Faculty Publications - African Studies

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/3144

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The 1993 Celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in Bloomington, Indiana: Tradition, Interpretation, and Conflicts of Identity
(Hoosier Folklore Society, Deptartment of English, Indiana State University, 1996) Reed, Daniel B.
African Borderland Sculpture
(UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center, 1987) McNaughton, Patrick
African Immigrant Families' Views on English as a Second Language (ESL) Classes Held for Newly Arrived Immigrant Children in the United States Elementary and Middle Schools: A Study in Ethnography
(Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006) Obeng, Samuel; Obeng, Cecilia
Twenty immigrant families from different Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone African countries were interviewed about their views on English as a Second Language (ESL) classes offered by the school systems in the United States to newly arrived immigrant children. Whereas nine families (mostly from Francophone and Lusophone Africa) found the ESL classes useful, eleven families (mostly from Anglophone Africa) found them to be useless because they did not help to improve their children's English. Some respondents were frustrated because ofthe criterion used in selecting students to participate in the program, and also because their children were kept in the program long after their English proficiency had improved. Most respondents saw inclusion within the mainstream classes, instead of separate ESL classes, as a better way to increase students' English competency.
African Literature
(Indiana University Press, 1995) Julien, Eileen
African Literature in Comparative Perspective
(Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University Bloomington, 1995) Julien, Eileen
Akan Death-Prevention Names: A Pragmatic and Structural Analysis
(Maney Publishing, 1998) Obeng, Samuel Gyasi
This paper discusses the content and types of Akan death-prevention names. It provides a structural linguistic analysis of the morphology of these names and presents a socio- and ethnolinguistic account of the death-prevention names as they function within Akan communication. The paper also classifies the names according to their structures. Death-prevention names are shown to be meaningful and to refer to the lives of both their bearers and the name-givers.
Are Births Just “Women’s Business?” Gift Exchange, Value, and Global Volatility in Muslim Senegal
(American Anthropological Association, 2011-11) Buggenhagen, Beth
Through global circuits of wage labor and capital, the Murid way has become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony amid conditions of protracted global volatility. In this article, I analyze women's actions within these global circuits. Women create value by giving gifts during the celebration of births and marriages, gifts that are the product of and the motivating force behind Murid global trade. Female ritual activities, on which male honor rests, draw women into conflict with the Murid clergy, which views women's actions as customary and not part of its modern, austere, and global vision of Islam in Senegal.
Artists' Depictions of Senegalese Signares: insights concerning French racist and sexist attitudes in the nineteenth century.
(Institut universitaire d'études du développement (IUED) & Société suisse d'études africaines (SSEA), 1980) Brooks, George E.
Asante Queen Mothers: Precolonial Authority in a Postcolonial Society
(Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana, Legon, 2003) Stoeltje, Beverly J.
While the Asantehene and Asantehemmaa are well known figures in Ghana, less familiar are the many queen mothers who function in parallel roles to chiefs in every Asante town and paramountcy. Ignored by the British and generally bypassed by modern Ghanaian leaders, queen mothers have nevertheless continued to serve their constituencies faithfully. More recently, however, globalization has discovered them, and external sources are beginning to seek them out for local projects. Yet, queen mothers continue to face serious obstacles as a precolonial female authority in a postcolonial society.
Asymmetric coordination in Lega
(Kölner Institut für Afrikanistik, Köln, Germany, 1998) Botne, Robert; Tak, Jin Young
Avatars of the Feminine in Senghor, Laye and Diop
(Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1987) Julien, Eileen
Bamana Blacksmiths
(UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center, 1979) McNaughton, Patrick
Between agreement and case marking in Lamnso
(Indiana University Linguistics Club, 2002) Botne, Robert; McGarrity, Laura W.
Lamnso, a language in the Grassfields branch of Southern Bantoid, has a system of noun classes marked by (C)V affixes that attach to the stem. Noun modifiers agree with the noun by attaching a comparable affix that matches the class. This type of NP-level concord is typical of Bantu languages. At the clausal level, (C)V markers that are identical in form to those appearing at the NP-level appear as enclitics on virtually all nouns in a sentence. Though these markers are identical, it is argued that they serve separate functions, marking agreement on subject nouns before the verb and case on oblique object nouns after the verb. Direct objects and nouns in locative expressions are not marked. Typological evidence in the form of a grammatical relations hierarchy is discussed in support of these claims.
