African being and cultural project

This article examines aspects of African culture seen as projects from an existentialist perspective and seeks to make a robust contribution to African studies and in particular interdisciplinary African studies. It offers a focus on the interiorisation of African cultural project-as-text as an upsurge of being; interiorisation(s) of being projects of African being and consciousness. This study on African subjectivity situates the African cultural constituency within a specific existentialist schematic: the African for itself in the form of cultural project-as-text, a reflective black consciousness, the black ‘I’ or African being-with-others in the form of cultural projects-as-texts, a self-reflective conscious of black consciousness, the black ‘we’-subject, ‘us’, and lastly African being-for-ourselves Black existentialist philosophy is predicated on the liberation of all black people from oppression.     

Bringing the British back in: Sephardim,Ashkenazi anti-Zionist Orthodox and the policy of Jewish unity

This article analyses the British role in establishing and maintaining a Jewish–Arab demarcation line by means of a policy of Jewish unity and by enabling Ashkenazi Zionist control of the Yishuv. In the first part, it analyses British policy towards the local Sephardi as well as the local Ashkenazi anti-Zionist Orthodox communities, both of which for different reasons did not neatly fit into the Jewish/Zionist–Arab binary. I argue that the British followed a policy of Jewish unity at the inception of the Mandate which they upheld repeatedly against Ashkenazi anti-Zionist Orthodox efforts and which by 1936 had created a truism enforcing a binary understanding of the conflict. In the second part, this article analyses the ways in which these communities presented themselves vis-à-vis the British. I argue that despite different strategies of maximizing their influence, both communities foundered on the existing power configurations.     

The coup d'état in Spain: from the anti-liberal movements to the democratic revolution, 1814–1874

SUMMARY

In this article Mikel Urquijo seeks to explain the evolution of the coup d'état as a feature of the political history of Spain in the nineteenth century. The repeated interventions based on the armed forces, with a greater or lesser contribution from the civilian politicians, are seen as the method by which some alternation in government between the political factions was made possible. The article traces the development from the purely military coup, or pronunciamiento of the early years, intended to exclude civilian politicians, to the mixed coups of the mid-century. In the absence of a truly democratic political system, or a developed national and civic consciousness, in a system where the ruling party could decide the outcome of elections by executive action, the coup was the accepted method of changing the regime. But the increasing participation of civilian politicians in the process culminated in the coup of 1868, which had some of the characteristics of a democratic revolution, and overthrew for a time the Bourbon monarchy. This represents a true civic-military coup d'état.     

Adaptation and Appropriation on the Colonial Frontier: Indigenous Leadership in the Colombian Chocó, 1670–1808

This article explores the consequences for the native population of the Colombian Chocó of the emergence, over the course of the eighteenth century, of an elite of caciques and indios mandones or principales whose functions of powers far exceeded those of the warrior chiefs that had traditionally acted as leaders of their people. Appointed for the purpose of facilitating the collection of tribute and the supply of labour to European settlers, caciques and mandones were almost universally rejected by native communities during the early phases of Spanish colonisation (c. 1630–1690), and they disappear from the historical record after Independence. Eighteenth‐century sources, however, not only record the existence of a clearly defined elite of mandones or principales in villages across the region, but show these individuals engaging actively with the colonial authorities, on behalf of their communities, at local and audiencia levels. This article argues that, at a time of a much strengthened European presence in the region, caciques and mandones came to understand their roles in ways that were entirely different from those intended by the Spanish, and in so doing acquired the legitimacy that had eluded their seventeenth‐century predecessors. Far from serving merely as intermediaries between settlers and indigenous populations, indios mandones acted as negotiators on behalf of the indigenous population, whose task was to defend and/or advance the interests of the communities they had been appointed to control.     

Re-confessionalising the Shi‘ites and the Druzes: The Failure of Secularism in Lebanon

This paper examines the history of the relations between the Shi'ite and Druze communities in independent Lebanon. Suggesting that these have turned on the issue of secularism, it argues that the attitude towards the state and its political structure has always taken front stage. Three stages in the relationship can be discerned: mobilization, cooperation, and political dissension. The defeat of the Left and the failure of the secular project constituted a historical watershed in the political behavior of both communities, leading to a regression to primordial loyalties and exclusivism. While this development reflects structural weakness and vulnerability amongst the Druze, amongst the Shi'ites it is indicative of increasing communal consciousness, growing empowerment, and the adoption of new strategies in the attempt to change Lebanese political reality. At the same time, the historical circumstances the two communities have experienced within independent Lebanon demonstrates that the confessional system continues to serve as an obstacle to the creation of a coherent and crystallized political community in Lebanon.     

