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In this erudite and gracefully written ethnography, Mariane Ferme explores the links between a violent historical and political legacy, and the production of secrecy in everyday material culture. The focus is on Mende-speaking southeastern Sierra Leone and the surrounding region. Since 1990, this area has been ravaged by a civil war that produced population displacements and regional instability. The Underneath of Things documents the rural impact of the progressive collapse of the Sierra Leonean state in the past several decades, and seeks to understand how an even earlier history is reinscribed in the present.
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This collection of essays provides a timely reassessment of nineteenth-century Islamic art and architecture. The essays demonstrate that the arts of that era were vibrant and diverse, making ingenious use of native traditions and materials or adopting imported conventions and new technologies. However, traditionalists, revivalists and modernists all referred in one way or another to an Islamic heritage, whether to reinvent, revive or reject it. Beginning with an historical introduction and an assessment of changing attitudes towards the visual arts the following essays provide case studies of architecture and art in Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, Iran, Central Asia, India and the Caribbean. They examine such issues as patronage, sources of artistic inspiration and responses to European art. The essays have a relevance and importance for our understanding of the societies and attitudes of that time, and have a direct bearing on the more general debate concerning cultural identity and the integration of modern ideas in the Muslim world. The book is richly illustrated with very many illustrations in black-and-white and in full colour.
Using a wealth of court records, Colonizing Consent shows how rape cases were caught up in, and helped shape, the major political debates in colonial South Africa.
A significant re-examination of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, revealing it to be a crucial nineteenth-century source for history in West Africa.
Describes the process of change from agricultural tribal society to one supplying migrant labor for mines and industry in South Africa and the concomitant effects on the economy, government, and families of Lesotho.
"Situating literature and anthropology in mutual interrogation, Miller's...book actually performs what so many of us only call for. Nowhere have all the crucial issues been brought together with the sort of critical sophistication it displays."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ". . . a superb cross-disciplinary analysis."—Y. Mudimbe
First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In the works of many prominent African writers, Islam provides a key component, and yet until now Islam has been ignored, unseen or glossed over in English literary criticism. This volume redresses this imbalance and focuses on Islam in the works of authors such as Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Sembene Ousmane, Birago Diop and Hampate Ba. It also includes studies on Songhay epics, Swahili and Somali poetry, Senegalese film, and the role of Sufism and Mouridism.
Venezuelan music has remained largely unnoticed in the academic English literature. Boasting a tremendous wealth of traditions, it displays influences from the Spanish, indigenous, and enslaved African communities that populated the territory from the “conquest” on and offers a tremendous diversity of genres and styles that vary by region, occasion, time, and sometimes ethnic influences. This book presents critical discussions of some of these traditions in connection with the issue of identity. The discussions capture country and city life, illustrate foundational myths, bring secular traditions closer to Christianity, explore surviving cultural strategies, et cetera. They also analyze the interface between Venezuelan identity and European classical music. The book displays diversity of perspectives in terms of (a) subject matter, as it includes traditional and concert musics; (b) disciplines on which the inquiries are grounded, as it includes essays by scholars and artists from musicology, performance, composition, history, cultural history, and education; and (c) epistemological approaches, as it includes critical, historical, and ethnographic research.