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Abstract: In late Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned artist Kara Walker to create her first large-scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the leg- endary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby was as controversial as it was revered. The powerful presence of the installation, coupled with its immersion in historical consciousness, makes A Subtlety rich in educational value. This article engages in a comparative reading of A Subtlety in the light of female writers and thinkers from the Caribbean, but also incorporates some of the generative questions Walker’s installation has pro- voked my students to ask. I especially engage questions on how to unravel the mixed metaphors that make A Subtlety the artistic embodiment of the textured experience of the African diaspora, with its complex history, cultural hybridity and transnational ramifications. While Walker’s instal- lation seems to sustain its many layers of meanings through both form and content, the (mostly white, US-born) students in my class have responded to it in a range of critical ways that pointed especially to their emotional and critical response toward female Blackness, and reflections about the artist’s responsibility toward her intention. The article reflects on the inherent possibilities for teaching A Subtlety and other forms of what I consider “vulnerable art,” which at its best helps to channel our collective and personal discomfort in effective, healing ways.
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Abstract:
Southern Africa has experienced highs and lows in its efforts towards democratisation. Following political independence of Southern Africa states, the germination of democratisation was a rather slow process. A brief period of multi-party democracy introduced through pre-independence elections quickly dissipated and was replaced by one-party, one-person and, in some instances, military regimes. This era also coincided with the height of the Cold War globally and the heyday of apartheid in which inter-state conflicts had intensified. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new dispensation has emerged wherein multi-party democracy has re-emerged in the context of the post-Cold War and post-apartheid dispensation, marked by relative peace dividend. However, democratisation in Southern Africa remains a mixed bag today. Some countries have not yet experienced the democratic transition. Others have managed to transition from one-party, one-person and military regimes to multi-party democracies. In various others, there are signs of reversal of democratic gains. This paper reviews the state of democratisation in Southern Africa with a view to understand why the regional record is so uneven across countries that form the Southern African Development Community (SADC). While the article presents a regional snapshot, it also presents comparative insights from Botswana and Lesotho.
Comment: The author debates the popular notion of whether states were 'fit for democracy' by asking whether they became 'fit through democracy' through the example of South African countries. The paper thus contributes to the debate on democratisation of formerly colonised/ authoritarian countries and the ideas in political science about democratic trajectories by investigating the linkages between political transitions and democratisation. This article can be used by students of political history in tracing the history of democratisation around the world, as well as in the debate of the longterm impacts of colonisation and authoritarian rule on democracy.
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Publisher’s Note: In this transnational account of black protest, Nicholas Grant examines how African Americans engaged with, supported, and were inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. Bringing black activism into conversation with the foreign policy of both the U.S. and South African governments, this study questions the dominant perception that U.S.-centered anticommunism decimated black international activism. Instead, by tracing the considerable amount of time, money, and effort the state invested into responding to black international criticism, Grant outlines the extent to which the U.S. and South African governments were forced to reshape and occasionally reconsider their racial policies in the Cold War world. This study shows how African Americans and black South Africans navigated transnationally organized state repression in ways that challenged white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. The political and cultural ties that they forged during the 1940s and 1950s are testament to the insistence of black activists in both countries that the struggle against apartheid and Jim Crow were intimately interconnected.
Comment: Discusses the perseverance of black activism from an international perspective and its relation to foreign policy. Requires prior knowledge of the US and South Africa during the Cold War as well as knowledge of anticommunism and apartheid during this period.
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, Contributed by: Atanas MalakchievAbstract:
This article explores how Nigeria's foreign policy has responded to transnational security challenges in West Africa. It engages in a conceptual overview of the discourse on transnational security and links this with a discussion of Nigeria's foreign policy towards West Africa. Of note is Nigeria's pursuit of a leadership role in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), in its quest for security, economic integration and development. Several questions are posed: What do Nigerian policymakers consider to be the most significant transnational threats in West Africa? How and through what legitimate policies and instruments do they respond to such threats? How important is ECOWAS to Nigeria's attempt to respond to transnational threats? And how effective have Nigeria's attempts to influence the ECOWAS agenda in this regard been? Although ECOWAS has remained central to Nigeria's responses to transnational security threats in the subregion, the country has not been able to match its rhetoric on addressing transnational security threats with far-reaching concrete achievements. It is suggested that social transformation of Nigeria's current foreign policy (that is, to one focused and committed to putting people at its centre) and a change in the policies of dominant global powers towards West Africa would enhance human emancipation and eliminate the numerous insecurities confronting the peoples of the subregion.
Comment: The text offers an overview of security threats in West Africa and the ways that Nigeria has tried to address them using the mechanisms provided by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Nigeria has sought a leadership role in this organization through economic and military aid to its members. The article can be used to illustrate the ways that a country can pursue its foreign policy through multilateral organizations such as ECOWAS.
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Abstract:
This article explores the motives of Ghana’s Trades Union Congress in
securing development assistance during the era of decolonization and early independence. African interests and agency in these complex processes of negotiation have not been sufficiently untangled to highlight the decisions that African trade unionists made as they aligned with, and fostered, international networks and alliances to meet particular development goals. By highlighting the perspectives and actions of Ghana’s trade union officials, the article demonstrates what Africans sought to achieve through connections to international trade union organizations. The Ghana case illustrates the ways in which African trade unionists actively engaged in the variable and competing politics and policies of local, regional, and global trade unionism in order to strengthen their union apparatus and meet shifting needs.Comment: This article shows how a trade union functioned in sub-Saharan Africa’s first country to gain its independence from British colonial rule, and demonstrates how trade union diplomacy emerged as an important element of African national and international politics during the era of decolonisation. Through the lens of African labor interests and the actions of the Ghana Trade Union Congress, the article engages with the confluence of internationalism and decolonisation in post-independence African societies.