The Discourse and Experience of the Arabian Mission's Medical Missionaries: Part II 1939–60

In 1889 the pioneers of the Arabian Mission – a mission under direction of the Reformed Church in America – arrived in Arabia with the aim of Christianizing Muslims of the Najd and Arabian Peninsula. By the turn of the century, the missionaries were using medical knowledge and service as an interface for dialogue and evangelism. This article‘s aim is two-fold. First, it examines the history of the Arabian Mission and the history of medicine in the Gulf. Second, it explores the impact of the Americans on the Muslim communities from 1920 to 1960. To do so, it explores the experience of missionaries as well as the discourses missionaries constructed about Arabs and Arabia. It examines how the missionaries transcend the label of cultural imperialist, and how both the function and language of the missionaries evolved as oil wealth transformed the Gulf nations of Bahrain and Kuwait. This article, exploring the impact of the Arabian Mission from the late 1930s through 1960, continues the discussion published in the preceding issue of Middle Eastern Studies.     

Making Space: Social Change, Identity and the Creation of Boundaries in the Central Ecuadorian Andes

Abstract— In rural Latin America, communities and their boundaries are changing due to government intervention, immigration, temporary migration and changing patterns of consumption. This article investigates the conflicts that arise from these changes and the impact they have on the creation of boundaries in a peasant community in the Ecuadorian Andes. It also discusses how the creation of community and household boundaries are linked to ethnic identification during rituals and daily life.     

Cultural Politics, Communal Resistance and Identity in Andean Irrigation Development

This article uses two case studies to illustrate how Andean irrigation development and management emerges from a hybrid mix of local community rules and the changing political forms and ideological forces of hegemonic states. Some indigenous water-control institutions are with us today because they were consonant with the extractive purposes of local elites and Inca, Spanish and post‐independence Republican states. These states often appropriated and standardised local water-management rules, rights and rituals in order to gain control over the surplus produced by these irrigation systems. However, as we show in the case of two communities in Ecuador and Peru, many of these same institutions are reappropriated and redirected by local communities to counteract both classic 'exclusion-oriented' and modern 'inclusion-oriented' water and identity politics. In this way, they resist subordination, discrimination and the control of local water management by rural elites or state actors.     

Latvian-Americans in the Post-Soviet era: Cultural factors on return migration in oral history interviews

Abstract

This article examines the changing exile identity and the lack of return migration of Latvian-Americans to Latvia after its independence in 1991, as revealed in life narratives of individuals and in oral history workshops. Focusing on the first and second generation of World War II refugees from Latvia, who emigrated to the USA around 1950 and formed still active communities-in-exile, the author presents the self-identity of community members during the exile period when contacts with the home country were limited, and examines the changing relationship of the diaspora community members to Latvia after its independence, and the cultural and interpersonal factors that have affected Latvian-American return migration to Latvia and hampered understanding between the two communities.     

Apartheid,Jim Crow,and Comparative Literature

This article examines John Greyson’s film, Proteus, for the way it figures queer masculinity and race in South Africa’s national historical narrative. The film offers an esthetic rendering of an eighteenth century interracial sodomy trial set on Robben Island. Drawing on contemporary queer theory and recent South African narratives of masculinity that privilege heternormativity and nationalism, this paper argues that the film carves out a space for queer identity within national history where it had previously been denied. The paper traces the way that the film interjects queer narratives into South Africa’s national identity, disrupts the heteronormalization of various sites of national iconography on South Africa’s historical terrain (such as Robben Island), and offers a queer masculinity that resists racial segregation. Moreover, this paper traces the ways that the film has implications for contemporary queer communities within South Africa.     

Class or Citizenship? Debating Workplace Conflict in China

While a new working class is in the process of remaking itself in China, the latest trend in labour studies has rejected the Marxist tradition which sees the social relations of production as the point of departure for analysing workplace conflict. According to the new current, influenced by post-structuralism, class is only one of the identities articulated by workers, and it can be understood only with reference to their discourses. By critically evaluating an important book by Ching Kwan Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt), this article suggests that her approach generalising workers' protests with the notion of citizenship cannot satisfactorily explain the changing pattern of labour protests in China since 2004. By using fieldwork data and connecting the analysis of the social relations of production with the changing patterns of workers' struggle, this paper argues that migrant workers protests are a significant part of the emerging class conflict in China.     

Interethnic discordance and stability in Estonia

This article proposes a theoretical model of perceived intergroup stability (STB) consisting of two factors: the perceived strength differential (PSD) between the groups, expressing the changeability of the power relations, and the level of intergroup discordance (D), expressing the level of aversion towards the outgroup combined with the perceptions of legitimacy of intergroup power relations. A quantitative study of Estonian (N?=?538) and Russian-speaking (N?=?460) communities revealed that the perceived stability was highest in monolingual Estonian regions while it was lowest in Russian-speaking eastern Estonia. The findings concur with the results of previous empirical studies, validating the conceptual structure of the theoretical model underlying the current study.     

Chachawarmi: Rhetorics and Lived Realities

Latin America's turn away from neoliberalism and adoption of decolonising alternatives to development has been spearheaded—nowhere more so than Bolivia—by indigenous movements. The gender ideology of chachawarmi is part of this decolonisation programme, but has been criticised for disguising gendered exploitation. These tensions are explored by looking at, in Escobar's words, ‘the concrete struggles within particular communities’. Based on long‐term research in rural Bolivia, this article situates the chachawarmi ideal in the multiple influences on the recreation of gender identities, and considers the complex ways in which chachawarmi as mobilised politically may influence gendered power.     

