A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse.Golda Meir once said, Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, theres nothing you can do. The poems in Fleda Browns brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a childs terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation.Browns poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to lifes terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.
Chris Hani was one of the most highly respected leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, and uMkhonto we Sizwe. His assassination in 1993 threatened to upset the transition to democracy but also prompted an intervention by Nelson Mandela, which accelerated the process.
This stirring, poetic tale features a Bedouin man whose irrepressible love for his family, his camels, and his way of life fuels his harrowing journey into the Sahara Desert to find a lost camel and his struggle to preserve a culture on the brink of profound change.
By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.
A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana.Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them.The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South byemphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experiencedproviding new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourseunsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are madeexposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governedshowing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequitiesDespite massive changes in twentieth-century political structuresthe imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policiesunremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking the village became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.
Representations of diasporic Murid disciples often depict them as passive recipients of change wrought by powerful clerics left behind in Senegal. In this study, Cheikh Anta Babou examines the construction of their transnational collective identity and its influence on cultural practices, identities, and aspirations.
Bridging phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, Peter Antich asserts that the latter has long been hampered by an inadequate phenomenology of knowledge. However, a careful description of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenon of motivation can offer compelling new ways to think about knowledge and longstanding epistemological questions.
Cooke's analysis of this milestone Victorian publication reveals the fluctuating harmony and dissonance between Tennyson's poems and their illustrations, the technical challenges and occupations involved in its manufacture, its readers' contemporary reception, and its subsequent influence as a variously revered and reviled publication.
A nineteenth-century entrepreneurs bold, innovative marketing helped transform flower gardens into one of Americas favorite hobbies. There is much that is hard and productive of sorrow in this sin-plagued world of ours; and, had we no flowers, I believe existence would be hard to be borne. So states a customers 1881 letterone of thousands James Vick regularly received. Vicks business, selling flower seeds through the mail, wasnt unique, but it was wildly successful because he understood better than his rivals how to engage customers emotions. He sold the love of flowers along with the flower seeds. Vick was genuinely passionate about floriculture, but he also pioneered what we now describe as integrated marketing. He spent a mind-boggling $100,000 per year on advertising (mostly to women, his target demographic); he courted newspaper editors for free publicity; his educational guides presaged todays content marketing; he recruited social influencers to popularize neighborhood gardening clubs; and he developed a visually rich communication and branding strategy to build customer loyalty and inflect their purchasing needs with purchasing desire.
In this, Julie Hanson's second award-winning book, the poems inscribe deep stillness on a world of harmonies in motion. Whether composed on modern objects, say a vacuum-"e;part pet, part sculpture/sprawled awkwardly, still shrieking"e;-that evokes a sudden onrush of sobbing, or the notional movement between a plastic bag, a lawn and a return from a France not yet visited, these poems circulate among the senses as moments that pass and are recalled.Hanson's poems investigate interiority as they resonate in the ear to excite the eye. Together, her poems illustrate the movement between and among seasons and tasks, work and leisure, solitude and people, and all through the private life as it intersects with the products and noises of industry and nature. Hanson's is a poetic realm that includes the head-splitting bright white screamings of an Indy 500 race into a zen garden, this realm we all inhabit where birdsong and squeaky water meters improvise together.
Joseph J. Capista's Intrusive Beauty reckons with reluctant ecstasy and the improbable forms that beauty assumes. In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one's life and one's livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one's vision of the world. Whether a young father who won't lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one's assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they're uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.
When Linda Spence asked her aging mother to write her life story, her mother stared at a blank sheet of paper and asked-"e;How? Where do I begin?"e; In this practical guide to capturing those memories that have been stored away, Linda Spence provides the questions that are the keys to unlocking the memories that make up a life.Beyond the vital statistics are the personal stories that tell what it was like, what we did, and why we did it, how we feel about our choices, and what our circumstances were. Through encouraging coaching, shared memories, and open-ended questions, the process of producing a personal history becomes intriguing and engaging.With Legacy the possibilities expand: a personal record is preserved-with its myths, traditions, joys, pains, gains, and losses; a family opens a potential dialogue that will last for generations; the writer has an opportunity for insight and resolution; the culture of a time and place is noted; the tradition of personal story is revitalized, and our present and future find nourishment and knowledge in the past.Either as a gift that can act as a shared experience as the memories are recounted or as a personal way to take account of one's experiences, often long since forgotten, Legacy is indeed a way to get one's story down.
