend, which today are in Northern Mali and Western Mauritania. The article examines the evolving relationship between North and West Africans along this Sahelian borderland using the writings of Arab travellers, local chroniclers, as well as several specific documents that address the issue of the legitimacy of enslavement of different West African groups. Using primarily the Arabic writings of the Kunta, a politically ascendant Arab group in the area, the paper explores the extent to which discourses of ‘race’ served growing nomadic power. My argument is that during the nineteenth century, honorable lineages and genealogies came to play an increasingly important role as ideological buttresses to struggles for power amongst nomadic groups and in legitimising domination over sedentary communities. -
Book Reviews
African Studies Quarterly | Volume 10, Issue 4 | Spring 2009 BOOK REVIEWS Kwasi Konadu. Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society. New York: Routledge, 2007. 240p. The historical analysis of conceptions of health and healing in many traditional African societies offer an interesting avenue for the study of the contradictions and ambivalences within definitions of medical knowledge and the concept of disease. Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society brings to mind the challenges of writing and investigating the therapeutic knowledge of indigenous societies and provides important suggestions for the study of medicine and knowledge systems in Africa. As much about therapeutic knowledge as about culture, it adds to our understanding of the resilience of traditional practices in contemporary Africa. Kwasi Konadu consciously modeled his discussion of traditional Bono-Takyiman (Akan, Ghana) medical knowledge to refute the work of Dennis M. Warren in “Religion, Disease, and Medicine among the Bono-Takyiman,” which relied on the healing knowledge of one traditional healer (Nana Kofi Donkor) as the baseline data in looking at the work of several indigenous healers. Konadu argues that although Warren’s work is laudable, “it must be stated that the experiences, perceptions, and levels of competence amongst healers are not identical, and to use one person as a standard or benchmark seems problematic in the articulation of an ‘ethnomedical system’ authenticated by so few sources that possess equivalent levels of in- depth medical knowledge and aptitude” (xxix). Konadu also hopes for his work to serve as foundation on which future research into indigenous medicine and knowledge would be embedded. -
The Spiritual Landscapes of Barbados
W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 4-2016 Sacred Grounds and Profane Plantations: The Spiritual Landscapes of Barbados Myles Sullivan College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the African History Commons, Archaeological Anthropology Commons, Cultural History Commons, History of Religion Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Sullivan, Myles, "Sacred Grounds and Profane Plantations: The Spiritual Landscapes of Barbados" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 945. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/945 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sullivan 1 Sacred Grounds and Profane Plantations: The Spiritual Landscapes of Barbados Myles Sullivan Sullivan 2 Table of Contents Introduction page 3 Background page 4 Research page 6 Spiritual Landscapes page 9 The Archaeology and Anthropology of Spiritual Practices in the Caribbean page 16 Early Spiritual Landscapes page 21 Barbadian Spiritual Landscapes: Liminal Spaces in a “Creole” Slave Society page 33 Spiritual Landscapes of Recent Memory page 47 Works Cited page 52 Figures Fig 1: Map of Barbados page 4 Fig 2: Worker’s Village Site at Saint Nicholas Abbey page 7 Fig 3: Stone pile on ridgeline page 8 Fig 4: Disembarked Africans on Barbados (1625-1850) page 23 Fig 5: Total percentage arrivals of Africans by regions page 23 Fig 6: “Gaming” Pieces from the slave village site page 42 Fig 7: Gully areas at St. -
Mu√Allaf T Al-Shuyükh: I. the Writings of Ivor Wilks
MU√ALLAF◊T AL-SHUYÜKH: I. THE WRITINGS OF IVOR WILKS This is the first of a series of reports, listing the writings of senior scholars in the field of Sudanic Africa. The aim is to help researchers become more fully acquainted with such scholars’ writings, which are often to be found in a wide range of journals and multi-authored volumes, some of which have long been out of print, or in the case of journals, ceased to be regularly published. The lists are based on information provided by the scholars themselves. We begin the series with the writings of the historian Ivor Wilks, now in retirement after over two decades of service at Northwestern University (1971-1993), and thirteen years at the University of Ghana (1953-66).1 He has contributed to Sudanic Africa, and has made a valuable contribution to volume 4 of Arabic Literature of Africa, which will shortly be published by Brill. Publications 1961 The Northern Factor in Ashanti History. Legon: Institute of African Studies. 1961 ‘Festival at Jenne’. West African Review, xxxii, 402, June 1961, 48-50. 1961 ‘The Northern Factor in Ashanti History: Begho and the Mande’. Journal of African History, ii, 1, 25-34. 1 For more biographical information on him, see Nancy Lawler, ‘Ivor Wilks: a biographical note’, in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler (eds.), The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society, Ghanaian and Islamic, in Honor of Ivor Wilks, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996, 5-13. Sudanic Africa, 12, 2001, 143-155 144 MU√ALLAF◊T AL-SHUYÜKH [Repr., The Bobbs-Merrill Reprint Series, BC-318.] 1961-62 [with Mahmoud El-Wakkad] ‘Qissatu Salga Tarikhu Gonja: the Story of Salaga and the History of Gonja’. -
