African History Commons^™

Assata Shakur: The Battle For Memory In The Imagined Borderlands, Joe Kaplan

Summer Research

This work focuses on the former Black Panther, Assata Shakur, and her exile in Cuba. It probes Shakur’s identification with the maroon, or escaped slave, to examine how the experience of exile creates a sense of rootlessness and alienation from national identity, and how memory can come to reshape one’s inclusion within various “imagined communities.” Shakur occupies a liminal space, a borderlands existence, between the two nations in which she has lived. I trace her memories of the terror she experienced in the U.S, the ethnocentrism inherent in the act of becoming American, and how her imagination has been shaped …

Melancholic Mirages: Jules Verne's Vision Of A Saharan Sea, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

L’invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea), Verne’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, would appear to be a paradoxical vision of French colonial involvement as it chronicles the attempts of the French army occupying Tunisia and Algeria to capture Tuareg leaders bent on pushing the French out of the Maghreb on the one hand, and thwarting an environmentally disastrous French project on the other. L’Invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea) is a complex, if not melancholic vision of the limits of French expansionism, however. The real-life French army geographer François-Elie Roudaire and …

Oil Wealth, Resource Curse And Development: Any Lessons For Ghana?, Felix Kumah-Abiwu, Edward Brenya, James Agbodzakey

Felix Kumah-Abiwu

Ghana’s new status as an oil-producing country has invigorated the scholarly debate on the resource curse theory, which assumes that countries with vast natural resource wealth like oil, diamond and gold are likely to experience slow economic growth and development as compared to countries with scarce natural resources. Although the development literature is well endowed with cases of countries with huge natural resources that have experienced slow economic growth, the literature is also clear on few other countries with enormous natural resources that continue to experience high economic growth due to strong political institutions and democratic practices. Norway and Botswana …

The Impact Of Kenya African Soldiers On The Creation And Evolution Of The Pioneer Corps During The Second World War, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Story Of Swahili, John M. Mugane

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world. From its embrace in the 1960s by the black freedom movement in the United States to its adoption in 2004 as the African Union’s official language, Swahili has become a truly international language. How this came about and why, of all African languages, it happened only to Swahili is the story that John M. Mugane sets out to explore.

The remarkable adaptability of Swahili has allowed …

Slavery, Agriculture, And Malaria In The Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula, Benjamin Reilly illuminates a previously unstudied phenomenon: the large-scale employment of people of African ancestry as slaves in agricultural oases within the Arabian Peninsula. The key to understanding this unusual system, Reilly argues, is the prevalence of malaria within Arabian Peninsula oases and drainage basins, which rendered agricultural lands in Arabia extremely unhealthy for people without genetic or acquired resistance to malarial fevers. In this way, Arabian slave agriculture had unexpected similarities to slavery as practiced in the Caribbean and Brazil.

This book synthesizes for the first time a body of …

Slander, Buzz And Spin: Telegrams, Politics And Global Communications In The Uganda Protectorate, 1945-55, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

Ugandans, from the earliest days of empire, did not simply receive information and messages from a distant Britain. Instead, with methods rooted in pre-colonial understandings of communications as establishing personal, affective, social closeness and reciprocities, they invested in education, travel and correspondence and built wide-ranging information and communications networks. Networked, they understood imperial institutions and pushed their own priorities via both official and unofficial channels. By the 1940s, political activists combined these information networks with the modern technologies of newspapers, telegrams and global press campaigns to destabilize colonial hierarchies. Generating slanderous allegations, repeating them to generate popular buzz, interpreting and …

Ugandan Politics World War Ii (1939-1949), Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

World War II shaped Uganda's postwar politics through local understandings of global war.¹ Individually and collectively Ugandans saw the war as an opportunity rather than simply a crisis. During the War, the acquired wealth and demonstrated loyalty to a stressed British empire, inverting paternalistic imperial relations and investing loyalty and money in ways they expected would be reciprocated with political and economic rewards. For the 77,000 Ugandan enlisted soldiers and for the civilians who grew coffee and cotton, contributed money and organizational skills, and followed the war news, the war was not a desperate struggle for survival. Ideological aspects …

Oil Wealth, Resource Curse And Development: Any Lessons For Ghana?, Felix Kumah-Abiwu, Edward Brenya, James Agbodzakey

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

Ghana’s new status as an oil-producing country has invigorated the scholarly debate on the resource curse theory, which assumes that countries with vast natural resource wealth like oil, diamond and gold are likely to experience slow economic growth and development as compared to countries with scarce natural resources. Although the development literature is well endowed with cases of countries with huge natural resources that have experienced slow economic growth, the literature is also clear on few other countries with enormous natural resources that continue to experience high economic growth due to strong political institutions and democratic practices. Norway and Botswana …