Cabo Verde: Gulag of the South Atlantic: Racism, Fishing Prohibitions, and Famines.
(African Studies Association, 2006) Brooks, George E.
Can we help fight cultural illiteracy?
(UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center, 1992) McNaughton, Patrick
The Challenges of Aesthetic Populism: An Interview with Jean-Pierre Bekolo
(Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, 2008) Adesokan, Akin
In the early 1990s a young Cameroonian director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, stormed the annals of African filmmaking with a stylish urban comedy, Quartier Mozart. This fast-paced story about sexual politics in a Yaounde neighborhood was edited on the template of the musical video, a genre in which Bekolo had worked briefly before turning to filmmaking. Quartier Mozart was widely praised for its iconoclastic attitude in a filmmaking tradition which had formalized cultural identity and the politics of self-representation into aesthetic concerns. The form of Bekolo’s work encouraged critics to compare him to the Senegalese Djibril Diop Mambety (d. 1998), another filmmaker who, twenty-years earlier, had similarly redefined African cinema with the magnificent Touki-Bouki (1973), his first work. The film was also so reflexive in its awareness of contemporary cinema that further comparisons with the style of the black American director, Spike Lee, became moot. Such critical comments did not produce an “anxiety of influence” in the young director: he openly and repeatedly declared his interest in the works of Mambety (about whom Bekolo shot a documentary film, Grandmother’s Grammar, 1996). Four years after Quartier Mozart, Bekolo produced and directed Aristotle’s Plot (1996), his commissioned entry in the series sponsored by the British Film Institute to mark the centenary of cinema. Other directors in the series included Stephen Frears, Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorcese, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this film, Bekolo sets up the genre of action film to question the rationale of mimesis, the Aristotle’s plot of the title, which has overdetermined the practice of storytelling, in Hollywood and elsewhere. The confident mix of aesthetic populism and critical, even auterish staging of conceptual issues in African and contemporary filmmaking has become Bekolo’s style. For him, a film has to entertain in the traditional sense but without sacrificing an awareness of its place in a vast, diverse but persistent effort to form and transform the practice of African filmmaking. This is a complex but productive intellectual position within an artistic tradition noted for its divisions, factions, and labels. The commitment is pursued further in Les Saignantes (2005), a beautifully photographed film about two femme fatales who set out to rid their country of its corrupt and sexually obsessed male politicians. It is a hybrid sci-fi-action-horror film set in the year 2025, and again, the director uses the opportunity to discursively explore the forms of cinema and of African politics. Bekolo’s other directorial credits include Boyo (1988), Un pauvre blanc (1989), and Mohawk People (1990). This interview was conducted on April 29, 2006, in New York City.
Civil War in the Kingdom of Benin, 1689-1721: Continuity or Political Change?
(Cambridge University Press, 2001) Girshick, Paula Ben-Amos; Thornton, John
Using a combination of oral tradition and written documents, the authors show that Benin's civil war was a fundamental transformation of political structure, and not simply an isolated struggle. Before 1640, Benin was centrally governed by its king with the assistance of a royally appointed administration. Difficulties in succession, coupled with changing trading patterns, allowed the administration to gain some independence and then to challenge the kings, taking away some power. The civil war matched different levels of the administration and the kings against each other, and transformed Benin from a centrally governed to a more collectively governed kingdom.
Communication strategies: persuasion and politeness in Akan judicial discourse.
(Mouton de Gruyter, 1997) Obeng, Samuel Gyasi
Persuasive Akan judicial discourse includes a variety of effective strategies, among them the use of apologetic expressions or mitigators, deferential modes of reference, indirectly authored speech forms (e.g., tales, riddles, proverbs, etc. ), negotiation, complements, and acknowledgement of impositions. These persuasive strategies help legal professionals in dealing with the face-wants that arise in the judicial process. In this article, I demonstrate how Akan legal professionals, in persuading a chief and his elders to do what they will otherwise not do - pardon an appellant - employ one or more of these strategies to achieve their ends.
A Comparison of Reduplication in Limonese Creole and Akan
(Battlebridge Publications, 2003) Winkler, Elizabeth Grace; Obeng, Samuel Gyasi
Comprehensive Bibliography of Chadic and Hausa Linguistics, Fourth Edition
(Paul Newman, 2018) Newman, Paul

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