This book Trends in African Studies is a response to the challenge of the paucity of materials on the history and the development of African Studies in a global context. The available substantive materials on the subject are limited, thus creating a gap in related literature. Yet, the field of African Studies continues to generate global interest, academic recognition and respectability. This book documents the current state of African Studies and emerging trends in the field. It covers the development of African Studies in a global context: African Studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Europe, Australia, the United States of America and Canada, South America and the Caribbean, and it analyzes the trends present in each continent. An important contribution of this book to the field of African Studies is the development of an African Studies index designed for measuring the quality of African Studies and ranking. Useful information, suggested multidisciplinary research methods in African Studies and an appendix which includes a researched list of African Studies journals and organizations related to African Studies are found within its pages.

Awarded 'Special Commendation' in the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa 1998. The intellectual liberation of the study of Africa is the battle cry of this forceful book. The author is one of Africa's younger scholars, in the forefront of research and thinking about the role of African scholars, and the ownership and state of African Studies; and winner of The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa 1994. He describes this book as an interrogation of African Studies, its formulations and fetishes, theories and trends, possibilities and pitfalls. He argues that, as a discursiveformation, African Studies is immersed in the contexts and configurations of the western epistemological order; and the crisis in African Studies in North America and Britain reflects changing cultural policies as a result of the shifting ethnic and gender composition o fclassrooms, tansformations in the global positions of these countries, and the crisis of liberal values. The study has been highly recommended by such distinguished African scholars as Professors Mahmood Mamdani, Ali Mazrui, V.Y. Mudimbeand Adebayo Olikosh.

This book volume engages the emergent ways and exercises of world-making in eastern African literatures and cultures. It also includes how the world comes to eastern Africa as well as how eastern Africa speaks to the world. Writers within the region have come up with novel commentaries on diverse social issues. Artists and other users have invented new forms of expression through digitalization. The structure and content of this literature and cultural conversations, in line with modernity, has exhibited a fluidity that calls for the critical appraisal carried out in this book. Therefore, this book volume centralises the emergence of new patterns of engagement in the literatures and cultures of the region. Taking cue from the cultural transformations, technological advancements and political influences, the volume raises questions on politics, conflict and war, and the evolving genres and canon. The book crosses language barriers beyond English and includes critical attention to texts written in the Swahili and French languages. The chapters aim to give a broad overview of the writings and cultural expressions in the eastern African region, including novels, films, short stories, theatre, poetry, oral, and digital performances. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: An Overview of Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures Oduor Obura Part One: The Evolving Literary Canon Literary Disruptions of the Ugandan Canon in Selected Ugandan Short Stories Edgar Nabutanyi A Discipline under Siege: Interrogating the Place of Literature in English in the Secondary School Curriculum in Tanzania Obala Musumba Cartographies of Killing: Transnational Drones in Eye in the Sky Jana Fedtke Performing in the Cyber Space: The Online Mchongoano Battles Kimingichi Wabende Mobile Phones in the Public Space: Communication as Contextual Cultural Practice in Kenya James Ogone Part Two: Conflict, Politics, and War Narrating Violence in Burundian Genocide and Civil War Literat

In recent years, Africa has undergone the longest period of sustained economic growth in the continent’s history, drawing the attention of the international media and academics alike. This book analyses the Africa Rising narrative from multidisciplinary perspectives, offering a critical assessment of the explanations given for the poor economic growth and development performance in Africa prior to the millennium and the dramatic shift towards the new Africa. Bringing in perspectives from African intellectuals and scholars, many of whom have previously been overlooked in this debate, the book examines the construction of Africa’s economic growth and development portraits over the years. It looks at two institutions that play a vital role in African development, providing a detailed explanation of how the World Bank and the IMF have interpreted and dealt with the African challenges and experiences. The insightful analysis reveals that if Africa is rising, only 20-30 per cent of Africans are aboard the rising ship, and the main challenge facing the continent today is to bring on board the majority of Africans who have been excluded from growth. This book makes the complex, and sometimes confusing debates on Africa’s economic growth experience more accessible to a wide range of readers interested in the Africa story. It is essential reading for students and researchers in African Studies, and will be of great interest to scholars in Development Studies, Political Economy, and Development Economics.