‘This is not a Favela’: Rio de Janeiro's Urban Quilombo Sacopã and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Under Brazil's 1988 Constitution, quilombo communities have the right to the titles of the lands they occupy. This paper assesses quilombo titles' transformative potential through the experiences of Rio de Janeiro's urban quilombo Sacopã, an ethnic Afro‐descendant community once perceived as a favela. Unlike its neighbours, the community managed to resist the widespread favela removals of the 1970s. Based on an ethnographic approach during fieldwork conducted between December 2013 and January 2014, the article asks: how did Sacopã manage to remain, whilst its surrounding favelas were forcefully removed? Who counts as ethnic? What does this imply for Brazil's afro‐descendant majority?     

The disciplinary,interdisciplinary and global dimensions of African studies

Abstract

In discussing African studies or any other field, it is important to note that the economies and cultures of knowledge production are an integral part of complex and sometimes contradictory, but always changing, institutional, intellectual and ideological processes and practices that occur, simultaneously, at national and transnational, or local and global levels. From their inception, universities have always been, or aspired to be, universalistic and universalising institutions. This is not the place to examine the changes and challenges facing universities in Africa and elsewhere, a subject dealt with at length in African universities in the twenty‐first century (Zeleza and Olokoshi 2004). It is simply to point out that African studies ‐ the production of African(ist) knowledges ‐ has concrete and conceptual, and material and moral contexts, which create the variations that are so evident across the world and across disciplines.This article is divided into four parts. First, it explores the changing disciplinary and interdisciplinary architecture of knowledge in general. Second, it examines the disciplinary encounters of African studies in the major social science and humanities disciplines, from anthropology, sociology, literature, linguistics and philosophy, to history, political science, economics geography and psychology. It focuses on the interdisciplinary challenges of the field in which the engagements of African studies with interdisciplinary programmes such as women's and gender studies, public health studies, art studies, and communication studies, and with interdisciplinary paradigms including cultural studies and postcolonial studies are probed. Finally, this article looks at the focus on the study of Africa in international studies, that is, the state of African studies as seen through the paradigms of globalisation and in different global regions, principally Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia and Russia), the Americas (the United States of America (US), the Caribbean and Brazil), and Asia‐Pacific (India, Australia, China and Japan). Space does not allow for a more systematic analysis of African studies within Africa itself, a subject implied in the observations in the article, but which deserves an extended treatment in its own right.     

Left of Eden: The Changing Politics of Economic Inequality in Contemporary Germany

This article explores the changing politics of economic inequality in Germany and its relationship to the transformation of the German Left. During the post-war ‘Economic Miracle’, few saw economic inequality as cause for concern. Though inequalities existed, their economic impact and political significance were masked by the fact that workers' incomes were increasing and unemployment was rare. During the past two decades, by contrast, labour-market liberalisation and the increased political salience of rising economic inequality have changed the German political landscape in several ways, including the emergence of Die Linke, a far-Left party committed to economic redistribution. The article argues that this change represents more than a simple shift ‘to the Left’; instead, it reflects an important rethinking of the post-war ‘Social Market Economy’, its ability to reconcile equity and economic growth, and the politically acceptable range of public policies designed to alleviate economic inequality and exclusion.     

Economic changes during the Indian emergency

Abstract

North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—DPRK), more than any other industrial country, is a terra incognita in the Western consciousness. Most commonly it is abhorred as the embodiment of the irrational, the fanatical, and the threatening, and even among Western progressives it is dismissed as grotesque and/or irrelevant. Yet it is an important country and one that deserves close attention.     

INHERITING “JAPANESE-NESS” DIVERSELY

The late twentieth century saw a rise of global discourse about heritage. Research on heritage politics, however, has shed little light on heritage practices in schools, especially regarding language, that is, how heritage language is constructed and how it is “inherited” by students of various backgrounds. Heritage language education is often viewed as a means to empower heritage language speakers or to address the diverse needs of students in language classes. In existing works, the individual’s link to “heritage” is assumed as given and stable. More recent works show that the processes and effects of heritage language education are complex and nuanced due to diverse personal backgrounds and changing political economy and cultural politics. The role of schooling in the process of “inheriting” language, however, has not attracted much attention: how students are grouped or tracked into a particular class, for example. After ethnographically investigating various views and practices at a weekend Japanese language school in the northeastern United States throughout 2007 and 2008, the authors of this article argue that heritage language school is not merely a place to reproduce “heritage” by passing it on to students, but it is also a productive site where ways to imagine “heritage” and “inherit” it proliferate. The article analyzes the processes by which what would be considered as merely “speaking Japanese” and “being Japanese” outside heritage language school are differentiated into diverse ways of being Japanese. It suggests a need to investigate school as a site of heritage politics as well as a need for researchers and practitioners to view heritage language education not only as a way to teach language but also as a means to gain an understanding of heritage politics.