In Mexico Mystique Frank Waters draws us deeply into the ancient but still-living myths of Mexico. To reveal their hidden meanings and their powerful symbolism, he brings to bear his gift for intuitive imagination as well as a broad knowledge of anthropology, Jungian psychology, astrology, and Eastern and esoteric religions.
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.
Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development.
This addition to the Cambridge Centre of African Studies Series presents multidisciplinary essays that demonstrate how individual and collective anxieties can unsettle dominant historical narratives, shape contemporary discourse, and appear across material culture.
This fictionalized, first-person biography tells how a cunning rogue with nothing to lose relies on his guts and wits to survive amid racism and injustice in apartheid South Africa.
This timely and accessible companion to the work of twentieth-century American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) gathers essays that illuminate his poetics, themes, and the contexts of his poems through the diverse critical approaches that have emerged in the past five decades.
Drawing from distinctly African source materials and methods, Achebe's groundbreaking historical account examines the shared power, influence, and authority that uniquely African, female-gendered entities-people, diviners, and deities-exert across Africa's interconnected physical and spiritual worlds.
Historically, most black voters in the United States have aligned themselves with one of the two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal and, since the New Deal-and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement-the Democratic Party.
Eddie Rickenbacker survived personal tragedies and dozens of close calls as a mechanic, a race car driver, a fighter pilot, and airline executive. This biography invites young readers to consider the difference between recklessness and courage, even if both present dangers, and the enduring value of hard work and personal responsibility.
Through the prism of sports and from a range of scholarly perspectives, this anthology offers insight into the varied and shifting experiences of African athletes, fans, communities, and postcolonial states.
The precipitous rise and controversial fall of a formidable African leader. Samora Machel (1933-1986), the son of small-town farmers, led his people through a war against their Portuguese colonists and became the first president of the People's Republic of Mozambique. Machel's military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed people of Southern Africa. In 1986, during the country's civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain. Allen and Barbara Isaacman lived through many of these changes in Mozambique and bring personal recollections together with archival research and interviews with others who knew Machel or participated in events of the revolutionary or post-revolutionary years.
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.
The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe's rule, which had been interrupted by "e;that damned Napoleon."e;Ambitious in scope, Sacred River is a diaspora-inspired novel, in which Cheney-Coker has tackled the major themes of politics, social strife, crime and punishment, and human frailty and redemption in Malagueta, the fictional, magical town and its surroundings first created by the author in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, for which he was awarded the coveted Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Sacred River is equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa's major writers.
Based on one of the most significant periods in Frank Waters's own life, Pike's Peak is perhaps the most complete expression of all the archetypal themes he explored in both fiction and nonfiction.In
A bold synthesis of the events that have dominated modern Africa in this historic era of nation-building and transformation.
This critical account of the fair trade movement explores the vast gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results for poor countries, particularly those of Africa. In the Global North, fair trade often is described as a revolutionary tool for transforming the lives of millions across the globe. The growth in sales for fair trade products has been dramatic in recent years, but most of the benefit has accrued to the already wealthy merchandisers at the top of the value chain rather than to the poor producers at the bottom.Ndongo Sylla has worked for Fairtrade International and offers an insider's view of how fair trade improves-or doesn't-the lot of the world's poorest. His methodological framework first describes the hypotheses on which the fair trade movement is grounded before going on to examine critically the claims made by its proponents. By distinguishing local impact from global impact, Sylla exposes the inequity built into the system and the resulting misallocation of the fair trade premium paid by consumers. The Fair Trade Scandal is an empirically based critique of both fair trade and traditional free trade; it is the more important for exploring the problems of both from the perspective of the peoples of the Global South, the ostensible beneficiaries of the fair trade system.
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