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Author: R. Blench
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780759104662
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholarly work that attempts to match linguistic and archaeological evidence in precolonial Africa
Author: Bruce S. Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-06-06
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9781107002876
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe mobilization of local ideas about racial difference has been important in generating, and intensifying, civil wars that have occurred since the end of colonial rule in all of the countries that straddle the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. From Sudan to Mauritania, the racial categories deployed in contemporary conflicts often hearken back to an older history in which blackness could be equated with slavery and non-blackness with predatory and uncivilized banditry. This book traces the development of arguments about race over a period of more than 350 years in one important place along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert: the Niger Bend in northern Mali. Using Arabic documents held in Timbuktu, as well as local colonial sources in French and oral interviews, Bruce S. Hall reconstructs an African intellectual history of race that long predated colonial conquest, and which has continued to orient inter-African relations ever since.
Author: Lifongo J. Vetinde
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2014-11-12
Total Pages: 205
ISBN-13: 0739192558
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUndoubtedly one of Africa’s most influential first generation of writers and filmmakers, Ousmane Sembene's creative works of fiction as well as his films have been the subject of a considerable number of scholarly articles. The schemas of reading applied to Sembene's oeuvre (novels, short stories and films) have, in the main, focused either on his militant posture against colonialism, his disenchantment with African leadership, or his infatuation with documenting the past in an attempt to present a balanced and nuanced view of African history. While these studies, unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of his works, they collectively ignore Sembene’s relentless preoccupation with culture in his entire career as a writer and filmmaker. The collection of essays in Sembene and the Politics of Culture sets out to fill that gap as the contributors at once foreground Sembene’s fixation on the centrality of culture in the articulation of the discourse of national consciousness and reevaluate his intellectual and artistic legacy within an overarching framework of African liberation. The contributors critically reassess the ideological underpinnings of Sembene’s thoughts, his role as one of the foundational pillars of African cultural production, and his relevance in current discourses of nationhood. They do so through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches that draw on linguistics, feminist theory, film theory, historiography, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis and a host of other approaches that give novel insights in the critical analysis of the works under study. In the part entitled “Testimonies," a collection of conversations with people who worked closely with Sembene, each of the interlocutors provide illuminating insights into the man's life and work. The variety of themes and critical approaches in this critical anthology will certainly be of interest not only to students and scholars of African literature and cinema at various levels of intellectual and cultural sophistication but also anyone interested in the analysis of the nexus between power, culture, and the discourse of liberation.
Author: Peter Mitchell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2013-07-04
Total Pages: 1077
ISBN-13: 0191626147
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfrica has the longest and arguably the most diverse archaeological record of any of the continents. It is where the human lineage first evolved and from where Homo sapiens spread across the rest of the world. Later, it witnessed novel experiments in food-production and unique trajectories to urbanism and the organisation of large communities that were not always structured along strictly hierarchical lines. Millennia of engagement with societies in other parts of the world confirm Africa's active participation in the construction of the modern world, while the richness of its history, ethnography, and linguistics provide unusually powerful opportunities for constructing interdisciplinary narratives of Africa's past. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of African archaeology, covering the entirety of the continent's past from the beginnings of human evolution to the archaeological legacy of European colonialism. As well as covering almost all periods and regions of the continent, it includes a mixture of key methodological and theoretical issues and debates, and situates the subject's contemporary practice within the discipline's history and the infrastructural challenges now facing its practitioners. Bringing together essays on all these themes from over seventy contributors, many of them living and working in Africa, it offers a highly accessible, contemporary account of the subject for use by scholars and students of not only archaeology, but also history, anthropology, and other disciplines.
Author: David C. Conrad
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 1604131640
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores empires of medieval west Africa.
Author: Gregory H. Maddox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2006-03-24
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 1851095608
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA wealth of information and analysis on the environmental forces that have helped shaped the cultures of the African continent. A scholarly reference work that will also appeal to the general reader, Sub-Saharan Africa sets the story of the African environment within the context of geological time and shows how the continent's often harsh conditions prompted humans to develop unique skills in agriculture, animal husbandry, and environmental management. Part of ABC-CLIO's Nature and Human Societies series, this book enables readers to better grasp the extent of humanity's effect on our world. Of particular interest are the book's sections dealing with the impact of the Biafran famine of the 1960s, the Sahelian drought of the 1970s, population growth, and the ongoing challenges of war and HIV/AIDS. Crucially, the book also shows how, despite their relative poverty, many African states have coped admirably with rapid urbanization and have developed world-class conservation and sustainability programs in order to protect and harness some of the most endangered species in the world.
Author: J. Cameron Monroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-06-09
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 1139952536
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Bénin, emerged in this period as one of the principal agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Bénin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. J. Cameron Monroe argues that these tactics enabled kings to economically exploit their subjects and to promote a sense of the historical and natural inevitability of royal power.
Author: Christopher Chi Che
Publisher: African Books Collective
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 9956578096
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is a descriptive and documentary analysis of the Mankon I-language and E-language mirrored through aspects of history, geography, flora and fauna. These aspects manifest in the taxonomic nomenclatures attributed to referents in society. Because these referents were hitherto transmitted orally from generation to generation, the author has painstakingly analysed and documented aspects of Mankon culture for posterity. The work focuses in particular on Mankon proverbs for insights into the structure and function of the language. As a vehicle of communication, language plays a primordial role in encoding and decoding 'metalinguistic' data. Through thorough scientific linguistic universals and principals, Chi Che has proposed orthography for Mankon pedagogy that is simple, tenable and practicable. This book is the answer to the international clarion call for societies to analyse and document their endangered indigenous cultures. Schools, linguists, sociolinguists, anthropologists, historians and others will find this book especially useful.
Author: Heather Millar
Publisher: Cavendish Square Publishing
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 88
ISBN-13: 9780761400882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPresents the history and culture of the kingdom which 500 years ago outshone all others on Africa's west coast and which is now part of Nigeria.
Author: G. Tucker Childs
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Published: 2003-12-19
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 9027295883
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book introduces beginning students and non-specialists to the diversity and richness of African languages. In addition to providing a solid background to the study of African languages, the book presents linguistic phenomena not found in European languages. A goal of this book is to stimulate interest in African languages and address the question: What makes African languages so fascinating? The orientation adopted throughout the book is a descriptive one, which seeks to characterize African languages in a relatively succinct and neutral manner, and to make the facts accessible to a wide variety of readers. The author’s lengthy acquaintance with the continent and field experiences in western, eastern, and southern Africa allow for both a broad perspective and considerable depth in selected areas. The original examples are often the author’s own but also come from other sources and languages not often referenced in the literature. This text also includes a set of sound files illustrating the phenomena under discussion, be they the clicks of Khoisan, talking drums, or the ideophones (words like English lickety-split) found almost everywhere, which will make this book a valuable resource for teacher and student alike.
