Sémiotique et rhétorique de la duplicité dans la peinture de Bernard Baïfang

The Art of Bernard Baifang finds its strength in the subtlety with which this contemporary painter represents abstractions. Using figures of speech, he translates duplicity into images, a moral perversion that has become endemic in many African countries. A semiotic and rhetorical study of the figurations of duplicity in Feymania and La cité rouge reveals that the achievement of these paintings inspired by the experience of daily life in Cameroon is part of a subversive approach based on a cathartic conception of art.     

Farmer resistance to agriculture commercialisation in northern Ghana

Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghana^a, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers’ acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana’s postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers’ acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.     

Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror

This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with realism in its cynical disregard for stated intentions and insistence on the primacy of inter-state rivalry. It contains a theory of the postcolonial state as part of a wider international system based on class-conspiracy, wedding imperial interests to those of an indigenous elite, with little concern for preserving liberal norms of statehood. Hence we consider some forms of conspiracy theory a layperson’s theory of the capitalist state, which seeks to explain history with reference to global and domestic material forces, interests and structures shaping outcomes, irrespective of political actors’ stated intentions. While this approach may be problematic in its disregard for intentionality and ideology, its suspicion of the notion that the ‘War on Terror’ should be read morally as a battle between states and ‘non-state actors’ is understandable – especially when technological and political-economic changes have made the importance of impersonal economic forces driving towards permanent war more relevant than ever.     

Paradoxes of (dis)empowerment in the postcolony: women,culture and social capital in Ghana

Women’s empowerment discourses in Africa involve contradictory desires from women on one hand and society at large on the other. This article argues that the traditional validation mechanisms for women’s identities are crucial avenues for analysing both the conceptions and experiences of empowerment. Drawing on primary ethnographic data, I analyse paradoxes in women’s empowerment discourses in postcolonial Ghanaian societies, where neoliberal discourses thrive side-by-side with collectivist–socialist cultural ideals. Using an example of social capital, gained largely through mothering, I suggest that, because women’s relationships with capital are structured by local socio-cultural and global economic structures and relations, the theorisation and application of the concept of empowerment need to recognise the complicated relationships (with capital) that women negotiate on a daily basis.     

Literature,trauma and the African moral imagination

Trauma theory claims to represent a ‘new mode of reading and of listening’, but its Eurocentric roots lead to the question of whether or not this approach is relevant in postcolonial contexts. This essay makes the case that engaging trauma theory through African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, mostly because of what it does for the former. African social thought, expressed through its writers and critics, allows us to refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory, including questions about the representation of trauma and strategies for trauma healing. African writers' deployment of images such as the railroad, which is closely linked with discourses of trauma and of modernism, illustrates how their works can reframe trauma studies from an African perspective. An appreciation of the continent's traumatogenic contexts, of writers' cultural resources and strategies for speaking to those contexts, and of the intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination, suggests that African literatures are grounded in the types of imaginative ‘re-membering practice[s]’ that promote recovery and healing from the destructive effects of trauma.     

Identities in reconstruction: from rights of recognition to reflection in post-disaster reconstruction processes

This article examines the role of rights in both governing and shaping women’s relationship with the reconstruction process and their position in the reconstructed society. Through four years of empirical research in the post-earthquake reconstruction process in Maharashtra, India, this article focuses upon how women’s rights in social reconstruction are contingent upon processes of recognition. From the United Nations to local women’s organising, the article considers how women’s rights to “determine the pattern of their lives and the future of society” (United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (C.E.D.A.W.). General Recommendation No. 23 (1997), Article 7, para. 9.) are dependent upon processes of recognition. Through a critique of cultural, material and spatial acts and frameworks of recognition within the U.N., World Bank, State Government, public interest litigation, personal and nonformal law, rights are seen to actively and hierarchically construct either a modern, liberal subject or a religious, communitarian subject, which both either deny or prescribe agency. The experience of women’s organising reveals the possibility of reconstructing a feminist rights strategy of reflection.     

Post-colonial folk dancing: reflections on the impact of stage folk dance style on traditional folk dance variation in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia

ABSTRACT

The focus of this article is on traditional folk dance in Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia. Dance variation is analyzed through the prism of postcolonial theories to reveal the sequential effects of the colonial situation developed during the Soviet period. Specific causes and characteristic traits of the Soviet influence are explored. Colonialist echoes of the Soviet regime within contemporary Estonian culture are reflected in two trends in the variation of traditional folk dance: first, “contamination” of traditional folk dance with stage dance elements promoted during the Soviet era and, second, a regular search for “genuine” folk dance as a reaction to Soviet colonial heritage.     

Being reformed: Subjectification and security sector reform in the Congolese armed forces

In contrast to most studies addressing security sector reform (SSR) in Africa, this article queries defence reform efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from a governmentality perspective and hones in on processes of subjectification and modes of agency among members of the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC). Based on extensive field research in the DRC, it explores how army staff produce themselves through (and outside of) the ways in which they are ‘hailed’ into subject positions in donors’ efforts to govern. In asking how FARDC staff respond, position, and produce themselves in relation to external reform efforts and the attending governing technologies and techniques, the article contributes to the increasing – yet limited – scholarly attention to those being ‘reformed’ through SSR efforts. Ultimately, attending to the specificities of how processes of subjectification are experienced from the perspective of those who are to be reformed problematizes the simplified notions of lack of political will and commitment, obstruction and ‘spoilers’ that are so prevalent in the SSR literature, suggesting that these processes are heavily shaped by memories of colonialism and exploitation.     

“Socialist in content,national in form:” the making of Soviet national art and the case of Buryatia

This article examines the fine art of the Soviet national republics and its discourse in the Soviet Union, which were considerably shaped under the influence of socialist realism and Soviet nationality policy. While examining the central categories of Soviet artistic discourse such as the “national form,” “national distinctness,” and “tradition,” as well as cultural and scientific institutions responsible for the image of art of non-Russian nationalities, the author reveals the existence of a number of colonial features and discursive and institutional practices that foster a cultural divide between Russian and non-Russian culture and contribute to the marginalization of art. Special attention is paid to the implications of this discursive shaping for the local artistic scene in Buryatia.