Africa Today articles from April 1997

Africa Today archives from April 1997

Editor's introduction. (future of African and other area studies)(Editorial)
April 1, 1997... This issue of Africa Today introduces a number of changes - new features, a new focus, and a new editor. The vision of the journal's founders in 1953 was "an America which would side with the peoples of Africa in their aspirations for human...

Area studies and political science: rupture and possible synthesis (Africa studies)
April 1, 1997... This article addresses the tensions between area study and social scientific approaches to the study of politics. It characterizes - or, more accurately, caricatures - the differences between these approaches and the impact of these differences...

The social science area studies controversy from the continental African standpoint. (African area studies)
April 1, 1997... From the point of view of African social scientists working in Africa, one-fourth of whom are probably based in Nigeria, the raging controversy over whether to integrate Area Studies into wider International Studies programs, under an overarching...

For African studies, race still matters.
April 1, 1997... One of the crucial intellectual and social arguments for sustaining African Studies in the United States is the continuing need for a strong countervailing force, within U.S. academic life, to the repeated resurgence of deeply rooted and deeply...

The internalization of African studies: a view from the SSRC. (Social Science Research Council)
April 1, 1997... The term "globalization" and the implication of "global studies" for Area Studies are matters of much debate at the moment. At the close of the twentieth century, there is an unprecedented volume of flows of capital, people, commodities,...

Funding African studies in the twenty-first century.
April 1, 1997... For African Studies, the last decade of the twentieth century will be remembered primarily as a period characterized by an excitement about the prospects of democratic development in a number of countries that had experienced authoritarian rule...

Local/global linkages and the future of African studies.
April 1, 1997... Debates about the future of African Studies seem to have little to do with the past as I know or have come to understand it. What I discern is a profusion of arguments linked to differing standpoints and designed to privilege new hierarchies of...

The remaking of African studies.
April 1, 1997... Can African Studies flourish in the coming years given diminishing federal and foundation interest in Area Studies? What threats are represented by related university moves to organize their programs around international or global themes? If we...

African studies at the Fin de Siecle: is it really the 'Fin?'
April 1, 1997... I am probably not the best person to engage in the debates over Area Studies, globalization, and the organizational-funding changes currently refiguring African Studies in the United States.(1) By training and disposition I am a geographer(2) - a...

The perpetual solitudes and crises of African studies in the United States.
April 1, 1997... In November 1995 I went to my first annual meeting of the African Studies Association on U.S. soil.(1) It was the largest academic gathering I had ever attended. But what left an indelible impression on my mind was not the crowded and constrained...

Irredentist Rwanda: ethnic and territorial frontiers in Central Africa.
April 1, 1997... Three countries of Central Africa have been overtaken by three catastrophes in three years. In October 1993, the newly elected president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated. Since then, more than 150,000 people in the country have been...

Documenting genocide: Cambodia's lessons for Rwanda. (conflict in an Asian country applied to a Central African state)
April 1, 1997... More than two years after the end of the 1994 civil war in Rwanda,(1) a complete account of the genocide - and a sense that justice has been brought to bear against its planners - seems a distant prospect. To most observers, both inside and...

Rural ideologies and urban imaginings: Wolof immigrants in New York City. (Wolof-speaking Senegalese immigrants in New York, NY)
April 1, 1997... Senegalese in New York City Wolof-speaking Senegalese began migrating to New York City in the 1980s.(1) In Senegal, Wolofs are the politically and culturally dominant group,(2) but in New York City they are a minority among minorities. They...

An ode to the Lorax: the business of sustainable development, an African forest tale. (poem)
April 1, 1997... Back in the days of precolonial bliss when primordial forests were covered with mist wood dwelling natives ate nuts, berries, and bees and picked monkey bread pods from the baobab trees. One glorious morning Abdou Diallo N'diaye was harpooning...

Indigenous Capital in Kenya: The Indian Dimension of the Debate.
April 1, 1997... The debate on the political economy of capitalist development in Kenya just will not go away. Initiated by Colin Leys's famous 1978 renunciation of the hypothesis that indigenous capitalist accumulation in Kenya had been stunted by its dependence...

Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa.
April 1, 1997... A jointly authored study, Environment and History compares the history of environmental resource management in South Africa and the United States. The book is an impressive collation of recent research in U.S. and South African historiography...

Senegal: An African Nation Between Islam and the West, 2d ed.
April 1, 1997... For a wide variety of reasons, Senegal has drawn more attention from scholars and statesmen than either its demographic or economic weight might suggest it warrants. There is thus a relatively richer literature exploring Senegalese history,...