Transatlantic Slaving (Diet) and Implications for Health in the African Diaspora
14 transatlantic slaving (diet) and implications for health in the african diaspora Kwasi Konadu introduction he modern movement of plants and peoples in the Atlantic region created a T synthesis where those crops and their dietary implications became part of the genetics and health challenges for the region’s African Diaspora. International slav- ing created this Diaspora, and once the former morphed into sharecropping, wage laboring, and underemployment, the enduring socio-economic legacy of a metamor- phosing slavery partially explains the prevalence of certain diets and diseases disproportionately affecting diasporic Africans. Indeed, diet plays a critical part in determining long-term metabolic health, and environmental factors interact with the genome throughout our life to determine gene expression and, consequently, dis- ease risk. The cast members for which the African Diaspora is at greatest risk include hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and obesity. The other part of the diet and disease story is that these ubiquitous illnesses are preventable, though bound to a diet and the changing demands of a capitalist world forged through the processes of transatlantic slaving. Within the transatlantic slaving processes of forced movement, alienation from homelands, and domestication—for both people and plants—laid the origins of the slaving diet, which grew out of the transatlantic sys- tem and which became deeply rooted in the foodways of both sides of the Atlantic. Under this system, the major conveyer for edible crops and commodified black bod- ies were British and Portuguese registered vessels. Between 1500 and 1900, the vast majority of enslaved Africans were drawn essentially from west and west central Africa (and later southeast Africa in the nineteenth century), and staple crops that are a hallmark in the diet of those regions and the American Diaspora remain corn, cassava, yams, rice, plantains, and bananas (Mbida et al. -
Ousmane KANE Ph.D Alwaleed Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society, Harvard Divinity School & Professor Of
Ousmane KANE Ph.D Alwaleed Professor of Contemporary Islamic Religion and Society, Harvard Divinity School & Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University Andover Hall, 45 Francis Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 Email: [email protected] TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS Islam and Muslim Societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Comparative Politics, Islamic politics, religion and transnational migration, African Islamic intellectual history. EDUCATION Doctorat (Ph.D) in Political Science. Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Paris, France. 1993. Areas of specialization: Comparative Politics (Sub- Saharan Africa). Maîtrise (M.A.) in translation and documentation. Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Paris, France. 1988. DEA (M.Phil) in Political Science. Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Paris, France. 1987. Area of concentration: Political Sociology (Sub- Saharan Africa). Diplôme Supérieur d'Etudes Islamiques (Advanced Degree in Islamic Studies). Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. 1985. Area of concentration : Islamic history and civilisation. Diplôme d'Arabe Classique (BA in Classical Arabic). Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Paris, France. 1985. Area of concentration : Arabic language, Islamic civilisation. Diplôme d'Arabe Dialectal (B.A in Colloquial Arabic). Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Paris, France. 1985. Concentration: dialects of the Middle East with emphasis on Colloquial Arabic of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.= 1 SELECTED AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS Grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung Germany to fund research on “Islamic Institutions of Higher Learning in Africa. -
Redalyc.An Approach to the Study of Culture As People in the African World
