The "resource curse" is a term used to characterize the risks faced by poor countries where natural resources that are object of international greed are discovered. The promise of abundance arising from the enormous commercial value of resources and from the investments required to achieve it is so convincing that it starts to influence the pattern of economic, social, political, and cultural development.
06.12.2012 | by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Thus, far from being characteristic of colonial continuities before former European colonies - or what the Peruvian Anibal Quijano (1992) dubbed coloniality of power and knowledge, we are witnessing an Israeli colonialism that, contrary to what is preached is not based on defense and state security before the neighbors and "enemies" in Arabic or enlargement of its territory, but the regional dominance of a natural resource more precious than oil and that can feed the emergence of new colonial regimes in XXI Century: Water.
20.11.2012 | by Odair Bartolomeu Varela
Thinking about the body is a strategic requirement, a way to discuss the normative processes of exclusion, naturalization and production, setting new ways to be in the world, new affections, to expand the horizon of the reasoning about the body. The idea is to insist less in the identity politics nor the identity pretensions (and its deceiver subversion) and more on precariousness and the way it deals with difference as well as the way the maps of power are exploited.
06.11.2012 | by Buala
The African continent for a long time was totally overlooked in the annals of the history of photography. Indeed, Africa only appeared timidly on the international horizon or rather to arouse certain interest in the West around the early 1990s. Among other important events of the time that contributed towards this growing interest figures the African Photography Biennial in Mali, also known as the African Encounters of Photography. It was precisely that framework that gave rise to this collection that wishes to concentrate on the gaze of some of the women participating in the biennial. Our collection has two main objectives: firstly, to forestage African photography on the global scenario, in other words, to make it part of the whole and not merely consider it as part of the rest; and, secondly, to act out the will to endow African women photographers more visibility. This collection aims to break down the barriers of this double invisibility by looking at the narrative constructs of these women and thus multiplying the existing ways of seeing in an attempt to broaden and enhance our own perspectives.
24.09.2012 | by Masasam
The creole, as a language, arose from the communication needs of colonized societies with the colonizer regime, being the language of national unity in many countries. Considering their own mother tongues as little useful, colonized societies recurred to the linguistic knowledge of the imposed model to build a simpler form of vehicular language, which we nowadays call creole.
23.08.2012 | by Catarina Laranjeiro and Jorge Filipe
It’s Friday afternoon at the Al-Ahmad mosque in lower Buenos Aires. Despite gathering here with their multicultural brethren for prayer service, the small group of African men walking out the door is part of an inchoate community that has become a bit of a talking point in this vast and diverse metropolis.
08.06.2012 | by Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino
You will find here the account of a series of journeys which I began in August 2010. You will also find in the text and drawings of Right After the Comma other earlier and later journeys which are not restricted by it and which will orbit and “de-temporalise” its central course.
07.05.2012 | by Mattia Denisse
Nomads can be understood in different contexts, as in an anthropological sense, nomads as a new concept in philosophy and nomads as a real and metaphorical concept for new artistic praxis both in real and metaphorical senses. The real sense refers to art among nomadic people, while the metaphorical usage pertains to the use of nomadism in new artistic and theatrical creations.
20.12.2011 | by Knut OveArntzen
For the most part, prevailing definitions of gender in African studies have come from disciplines located within the Western body of knowledge. Scholars are often unaware how much these definitions are steeped in the mores and norms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the social conventions of European and European American cultures.
01.11.2011 | by Nkiru Nzegwu
My concern is not to say who is and who is not Angolan. In Angola, as in any modern society, being Angolan is defined by the nationality law. Portugal began to nationalize all the native of colonies during the colonial war. Denationalizing them was among the first political acts of the government resulted from the 25th of April.
09.10.2011 | by António Tomás
I set lusosphere as a debate far from any substance, a virtual focus that, referring to Portuguese language, develops its own dynamics in different national contexts. Far from being in front of a consensual thought, lusosphere hovers on situations of tension that put in contact these different contexts with each other.