The Life And Legacy Of Marie Couvent: Social Networks, Property Ownership, And The Making Of A Free People Of Color Community In New Orleans., Elizabeth Clark Neidenbach

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation recovers the life of Marie Justine Sirnir Couvent and the Atlantic World she inhabited. Born in Africa around 1757, she was enslaved as a child and shipped to Saint-Domingue through the Bight of Benin in the 1760s. In the tumult of the Haitian Revolution, Couvent fled the island, along with tens of thousands of Saint-Domingue inhabitants. She resettled in New Orleans where she eventually died a free and wealthy slaveholder in 1837. Although illiterate, Couvent left property to establish a free black school in her will. L'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents was founded on her land in 1847 …

Self Efficacy Of African American Women In Leadership Roles, Varil Deloise Williams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Little research has focused on developing female African American leaders. A mixed methods study examined the influence of conservation of resources (COR) and locus of control (LOC) on the self-efficacy (SE) of 26 female African American leaders. It also explored the role of mentoring and spirituality in leadership development for a subset of 5 participants. Data were obtained using a demographic questionnaire, the General SE Scale, the COR Evaluation Gain scale, and the LOC Assessment, along with transcribed responses to mentoring and spirituality interview questions. Pearson correlations run between age, education, and income, as well as COR, LOC, and SE …

Nineteenth Century Enslaved African Americans' Coping Strategies For The Stresses Of Enslavement In Virginia, Allison Michelle Campo

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Journal Of The National Association Of University Women - Spring 2015, Nauw

The Journal of the National Association of University Women

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN

JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN

SPRING 2015

Afro-Barbadian Foodways: Analysis Of The Use Of Ceramics By Freed Afro-Barbadian Estate Workers, Camille Lois Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Sea Of Change : Race, Abolitionism, And Reform In The New England Whale Fishery, Justin Andrew Pariseau

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Bound together across lines of color and lass, Nantucket and New Bedford residents pursued the unique economic opportunities presented by whaling during the nineteenth century. Whaling was becoming a major industrial enterprise with few available options to fulfill the labor needs required for the whaling crews, ropewalks, blacksmith shops, and sail lofts that made it possible for Nantucket and New Bedford whaleships to transit the globe. Whaling thus generated the jobs that made it possible for free black communities to thrive. People of color consequently turned the need for labor to their advantage. Drawn by the financial opportunities that the …

“El No Murio, El Se Multiplico!” Hugo Chávez : The Leadership And The Legacy On Race, Cynthia Ann Mckinney

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

“Chávez, Chávez, Chávez: Chávez no murio, se multiplico!” was the chant outside the National Assembly building after several days of mourning the death of the first President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This study investigates the leadership of Hugo Chávez and his legacy on race as seen through the eyes and experiences of selected interviewees and his legacy on race. The interviewees were selected based on familiarity with the person and policies of the leadership of Hugo Chávez and his legacy on race. Unfortunately, not much has been written about this aspect of Hugo Chávez despite the myriad attempts …

African Origins Of International Law: Myth Or Reality?, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This Article reconsiders the prevalent ahistorical assumption that international law began with the Treaty of Westphalia. It gathers together considerable historical evidence to conclude that the ancient world, particularly the New Kingdom period in Egypt or Kemet from 1570-1070 BCE, deployed all three of what today we would call sources of international law. African states predating the modern European nation state by nearly 6000 years engaged in treaty relations (the Treaty of Kadesh), and applied rules of custom (the MA 'AT) and general principles of law (as enumerated in the Egyptian Bill of Rights). While Egyptologists and a few international …

“Cross-Currents In African Christianity: Lessons For Inter- Cultural Hermeneutics Of Friendship And Participation”, A Chapter In A Forthcoming Book, Where We Dwell In Common: Pathways For Dialogue In The 21st Century, Stan Chu Ilo

Stan Chu Ilo

No abstract provided.

Reading Du Bois On East Africa: Epistemological Implications Of Apartheid Constructions Of Knowledge, Jesse Benjamin

Jesse Benjamin

No abstract provided.

History Of The Blues, Dan Rager

Dan Rager

This all inclusive History of the Blues introduction begins as early as 1400, when the first global trading routes began. Two early maps are enclosed from this period showing the direction and locations from which people, food and supplies were moved.

This research presentation illustrates African tribes such as the Arada, Dahomey and Fulani who sang music in their daily rituals and ceremonies long before they were moved to other continents. Early developmental music elements are introduced including spirituals, worksongs, Scottish ballads, Methodist and Baptist hymns, call and response, guttural effects, interpolated vocality, falsetto and blue notes. All of these …