African Silences

Author: Peter Matthiessen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819671
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
African Silences is a powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. In this critically acclaimed work Peter Matthiessen explores new terrain on a continent he has written about in two previous books, A Tree Where Man Was Born -- nominated for the National Book Award -- and Sand Rivers. Through his eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies, and threatened by the slow ecological catastrophe to which they have only begun to awaken.

A Search Past Silence

Author: David E. Kirkland
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807771791
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
This beautifully written book argues that educators need to understand the social worlds and complex literacy practices of African-American males in order to pay the increasing educational debt we owe all youth and break the school-to-prison pipeline. Moving portraits from the lives of six friends bring to life the structural characteristics and qualities of meaning-making practices, particularly practices that reveal the political tensions of defining who gets to be literate and who does not. Key chapters on language, literacy, race, and masculinity examine how the literacies, languages, and identities of these friends are shaped by the silences of societal denial. Ultimately, A Search Past Silence is a passionate call for educators to listen to the silenced voices of Black youth and to re-imagine the concept of being literate in a multicultural democratic society.

Silences in African History

Author: Jacques Depelchin
Publisher: Mkuki Na Nyoka Pub
ISBN: 9789976973730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Among those who have suffered enslavement, colonisation, steady and relentless economic exploitation, cultural asphyxiation, religious persecution, gender, race and class discrimination, as well as political repression, silences should be seen as facts, because silences are indeed facts which have not been accorded the status of facts. So states Jacques Depelchin in this discussion, which encompasses an examination and analysis of dominant theories - political, social, economic, cultural and ideological - on Africa. He analyses in depth the influence of capitalism on the continent, in relation to various historical events through the centuries. He also castigates those whose only vision of Africa is through the eyes of colonialism, and systematically erodes misconceptions about Africa and the nature of the Black man which have taken on the status of history.

Silences in NGO Discourse

Author: Issa G. Shivji
Publisher: Fahamu/Pambazuka
ISBN: 0954563751
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 88

Book Description
One of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence, Issa Shivji shows in two extensive essays in this book that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. As structural adjustment programs were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programs to minimize the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished--and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa. Shivji argues that if social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today.

Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa

Author: Signe Arnfred
Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute
ISBN: 9789171065131
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
"This volume sets out to investigate critically existing lines of thought about sexuality in Africa, while also creating space for alternative approaches"--P. [4] of cover.

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade: Volume 2, Essays on Sources and Methods

Author: Alice Bellagamba
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316538788
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
What were the experiences of those in Africa who suffered from the practice of slavery, those who found themselves captured and sold from person to person, those who died on the trails, those who were forced to live in fear? And what of those Africans who profited from the slave trade and slavery? What were their perspectives? How do we access any of these experiences and views? This volume explores diverse sources such as oral testimonies, possession rituals, Arabic language sources, European missionary, administrative and court records and African intellectual writings to discover what they can tell us about slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Also discussed are the methodologies that can be used to uncover the often hidden experiences of Africans embedded in these sources. This book will be invaluable for students and researchers interested in the history of slavery, the slave trade and post-slavery in Africa.

Secrets, Silences and Betrayals

Author: F. Ndi
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956762776
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Secrets, Silences, and Betrayals is an invitation to readers to consider factoring in the often discarded or censored but useful information held by the dominated. The books principal claim is that the unsaid weighs in significantly on the scale of semantic construction as that which is said. Thus, it legitimates the impact of the absentee in broadening and clarifying knowledge and understanding in most disciplines. In other words, just as exogenous epistemologies have underlain and explicated the basis for understanding diverse encounterssocial, political, historical, cultural, literary, etc.Secrets, Silences, and Betrayals challenges, from a pluridisciplinary angle, such highly dominant approaches to investigating the origin, nature, ways of knowing, and limits of human knowledge. It thus yields to the deontological basis to critically reexamine our understanding of the world around us. It is in this regard that the present volume points towards the need for human history to become a cumulative record and re-recording of every human journey and endeavor in life; it brings together disparate voices illuminating topical issues that would be or have been legated to posterity as nonexistent, partial, or half-truths.

Shadows of War

Author: Efrat Ben-Ze’ev
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139484346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war.

Postcolonial Hauntologies

Author: Ayo A. Coly
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496214870
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women's sexuality "haunt" contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which--by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women's sexuality--generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of "hauntology" and "ghostly matters" to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how "ghosts" from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women's sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women's power and autonomy.

Ghosts of the African Diaspora

Author: Joanne Chassot
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1512601616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers - Fred D'Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers' engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.