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Abstract: Recent scholarship has demonstrated that in the period from 1945 through to the late 1950s African American intellectuals re-oriented their activism from an internationalist and human rights framed agenda towards a domestically bound struggle. This article will contribute to this literature by mapping out a facet of African American intellectual engagement with the African diaspora during this period. Of particular focus will be African American reactions to the journal Présence Africaine and the conference sponsored by the journal in 1956, le Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs. Iwill argue that the experiences of a select group of African American delegates to this Congrès served to emphasise the radically different objectives and strategies of nationalities within the African diaspora, thereby consolidating black American perceptions of themselves as first, and foremost, American. In interrogating this diasporan dimension of the period, this article will shed light on a neglected aspect of African American history and expand the intellectual and political boundaries of the black freedom struggle.
Comment: Useful for discussions on African American activism in the early Cold War. Shows the discrepancy between the impact of anticommunism on radical activism and American foreign diplomacy championing for human rights. Should be used as an example after having established solid background knowledge on this topic.
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, Contributed by: Noemi SuterAbstract: This paper investigates the risk presumably involved in the narratives of non- Western international relations theory (IRT) by focusing on a similar historical case in Japan. It reveals the risk of uncritically accepted geographical division, and particularly focuses on the discourses of the Kyoto School’s theory of world history as an example of non-Western narratives in the past, which was to ‘overcome’ the Western civilization similar to the contemporary non-Western IRT. However, they are also infamous for providing justification for the wartime regime in Japan for their aggression in the Asian continent. What is the connection between their philosophy and support for the imperialist regime? If there is a connection between them, is there any possibility of the resurrection of the same results in the case of non-Western IRT? To answer these questions, the article introduces the philosophy of Tosaka Jun who was critical of the School but, unlike Kyoto School philosophers, stubbornly fought against the mainstream politics of the time.
Comment: By concentrating on a similar historical situation in Japan, Kosuke Shimizu’s article “Materializing the ‘non-Western’: two stories of Japanese philosophers on culture and politics in the inter-war period” examines the risk that is supposedly inherent in the narratives of non-Western international relations theory (IRT) and sheds a different light on IRT. He demonstrates the dangers of uncritically accepting geographical division and explains that “non-Western IRT discussion faces the risk of being co-opted into the Western positivist mainstream IR that it seeks to challenge”.
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Added by: Simon, Contributed by: ContributorAbstract:
Text description here
Comment: Great resource!
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, Contributed by: Gijs ter HaarAbstract: Armchair strategists analyzing the far-reaching impli- cations of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan tend to ignore or under- emphasize one very important reality: The Soviet occupation of Af- ghanistan is not yet an established fact. The Afghan resistance movement has become a national liberation war, posing a real and formidable challenge to Soviet control over Afghanistan. Six months after the Soviet intervention in December 1979, Brezhnev claimed in the plenary session of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "Now life in Afghanistan is gradually returning to normal. Large bands of counterrevolutionaries have been routed, and interventionists have suf- fered a serious defeat."' But four years later, the Soviet media continue to report "counterrevolutionary" activities, admitting that "many public institutions in Afghanistan have been destroyed. Industrial enterprises, utility lines and irrigation systems have become targets of sabotage, costing Afghan industry alone 2.8 billion Afghanis.3 On April 11, 1983, Kabul Radio carried a broadcast in which Prime Minister Sultan Ali Keshtmand revealed that half of Afghanistan's hospitals and schools have been destroyed and three-quarters of the country's communications have been disrupted by the guerrillas.4
Comment: Discusses the Afghan resistance towards the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. According to the writer, this is a topic that is overlooked by most other works on the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.
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Publisher’s Note:
Not being of the West; being behind the West; not being modern enough; not being developed or industrialized, secular, civilized, Christian, transparent, or democratic - these descriptions have all served to stigmatize certain states through history. Drawing on constructivism as well as the insights of social theorists and philosophers, After Defeat demonstrates that stigmatization in international relations can lead to a sense of national shame, as well as auto-Orientalism and inferior status. Ayşe Zarakol argues that stigmatized states become extra-sensitive to concerns about status, and shape their foreign policy accordingly. The theoretical argument is supported by a detailed historical overview of central examples of the established/outsider dichotomy throughout the evolution of the modern states system, and in-depth studies of Turkey after the First World War, Japan after the Second World War, and Russia after the Cold War
Comment: The author attempts to understand East-West relations by examining the dynamics that constructed the behaviour of the East towards the West and vice versa. Zarakol argues that within the international system, following major historical events such as the both World Wars, the Western states continued to be understood as the 'insiders', while their Eastern counterparts became 'outsider' states. This outsider status resulted in stigmatisation of the states she studies, and through being stigmatised the outsiders felt inferior and their access to certain political, economic and social privileges was hindered. The book is therefore a highly useful overview of East-West relations for students of the history of international relations, and can be used within the debate about East-West relations in the post-Cold War world. This book is also useful for understanding how theoretical concepts in diplomatic history/ international relations can be applied to real-world cases.
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Comment: Very useful for teachers interested in integrating contemporary exhibitions into debates about race, gender and colonialism. Establishes connections to other literary pieces and discusses implementation in the classroom as well as reception by students. Prior knowledge of the themes mentioned is recommended but not mandatory if the focus is on the methods used.