Revista Brasileira do Caribe ISSN: 1518-6784 [email protected] Universidade Federal de Goiás Brasil Konadu, Kwasi An Approach to the Study of Culture as People in the African World Revista Brasileira do Caribe, vol. VI, núm. 11, julio-diciembre, 2005, pp. 261-283 Universidade Federal de Goiás Goiânia, Brasil Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=159113676014 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative An Approach to the Study of Culture as People in the African World Kwasi Konadu Winston-Salem State University Resumo Nos último anos, “a diáspora” e os “estudos sobre a diáspora”, além de perceberem as comunidades como imaginadas ou inventadas tem gozado de popularidade ao mesmo tempo que são objeto de crítcas. Ainda que haja uma grande proliferação de programas acadêmicos e de investigações sobre a diáspora africana, a exploração da cultura daqueles que são (supostamente) os objetos de tais esforços sofrem interpretações inexatas da cultura. Portanto, a narrativa e a identidade dos africanos são percebidas como versões plagiadas que são apresentadas através de expressões como hibridismo, criollismo e sincretismo. Os temas tratados neste artigo tratam das interpretações da cultura como um conceito polisémico ou como eixo de definição e interpretação de um habitat temporal. Reavalia-se principalmente fontes secundárias e materiais de arquivo junto com pesquisas realizadas nas regiões caribenhas, bem como no oeste da África, pretendendo-se oferecer uma exploração conjunta sobre a cultura como individuos no mundo africano (e não como “diáspora”) no contexto de estratégias socio-políticas y culturais dominantes utilizadas tanto pelos africanos como por aqueles que controlam a ordem social dentro da qual se encontram os africanos. -
West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation
West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History West African Manuscripts in Arabic and African Languages and Digital Preservation Fallou Ngom Subject: Historical Preservation and Cultural Heritage, Intellectual History, West Africa Online Publication Date: Jun 2017 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.123 Abstract and Keywords West African manuscripts are numerous and varied in forms and contents. There are thousands of them across West Africa. A significant portion of them are documents written in Arabic and Ajami (African languages written in Arabic script). They deal with both religious and nonreligious subjects. The development of these manuscript traditions dates back to the early days of Islam in West Africa, in the 11th century. In addition to these Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, there have been others written in indigenous scripts. These include those in the Vai script invented in Liberia; Tifinagh, the traditional writing system of the Amazigh (Berber) people; and the N’KO script invented in Guinea for Mande languages. While the writings in indigenous scripts are rare less numerous and widespread, they nonetheless constitute an important component of West Africa’s written heritage. Though the efforts devoted to the preservation of West African manuscripts are limited compared to other world regions, interest in preserving them has increased. Some of the initial preservation efforts of West African manuscripts are the collections of colonial officers. Academics later supplemented these collections. These efforts resulted in important print and digital repositories of West African manuscripts in Africa, Europe, and America. Until recently, most of the cataloguing and digital preservation efforts of West African manuscripts have focused on those written in Arabic. -
Book Reviews the African Diaspora
New West Indian Guide Vol. 86, no. 1-2 (2012), pp. 109-196 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig/index URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101731 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0028-9930 BOOK REVIEWS The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture. PATRICK MANNING. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xxii + 394 pp. (Paper US$ 24.50) JOSEPH C. MILLER Department of History University of Virginia Charlottesville VA 22904, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Patrick Manning offers a strong and promising vision to overcome the con- ventional exclusion from history’s macro-narrative of Africans and peoples of African descent around the world. The modern historical discipline is implicitly (and often explicitly) framed around the nation-state, grand politi- cal scale, military conquests, and costly monumental construction. Indeed, beyond Hegel’s metaphysical faith in progressive western civilization, and his specific exclusion of Africa from history construed in these limiting terms, the professional discipline itself took shape in the nineteenth cen- tury as handmaiden of the consolidation of the modern – and profoundly militaristic – nation-state in Europe and throughout the Americas. The era was also heir to the abolitionist campaigns against maritime slaving and to emancipation movements central to creating several of the new nation-states. Indeed, the egalitarianism enshrined in national constitutions proclaimed the “nations” of ethnic, and in extreme cases, racial homogeneity. Of course, the virulence with which the custodians of these homogeneous “nations” asserted this illusory ideology was a direct and calculated contradiction of the extreme diversity of the older communities living in all of the territorial spaces thus defined as “states.” The newly emancipated citizens of African descent living in them all but disappeared in the glare of triumphal national identities asserted in narrowly Victorian, male, militaristic senses. -
