Books in the Research in International Studies, Africa Series series

There is a tendency to regard African literature as a homogenous product. Certainly it is true that African writers have created a vibrant, modern literature. Nevertheless, they come from specific societies and reflect vastly differing worlds.Wanasema attempts to show some of the many faces of African literature.

The Moral Economy of the State examines state formation in Zimbabwe from the colonial period through the first decade of independence.

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Wangari Maathai is presented as a scholar whose contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges paralleled her renowned environmental activism.

Since 1999 and the death of King Hassan II, Morocco has experienced a dramatic social transformation. This book focuses on Moroccan films produced and distributed from 1999 to the present. It introduces American readers to the richness in theme and scope of the cinematic production of Morocco.

Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa's lingua franca, and its cultures.

Even with a university education, the Igbo women of southeastern Nigeria face obstacles that prevent them from reaching their professional and personal potentials. Negotiating Power and Privilege is a study of their life choices and the embedded patriarchy and other obstacles in postcolonial Africa barring them from fulfillment.Philomina

This volume presents a broad overview of the work of seven of Africa's leading poets. Five of them have received international recognition: Niyi Osundare and Chinua Achebe, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Osundare and Antonio Jacinto, the Noma Prize; and Jose Craveirinha, the Camoes Prize.

Although development issues generally have been considered in a framework of economic theory and politics, in this volume Tedros Kiros looks to European ideas of moral philosophy to explain the underdevelopment of Africa and the persistent African food crisis.

There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.Wit

Nigerian video films-dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes-are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.

A Most Promising Weed examines the work experience, living conditions, and social relations of thousands of African men, women, and children on European-owned tobacco farms in colonial Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1945.

On the night of Saturday, July 13, 1991, a mob of male students at the St. Kizito Mixed Secondary School in Meru, Kenya, attacked their female classmates in a dormitory. Nineteen schoolgirls were killed in the melee and more than 70 were raped or gang raped.The

In the case of Nigeria, scholarship on religious politics has not adequately taken into account the pluralistic context and the idealistic pretensions of the state that inhibit the possibility of forging an enduring civic amity among Nigeria's diverse groups.

Katutura, located in Namibia's major urban center and capital, Windhoek, was a township created by apartheid, and administered in the past by the most rigid machinery of the apartheid era. Namibia became a sovereign state in 1990, and Katutura reflects many of the changes that have taken place.

Du Toit examines the results of two surveys which he made a decade apart among high school students of Black, Indian, White, and Colored backgrounds. The initial survey showed some acceptance of the use of these substances among a small proportion of high school students but a high degree of intolerance of such use by the majority.

Western Bahr al-Ghazal is perhaps one of the least known places in Africa. Yet this remote part of the Republic of Sudan can be regarded as a historical barometer, registering major developments in the history of the Nile valley. In the nineteenth century the region became one of the most active slave-exporting zones in Africa.

The concept of Colouredness-being neither white nor black-has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.Not

Portugal was the first European nation to assert itself aggressively in African affairs. David Birmingham's Portugal and Africa, a collection of uniquely accessible historical essays, surveys this colonial encounter from its earliest roots.

African Video Movies and Global Desires is the first full-length scholarly study of Ghana's commercial video industry, an industry that has produced thousands of movies over the last twenty years and has grown into an influential source of cultural production.

The Struggle for Meaning is a landmark publication by one of African philosophy's leading figures, Paulin J. Hountondji, best known for his critique of ethnophilosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this volume, he responds with autobiographical and philosophical reflection to the dialogue and controversy he has provoked.

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectivesthose of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leadersinto a riveting account. Though many books have been published on the topic of genital cutting, this is one of the few ethnographies to give voice to evolving perspectives of practitioners, especially through a period of intense anticutting campaigning on the part of international NGOs, local activists, and donor organizations. Prazak also examines the cultural challenges that complicate the human-rights anti-FGM stance.Set in the rolling hills of southwestern Kenya, Making the Mark examines the influences that shape and change female genital cutting over time, presenting a rich mosaic of the voices contributing to the debate over this life-altering ritual.

In the early and mid-1940s, during the period of British wartime occupation, community and religious leaders in the former Italian colony of Eritrea engaged in a course of intellectual and political debate that marked the beginnings of a genuine national consciousness across the region. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the scope of these concerns slowly expanded as the nascent nationalist movement brought together Muslim activists with the increasingly disaffected community of Eritrean Christians.The Eritrean Muslim League emerged as the first genuine proindependence organization in the country to challenge both the Ethiopian government's calls for annexation and international plans to partition Eritrea between Sudan and Ethiopia. The league and its supporters also contributed to the expansion of Eritrea's civil society, formulating the first substantial arguments about what made Eritrea an inherently separate national entity. These concepts were essential to the later transition from peaceful political protest to armed rebellion against Ethiopian occupation.Paths toward the Nation is the first study to focus exclusively on Eritrea's nationalist movement before the start of the armed struggle in 1961.

The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions.

The Children of Africa Confront AIDS depicts the reality of how African children deal with the AIDS epidemic, and how the discourse of their vulnerability affects acts of coping and courage.

This book examines the major phases in the history of health services in Africa and treats health as an integral aspect of the deepening crisis in Africa's underdevelopment. One important thesis is that Western delivery systems have made health care less accessible for most people.

The Twelve Best Books by African Women is a collection of critical essays on eleven works of fiction and one play, an important but belated affirmation of women writers on the continent and a first step toward establishing a recognized canon of African women's literature.

Every European power in Africa made motion pictures for its subjects, but no state invested as heavily in these films, and expected as much from them, as the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Flickering Shadows is the first book to explore this little-known world of colonial cinema.J.

Witchcraft Dialogues analyzes the complex manner in which human beings construct, experience, and think about the "occult."

In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.Broken

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder.