African History Commons^™

Mau Mau’S Moral War: The Sacralization Of Kenya’S Anticolonial Struggle, 1952–1956, Henry Muoki Mbunga

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation is a study of the ethical and religious history of the Mau Mau War in Kenya, 1952–1956. It breaks with a historiographical tradition that reduces Mau Mau’s ritual activities to stage props and backdrops on the historical stage. The project investigates two central questions: (1) why did Mau Mau members invent a variety of rituals during the anticolonial struggle in Kenya? and (2) how did the ethical and religious convictions of Mau Mau members shape their military campaign? Using rare archival sources and the oral histories and published memoirs of Mau Mau War veterans, this study argues that …

“Remov[E] Us From The Bondage Of South Africa:” Transnational Resistance Strategies And Subnational Concessions In Namibia's Police Zone, 1919-1962, Michael R. Hogan

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Between 1919 and 1962, the South African government implemented ever more restrictive segregationist and apartheid policies in South West Africa that attempted to control and monitor the social, political, and economic development of Namibians living in South West Africa’s Police Zone. This dissertation examines the transnational resistance campaigns and strategies developed by Namibians living in the Police Zone and their attempts to dissolve and frustrate the colonial state’s implementation of these policies. Particular focus is paid to such transnational institutions/actors as the League of Nations, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the United Nations, and international …

Failure To Protect?: Applying The Drri-2 Scales To Rwanda And Srebrenica, Elizabeth Mason

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article critically reanalyses the action, or lack of action, taken by UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990's. The lack of action of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda and Bosnia has long been criticised as a conscious decision made by peacekeepers to not act in defence of those being targeted but instead to act as bystanders of genocide when they had the ability to prevent acts of genocide taking place. This article re-examines the actions of the UN command under Romeo Dallaire in Rwanda and Thom Karremans in Srebrenica, Bosnia in terms of the stress-related factors which influenced …

Women's Political Participation Aided By Constitutional Provisions In Post-Conflict African Nations, Roksana Gorgolewski

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

After two major continental conflicts, many African countries were forced to re-evaluate their constitutions and inherent political structures. This left a window of opportunity for greater female political participation as political leaders and members of the peacemaking process. This project will focus on selected African post-conflict states during the 1970’s to 2000’s that have re-written their constitutions. The general query asks whether those rewritten constitutions have contributed to greater gender equality in the legislature of those states and which constitutional provisions work best at promoting and maintaining gender equality. By studying Geisler’s book Women and the remaking of politics in …

Amjambo Africa! (December 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

Boko Haram .................................2/3

Publisher’s Editorial ........................4

Meet Georges Budagu Makoko .....4

Elections/immigration reform .......5

Translations

French ............................................7

Swahili............................................8

Somali ............................................9

Kinyarwanda...............................20

Portuguese ............................20/21

News from Africa.....................10/11

Piece Together Project .................12

I’m Your Neighbor Books.............13

Pious Ali mourns Rawlings of Ghana ....................14

A Man on the move.......................15

Black Mainer project.....................16

Finance/Business............................19

Auto Insurance ..............................21

Poem by Ekhlas Ahmed................22

Guest columns...............................23

Titi de Baccarat .......................26/27

Amjambo Africa! (November 2020), Kathreen Harrison

Amjambo Africa!

In This Issue

batimbo Foundation Family ..........2

The Power of We.............................3

election 2020................................../5

Panel on childcare in maine............5

Publisher’s editorial ........................6

Translations

French ............................................7

Swahili............................................8

Somali ............................................9

Kinyarwanda...............................20

Portuguese..................................21

CovID in maine ..............................0

DiriGo TouchPass ..........................12

Youth photography.......................13

market basket..................................4

A Shooting Star................................5

Community News............................6

organization updates...................17

Telling room poetry.....................18

Finance ...........................................19

Guest columns...............................22

The mix...........................................25

Kennedy Park little library ........27

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.

Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The anthology Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of gender-related topics, from motherhood to concepts of masculinity, sexuality, and professional work.

Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In her book Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe (Restauration of capitalism: Re-patriarchization of society), Lilijana Burcar compares the systemic and structural conditions of women’s position in socialism and capitalism.

Chiara Bonfiglioli, Women And Industry In The Balkans. The Rise And Fall Of The Yugoslav Textile Sector. (I.B.Tauris 2019, 230 Pages, 1st Ed.), Agata Zysiak

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

“For us it was much better, for us personally, for people it was much better during socialism than it is today, in any case.” (p. 1) This quote from a textile worker opens Chiara Bonfiglioli’s book, but the story presented is by no means a nostalgic tour exploring collapsed factories or reproducing homo-sovieticus stereotypes.

Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

While most recent feminist studies on the socialist heritage are preoccupied with the conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions of the 1990s and beyond, Kristen Ghodsee’s book Second World, Second Sex (2018) evokes the most vibrant decade of women’s global activism marked by joint initiatives of women from both socialist and decolonized societies from the Global South.

A Study Of West African Slave Resistance From The Seventeenth To Nineteenth Centuries, Adam D. Wilsey

History in the Making

Accompanying the dawn of the twenty-first century, there has emerged a new era of historical thinking that has created the need to reexamine the history of slavery and slave resistance. Slavery has become a controversial topic that historians and scholars throughout the world are reevaluating. In this modern period, which is finally beginning to honor the ideas and ideals of equality, slavery is the black mark of our past; and the task now lies before the world to derive a better understanding of slavery. In order to better understand slavery, it is crucial to have a more acute awareness of …

Slavery And The Search For Belonging In Modern Sudan, William Fant

History in the Making

For many Sudanese, the migration of Islamic society into Sudan has produced difficulties in identifying belonging. Centuries in the making, Sudan has become a split nation in which the south has retained much of its African identity, while the north has become increasingly Islamized. While no discernable traits separate the divided portions of Sudan, the division has allowed the dominant north to forcibly gain control of the entire nation. This phenomenon has led to increased discontent among the regions, resulting in civil war and the reintroduction of slavery. Although the physical division in Sudan is as blurred as the ethnic …