The Historical Journal of Massachusetts
The Historical Journal of Massachusetts “Captives on the Move: Tracing the Transatlantic Movements of Africans from the Caribbean to Colonial New England.” Author: Kerima M. Lewis Source: Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Volume 44, No. 2, Summer 2016, pp. 144-175. Published by: Institute for Massachusetts Studies and Westfield State University You may use content in this archive for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the Historical Journal of Massachusetts regarding any further use of this work: [email protected] Funding for digitization of issues was provided through a generous grant from MassHumanities. Some digitized versions of the articles have been reformatted from their original, published appearance. When citing, please give the original print source (volume/number/date) but add "retrieved from HJM's online archive at http://www.westfield.ma.edu/historical-journal/. 144 Historical Journal of Massachusetts • Summer 2016 A Slave Receipt This bill of sale from November 25, 1765, records the exchange of “Twenty-Four Negroes” brought from “the coast of Africa” to Rhode Island aboard the Sally. Image courtesy of the Brown University Library. 145 Captives on the Move: Tracing the Transatlantic Movements of Africans from the Caribbean to Colonial New England KERIMA M. LEWIS Editor’s Introduction: This article explores the many ways that West Africans arrived in New England by way of the British American Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than being shipped directly from Africa, Africans who arrived in New England were usually the “residue” or leftover human cargo from these Guinea voyages. Small numbers of Africans were shipped with the rum and sugar sent back to New England as part of the provisions and carrying trade. -
(Mali) by Mamadou Cisse a THESIS SUBMITTE
RICE UNIVERSITY Archaeological Investigations of Early Trade and Urbanism at Gao Saney (Mali) By Mamadou Cisse A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFULMENT OF THE REGUEREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE: Susan Keech McIntosh, Professor, Anthropology Je frey FleIsher, ro essor, Anthropology ~~ Ro rick J. McIntosh, Professor, Anthropology Ie University HOUSTON, TEXAS OCTOBER 2010 Abstract Excavations at the mound site of Gao Saney, located near the historic town of Gao eastern Niger Bend, Mali, revealed over six meters of domestic deposits and debris from secondary processing of glass and copper dating to the period 700--1100 A.D. This is 200-300 years earlier than anticipated and points to the early development oflong distance trade networks. Lead isotope analysis of copper and glass samples using LA ICP-MS points to multiple sources areas, including copper ores in Tunisia and glass production areas in the Middle East. Secondary processing of copper and glass took place at the site, and a substantial portion ofthe sequence comprised mud brick structures and associated domestic trash and wall collapse episodes. The distinctive polychrome pottery assemblage found in the Gao Saney deposits occurs along a 500 km stretch of the Niger Bend between Bentia to the south and Timbucktu to the west, where it appears suddenly and intrusively c. 650-700 A.D. This thesis documents the excavations and the material culture, chronology, subsistence economy and production activities at the site. It argues that the findings support the identification of Gao Saney with the trading town Sarneh mentioned in a tenth century Arab chronicle. -
GSC Newsletter, No. 16
Issue 16 Summer/Fall 2003 Ghana Studies (no. 5, 2002) three grants-in-aid, up to 1.8 Chair’s Remarks has appeared and, like its million cedis ($200 US), to By Ray Kea predecessors, the academic facilitate research, in any University of California, Riverside quality of its articles does the discipline, in Ghana. Eligible editor (Larry Yarak) and the applicants have to be Ph.D. his year’s newsletter editorial board proud. On be- students or university faculty arrives later than half of Council members I members who are permanently Tprevious issues. I extend would like to commend them resident in Ghana. In May the my apologies for the for a job well done. Members executive committee delay. The timely support and are encouraged to submit (Emmanuel Akyeampong, Jean assistance of the History articles to the journal. The new Allman, Ray Kea, David Department chair and office editors are Takyiwaa Manuh Owusu-Ansah, and Larry were indispensable. I would (Institute of African Studies, Yarak) selected three appli- like to take this opportunity to University of Ghana) and cants – a PhD student, a senior thank them for formatting and Lynne Brydon (University of lecturer, and a lecturer. While mailing the newsletter. Birmingham). in Ghana, Jean Allman presented the awards. (For the The Ghana Studies Council Larry Yarak, the Council’s awardees see below.) The (GSC) is sponsoring two panels webmaster, has created a pdf quality of the applications was at the 46th annual African file of the GSC Directory and generally high, but the Studies Association meeting in placed it on the GSC website.