17.09.2011 | by Omar Thomaz Ribeiro
Pedro F. Marcelino has released a study on the new migratory paradigm emerging in post-9/11 Cape Verde. The study reflects a socio-economic context in which out-migration to traditional overseas destinations is no longer the only migratory phenomenon in the islands. The country has seen a steep increase in part- and full-time resident Europeans, as well as Chinese and continental African migrants. The research proposes that anti-terrorist measures and immigration control policies in both the USA and the EU after 9/11 have altered the migratory map of West Africa, whilst failing to curb people’s aspirations to depart and seek a better life.
16.09.2011 | by Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino
Stating that sorcery exists in Mozambique is a mere declaration of an obvious and recurring fact. People may use it in order to obtain active results or to protect oneself from undesirable events, in the pursuance of legitimate or illegitimate, beneficial or malevolent goals. The effectiveness of this practice is, nonetheless, an issue that tends to divide readers between outspoken scepticism, attitudes of plausible doubt, complex speeches about its symbolic efficacy, and a somewhat apprehensive fear or agreement.
15.09.2011 | by Paulo Granjo
It is undeniable that in Lisbon there is a natural approximation of Portuguese-speaking people, not Portuguese of nationality, even when they do not share the same race and culture. National differences reduce face to the discrimination which all are submitted to. And it makes full sense to think about this reduction as a need for resistance to discrimination, because the metropole turns homogeneous all the ex-colonized, grouping them in the categories of “nigger”, “black”, “immigrant”.
03.09.2011 | by António Tomás
Lusosphere has been traditionally intended on the basis of progressively reducing dimensions: the geographic one, that unite the eight countries of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (Portuguese: Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, CPLP); the political one, that is confined to Portuguese speaking communities spread all over the world; and finally, the historical and cultural one, related to the Portuguese inheritance in different parts of the earth during the maritime expansion and the colonial empire.
03.08.2011 | by Lurdes Macedo
Although most of the moral economy theorists discussed so far are critics of historical capitalism, few of them are Marxists. Indeed, whether stressing market rationalism or communal norms, they refuse (often explicitly) to discuss peasant society in class terms (see especially Magagna, forthcoming). Marxist analyses of the peasantry, along with "peasant studies" in general may indeed be out of fashion (Roseberry 1989); nonetheless it is Marxists who continue to search for the cultural components of Third World responses to capitalism-- including witchcraft beliefs. The results may be problematic, but they nonetheless point to paths of inquiry not opened by the individualist and functionalist approaches of other moral economy theories.
11.07.2011 | by Ralph A. Austen
The central trope of the various efforts to define moral economy has been an opposition between, on the one hand, the maximizing individual and ever-expanding market of classical political economy, and on the other a community governed by norms of collective survival and believing in a zero-sum universe: i.e. a world where all profit is gained at someone else's loss. The communal/zero-sum side of this equation is broadly consistent with African beliefs identifying capitalism and witchcraft as the dangerous appropriation of limited reproductive resources by selfish individuals.
21.06.2011 | by Ralph A. Austen
Witchcraft, as used here, is also an abstraction, but one intended to represent directly the terms used by African and other societies to describe their own beliefs and practices. The introductory section of the essay will attempt to identify an African witchcraft idiom which gives broader meaning to texts such as the Beninois oral account of slave-cowry transactions. The concluding section will examine the early-modern European "witch craze" in order to consider how the elaboration of common elements in European and African culture both reflects and mediates differing trajectories into the modern world
19.06.2011 | by Ralph A. Austen
When the Africans discovered that the mato inspired such horror in the Portuguese, they made it their habitual refuge, patiently negotiating from there with the intruders. Queen Njinga, in Angola, played this game to perfection, thus provoking the increasing anger of the Portuguese. Referring to the subterfuges the Portuguese governor opposed to the liberation of her sister, prisoner in Luanda, she wrote on 13 December 1655: “For these and other betrayals I took shelter in the matos, far from my territories” (Cadornega 1972, II: 501). By withdrawing to the forest, the queen was not only obeying a military imperative, but also putting pressure on the Portuguese.
17.05.2011 | by Martín Lienhard
Since the 1960s, there has been great excitement in many African countries with the creation of art schools. Together with the first exhibitions of self-taught artists, there have also been the first festivals of black art, and even the work of African photographers has begun to establish a reputation for itself in Africa, in European countries and in some forums in the USA. The history of these artistic movements is already being written, describing their schools, their leading figures and their international impact.
11.05.2011 | by António Pinto Ribeiro