Trends in institutional partnership in higher education have shown tremendous growth in the past three decades. These trends are manifested through the growing initiatives of joint programs that promote collaborative research, academic mobility, joint curriculum development and course delivery, joint bidding for development projects and benchmarking. Partnerships in higher education have been used not only as an instrument for institutional development through a wide range of strategic alliances but also as an essential way of introducing new voices to the operations of the universities by initiating new paradigms that bring new perspectives and bear competitive advantage on the partners. As the trend of partnership in higher education grew, scholars in higher education studies have also engaged in conceptualizing higher education partnership from academic perspectives, analyzing trends and developing models of higher education collaborations. Partnership in Higher Education: Trends between African and European Institutions is a pioneer in bringing together a comprehensive perspective on matters of higher education partnership among African and European institutions. It discusses the ongoing debates on higher education partnership and internationalization strategies by providing empirical insights from various case studies.

In the post-World War II era, the emergence of 'area studies' marked a signal development in the social sciences. As the social sciences evolved methodologically, however, many dismissed area studies as favoring narrow description over general theory. Still, area studies continues to plays a key, if unacknowledged, role in bringing new data, new theories, and valuable policy-relevant insights to social sciences. In Comparative Area Studies, three leading figures in the field have gathered an international group of scholars in a volume that promises to be a landmark in a resurgent field. The book upholds two basic convictions: that intensive regional research remains indispensable to the social sciences and that this research needs to employ comparative referents from other regions to demonstrate its broader relevance. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) combines the context-specific insights from traditional area studies and the logic of cross- and inter-regional empirical research. This first book devoted to CAS explores methodological rationales and illustrative applications to demonstrate how area-based expertise can be fruitfully integrated with cutting-edge comparative analytical frameworks.

In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.

Very little is known about how African journalists are forging "new" ways to practise their profession on the web. Against this backdrop, this volume provides contextually rooted discussions of trends, practices, and emerging cultures of web-based journalism(s) across the continent, offering a comprehensive research tool that can both stand the test of time as well as offer researchers (particularly those in the economically developed Global North) models for cross-cultural comparative research. The essays here deploy either a wide range of evidence or adopt a case-study approach to engage with contemporary developments in African online journalism. This book thus makes up for the gap in cross-cultural studies that seek to understand online journalism in all its complexities.

After more than three decades of economic malaise, many African countries are experiencing an upsurge in their economic fortunes linked to the booming international market for minerals. Spurred by the shrinking viability of peasant agriculture, rural dwellers have been engaged in a massive search for alternative livelihoods, one of the most lucrative being artisanal mining. While an expanding literature has documented the economic expansion of artisanal mining, this book is the first to probe its societal impact, demonstrating that artisanal mining has the potential to be far more democratic and emancipating than preceding modes. Delineating the paradoxes of artisanal miners working alongside the expansion of large-scale mining investment in Africa, Mining and Social Transformation in Africa concentrates on the Tanzanian experience. Written by authors with fresh research insights, focus is placed on how artisanal mining is configured in relation to local, regional and national mining investments and social class differentiation. The work lives and associated lifestyles of miners and residents of mining settlements are brought to the fore, asking where this historical interlude is taking them and their communities in the future. The question of value transfers out of the artisanal mining sector, value capture by elites and changing configurations of gender, age and class differentiation, all arise.

This book explores what constitutes contemporary African social and political philosophy with regard to its meaning, aims, sources, and relevance for today’s Africa. Kasanda denounces conventional approaches considering these either as a subcategory of general philosophy or as the ideological attempts of individual African leaders and professional philosophers, such as Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor, Fanon, Hountondji and Towa. On the contrary, Kasanda defines contemporary African social and political philosophy as an inclusive reflection of African communities with regard to power and equitable modes of social and political organization in order to promote human excellence for everyone. This perspective also includes the criticism of social and political concepts in use within African communities. The author postulates that contemporary African social and political philosophy relies on the legacy of precolonial African societies, as well as on the contribution of the diaspora throughout the world. Contemporary African social and political philosophy is rooted in the daily lives of African people, and it expresses itself through multiple modalities including, for example, art, religion, literature, music and the policy of urbanization of African cities. This book sheds new light on debates concerning topics such as ethnophilosophy, negritude, pan-Africanism, democracy, African civil society, African cultures, and globalization. It aims to ward off the lethargy that strikes African social and political philosophy, taking a renewed and critical approach.