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Tagged: Africa

Issues / MECAM

Mapping Liquid Boundaries: Africa, Europe, and the Limits of Mediterranean Geopolitics

By Daniel Tödt. European policy often describes North Africa and the Maghreb as Europe’s Southern Neighbourhood, as Mediterranean partners, or as security, energy and mobility corridors. These descriptions reflect real forms of cooperation and political interest, but they also create a particular field of vision. Within such framings, the region’s place within Africa can become less visible: centuries of Saharan mobility, Black North African histories, long-standing intra-African connections, and contemporary African lives in cities such as Casablanca, Tripoli, Tunis or Algiers.

Four people sit on a panel and stage, facing the audience, deep in discussion.

Conversations / MECAM

Multilinguality in Academic Research and Publishing

Maria Josua in Conversation with Diana Abbani, Souhir Zekri Masson, Maxine Rubin, and Andreas Ufen. Scholars working with and on the world regions in the Global South face a dilemma of doing fieldwork and researching in local languages and then publishing results in international outlets dominated by the English language. In this conversation based on the roundtable, we reflect on this tension navigating the requirements of academic publishing and career-related issues, and regional and local academic traditions in Southeast and West Asia as well as the African continent.

Reviews

What Local Gold Extraction Tells Us about a Globalized Mining Economy

By Diana Ayeh. When I first came to Houndé in 2016, the town of 150,000 inhabitants in southwestern Burkina Faso already had a certain gold-rush atmosphere. Not only was the landscape in and around Houndé marked with indications for future extraction, the construction of the first industrial gold mine in the urban municipality was also accompanied by the arrival of new actors and ideas that made extraction feasible.

Reviews

Yearbook on the African Union

By Ulf Engel. In October 2021, I published the Yearbook on the African Union (YBAU). This yearbook is the first of its kind. The YBAU is first and foremost an academic project that provides an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the institution, its processes, and its engagements.

Issues

Legba-figures and dzokawo: Unpacking a missionary collection from the Übersee-Museum Bremen

In the debate about colonial collections in ethnological and other museums, little attention has been paid to things acquired by European missionaries during conversion practices. These things do not fit into the current discussions of looted art and are barely subject to demands for repatriation.

Histories of Refuge

The Strange Case of Portugal’s Returnees

By Christoph Kalter. The year is 1975, and the footage comes from the Portuguese Red Cross. Who, or maybe what, are these people? Returnees or retornados is the term commonly assigned to more than half-a-million people, the vast majority of them white settlers from Angola and Mozambique, most of whom arrived in Lisbon in 1975.