African History Commons^™

A Language For The World: The Standardization Of Swahili, Morgan J. Robinson

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those …

Shifting Sands., Rachid Tagoulla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Shifting Sands is a re-exploration of the presentation of North Africans in colonial postcards, an examination of identity, and a critique of the modern Western museum. Since the inception of photography, colonizers used this medium- especially in the form of postcards- to categorize and exoticize Eastern peoples in order to more easily subjugate them. Shifting Sands is a series of reconstructed colonial postcards which challenges colonial-era stereotypes of North African peoples. The colonial gaze, represented by the camera lens, is subverted through a lensless image-making process in which sand is used to remove the subject from the colonial gaze and …

Understanding Violence Against Foreigners In Cape Town: Conceptions Of Autochthony And Xenophobia In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Mary L. Casey

Student Publications

Examining the correlation between the history of colonialism and structures of Apartheid in South Africa and the current xenophobic violence experienced by Black African immigrants settling in Cape Town. This thesis explores theories of autochthony and belonging in the context of Cape Town, Black South African relationships and ownership of land, access to resources and opportunities for employment, and the continued disenfranchisement of Black South Africans in the wake of Apartheid. These components of the issue of xenophobia in Cape Town are factored into an analysis of how and why violence persists against immigrants in the city.

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Exploring Moroccan Identities: The Tension Between Traditional And Modern Cuisine In An Urban Context, Miriam R. Dike

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

“Knowledge In The Service Of The Cause”:Education And The Sahrawi Struggle For Self-Determination, Randa Farah

Randa R Farah Dr.

This article examines the education strategy of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), the state-in-exile with partial sovereignty on “borrowed territory” in Algeria. The article, which opens with a historical glance at the conflict, argues that SADR’s education program not only succeeded in fostering self-reliance by developing skilled human resources, but was forward looking, using education as a vehicle to instill “new traditions of citizenship” and a new imagined national community, in preparation for future repatriation. In managing refugee camps as provinces of a state, the boundaries between the “refugee” as status and the “citizen” as a political identity were …