Engaging with the Legacy of Nehemia Levtzion: An Introduction

This volume draws principally on presentations from two African Studies Association meetings (2003, 2004) that celebrated Nehemia Levtzion’s contributions to the field of Islam in Africa and reminisced about our collective personal interactions with him. It is enriched by additional papers from former students, colleagues and friends (usually one and the same), as well as from contemporary young scholars just beginning to “know” Levtzion through his legacy. The “Epilogue” gives a final, posthumous word to Levtzion himself, in an article looking at the contemporary role of fundamentalism from the perspective of an historian who spent his life engaged in the history of Islam at its Middle Eastern and African crossroads. The following pages are meant not only to pay homage to Nehemia Levtzion but also to reflect critically, to push boundaries, and to introduce Africanist scholars, engaged in other areas of study and new generations of Africanist scholars in this field, to Levtzion’s role in shaping how we have come to understand the experience of Islam in Africa.     

“Walls made out of paper”: Witnessing wit and how I learned to drive

The article proposes an alternative performative methodology for displaying sexuality in public spaces called queer curatorship. Specifically, it examines Isaac Julien's film The Attendant and a Chicago leathersex museum (The Leather Archives &; Museum) wherein histories of sadomasochistic sex practices and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. Tyburczy posits that sites that feature materials such as real Antebellum slave whips alongside objects used as instruments of consensual pleasure and pain offer unique opportunities to reconfigure, recode, and reanimate epistemological frameworks for understanding the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of power exchange, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline. Cultivating the visual lessons learned from The Attendant into new curatorial models enacted during her tenure as a museum curator at the Leather Archives &; Museum, Tyburczy ultimately proposes queer curatorship as an experimental museum practice that stages alternative configurations between objects and bodies in space to alter the historical relationship of race, sex, and power as they relate to particular objects and acts, in this instance the use of whips in interracial scenes of sex and violence.     

Limiting Party Representation: Evidence from a Small Parliamentary Chamber

Parties are seen as vital for the maintenance of parliamentary government and as necessary intermediaries between voters and legislators; an elected parliamentary chamber not controlled by parties is highly anomalous. This study contrasts the party‐controlled Tasmanian lower house with its Independent‐dominated elected upper house and finds that the major source of constraints on party representation is not a clientelistic style of politics but the persistence of a distinctive institutional design and electoral rules based on fixed terms and annual staggered elections. The consequences of these rules are explored for their effects on voter choice and legislative behaviour.