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Sorcery in the Black Atlantic
Most scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly challenging these views, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic takes a longer historical and broader geographical perspective, contending that sorcery is best understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has significant connections to modernity and globalization. A distinguished group of contributors here examine sorcery in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, Cameroon, and Angola. Their insightful essays reveal the way practices and accusations of witchcraft spread throughout the Atlantic world from the age of discovery up to the present, creating an indelible link between sorcery and the rise of global capitalism. Shedding new light on a topic of perennial interest, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic will be provocative, compelling reading for historians and anthropologists working in this growing field.
The Power of the Occult in Modern Africa
The occult is a framework of ideas and related practices that is drawn upon as a common resource to provide an understanding of how an apparently random world 'really' works. Based mainly on experiential research in a range of African societies, the essays in this volume examine the relevance of the occult to a variety of social concepts and contexts. These studies stress three features of the occult in modern Africa: 1) as an explanatory and tactical device, it is resilient; 2) it is malleable, with a capacity to absorb and assimilate new elements; 3) it is flexible and adaptable to emerging situations and novel circumstances. Of interest to specialists in the fields of religion, social science and African studies, this book will benefit the general reader interested in the occult and its relevance to modernity and globalisation.
Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa
Religion is often seen as a conservative force in contemporary Africa. In particular, Christian beliefs and actors are usually depicted as driving the opposition to homosexuality and LGBTI rights in African societies. This book nuances that picture, by drawing attention to discourses emerging in Africa itself that engage with religion, specifically Christianity, in progressive and innovative ways--in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTI people. The authors show not only that African Christian traditions harbor strong potential for countering conservative anti-LGBTI dynamics; but also that this potential has already begun to be realized, by various thinkers, activis...
Cultivating Moral Citizenship. An Ethnography of Young People's Associations, Gender and Social Adulthood in the Cameroon Gra
In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.
Sociality
The notion of 'sociality' is now widely used within the social sciences and humanities. However, what is meant by the term varies radically, and the contributors here, through compelling and wide ranging essays, identify the strengths and weaknesses of current definitions and their deployment in the social sciences. By developing their own rigorous and innovative theory of human sociality, they re-set the framework of the debate and open up new possibilities for conceptualizing other forms of sociality, such as that of animals or materials. Cases from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe explore the new directions of human sociality, illuminating how and why it is transformed when human beings engage with such major issues as economic downturn, climate change, new regimes of occupational and psychological therapy, technological innovations in robotics and the creation of new online, 'virtual' environments. This book is an invaluable resource, not only for research and teaching, but for anyone interested in the question of what makes us social.
Rhetorics of Insecurity
In Rhetorics of Insecurity, Zeynep Gambetti and Marcial Godoy-Anativia bring together a select group of scholars to investigate the societal ramifications of the present-day concern with security in diverse contexts and geographies. The essays claim that discourses and practices of security actually breed insecurity, rather than merely being responses to the latter. By relating the binary of security/insecurity to the binary of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, the contributors to this volume reveal the tensions inherent in the proliferation of individualism and the concurrent deployment of techniques of societal regulation around the globe. Chapters explore the phenomena of indistinction, reve...
Civic Agency in Africa
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.
Race, Taste and the Grape
With the introduction of wine to the Cape Colony, it became associated locally with social extremes: with the material trappings of privilege and taste, on the one side, and the stark realities of human bondage, on the other. By examining the history of Cape wine, Paul Nugent offers a detailed history of how, in South Africa, race has shaped patterns of consumption. The book takes us through the Liquor Act of 1928, which restricted access along racial lines, intervention to address overproduction from the 1960s, and then latterly, in the wake of the fall of the Apartheid regime, deregulation in the 1990s and South Africa's re-entry into global markets. We see how the industry struggled to embrace Black Economic Empowerment, environmental diversity and the consumer market. This book is an essential read for those interested in the history of wine, and how it intersects with both South African and global history.
African Futures
The essays in this collection are written to make readers (re)consider what is possible in Africa. The essays shake the tree of received wisdom and received categories, and hone in on the complexities of life under ecological and economic constraints. Yet, throughout this volume, people do not emerge as victims, but rather as inventors, engineers, scientists, planners, writers, artists, and activists, or as children, mothers, fathers, friends, or lovers – all as future-makers. It is precisely through agents such as these that Africa is futuring: rethinking, living, confronting, imagining, and relating in the light of its many emerging tomorrows.
General Labour History of Africa
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.
