The Griot - The Online Newsletter of the Boston University
African Studies Center Graduate Students
Number 1
Number 2
About the African Studies Center...
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NEWS AND EVENTS
2010 Graduate Conference - Scheduled for March 19th and 20th
"Africa: Engaging the Past Envisioning Future"
Questions can be addressed to the conference organizers at ascgrcon@bu.edu
More information can be found at : http://www.ascgradconference.webs.com
Deadline for submission of papers is February 22, 2010.
We are pleased to note that Asnakew Kebbede Yeshiwondim, our Ph.D. student in Geography, has received a special commendation from the editors of The International Journal of Health Geographics for the "high level of citation" for his article based on his M.A. thesis. Asnakew is a member of the team currently working on the role of maize in malaria transmission led by Prof. James McCann. Asnakew's M.A. thesis used GIS methods to analyze a malaria data set for eastern Ethiopia to identify and map rates of infection among age groups of children. The article is below:
Spatial analysis of malaria incidence at the village level in areas with unstable transmission in Ethiopia
Asnakew K Yeshiwondim, Sucharita Gopal, Afework T Hailemariam, Dereje O Dengela and Hrishikesh P Patel
International Journal of Health Geographics, 8:5 (26 Jan 2009)
Total accesses to this article since publication: 1614
The African Studies Center will be participating in the upcoming annual African Studies Association meetings
11/19 - 11/22/09. For a complete list of participants click here.
Dan McCall
Many of you will have learned of the death of Professor Daniel McCall, Professor of Anthropology and one of the first faculty at the African Studies Center. At a memorial service on October 3, George Brooks offered a personal remembrace of Dan. We thought that his memory would help us touch base with our past and a valued ancestor (see Dan McCall).
Center Remembrance Event
On Friday November 6, 2009, the African Studies Center hosted an event to honor Center founders Adelaide Cromwell and recently deceased Dan McCall. Prof. Cromwell was one of the founders of our program and has been one of our favorite fellow travelers in all of its years. Robert Levine, a former Harvard graduate student unable to attend the event wrote, "In 1954, I was a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard who decided to do field work in Africa but found there was no one at Harvard who had ever been to Africa. So I would spend time, especially in 1954-55 and (after my return from Kenya) in 1957-58, at Bill Brown's new African Studies Center at BU, where Adelaide Cromwell held sway, and Dan McCall was always available to talk about what it was like in the Gold Coast. It wasn't just that Dan was the only person I knew who had ever been to Africa, he was willing to serve as a mentor and model to budding Africanists like me, and I shall always be grateful.
In one of those years, the BU African Studies Center's theme was enlivened by the prolonged visit of St. Clair Drake, already famous for his sociologial treatise with Horace Cayton, 'Black Metropolis'. Drake had not been to Africa, but from his time in Britain he had associated with the founders of African nationalism from the British colonies: Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikwe and others. I listened with fascination as he and Dan talked about these amazing characters - at a time when Kenyatta was still in a Kenya jail and Africa was at the beginning of decolonization. What an exciting time."
BU Undergraduate Encounter with Ethiopia's Film Industry
Shoppers and film goers in Ethiopia's capital are used to seeing larger than life posters advertising the newest films offered by the Empire Cinema, an Italian era theater on a small square in the Addis Ababa's Piazza area. The film on offer in July and August was "Damotra" a melodrama in the new popular genre. But this film had a feature of special interest to the Boston University African Studies community. Damotra's poster in a large section of its lower right-hand corner shows a young "ferenj" woman, Caroline Smartt (CAS, 2010) as one of the characters of the story. Prof. James McCann, to his surprise, saw this poster and took the photo on August 6 as the afternoon film audience gathered for the 4PM showing. Caroline's appearance in "Damotra" was unanticipated by the malaria project, but demonstrated the wide range of her contacts and interests.
Caroline is a Boston University senior who is writing a Senior Distinction Essay in History under the supervision of Prof. McCann on the History of Vector Borne Disease in East Africa. Caroline joined the research project on Malaria Transmission and Maize Cultivation in summers of 2007 and 2008. She also undertook to support six young street children and the mothers through her family and a fund-raising concert last year. Caroline will defend her B.A. Distinction thesis in December 2009. She spent the summer in Zanzibar studying in an intensive Kiswahili program. On her graduation in January, she will receive an African Studies Minor and Latin honors from the Dept. of History. We are proud of her achievements in all of those fields. (Click to see poster.)
Research Fellow Marc Sommers (who is also an Associate Research Professor of Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University) has won a Senior Fellowship from the Jennings Randolph (JR) Program for International Peace at the United States Institute of Peace for 2009-2010.
Beginning October 1, Prof. Sommers will be based at USIP's Washington, DC office for 10 months to write a book currently entitled "Youth, Popular Culture and Terror Warfare: Insights from Sierra Leone."
Prof. Sommers' 2005 field research in Sierra Leone revealed the leading role that hip hop artist Tupac Shakur, the Rambo movie character and reggae musician Bob Marley played in Sierra Leone’s civil war. It also detailed the influence of Tupac Shakur and other popular culture icons on youth adaptations to post-war life. Drawing on this field data, and prior field research in Sierra Leone, with Sierra Leonean refugees, and with ex-combatant youth in other contexts, the book promises to shed new light on how Western popular culture icons contribute to the practice of war and how youth customize peaceful responses to it.
LECTURES AND SEMINARS:
Wednesdays at 6:30 pm:
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
African Studies Center
232 Bay State Road
Room 505
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The Boston University
African Studies Center
announces the following lectures
for Fall 2009
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To see a list of 2007-08 lectures, click here.
To see a l ist of 2008-09 lectures, click here.
The Walter Rodney African Studies Seminar presents:
September 28: Samba Gadjigo
(Mount Holyoke College)
Ousmane Sembene: The Making of a Militant Artist
October 5: Solimar Otero
(Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School)
Coming Home: Nation, Gender, and Diaspora in Afro-Cuban Religion
October 12: Columbus Day / No seminar
October 19: Athuman Msangi
(Kwala Secondary School,Tanzania /Newton-Tanzania Collaborative)
"The Tanzanian Education System: A Teacher's Perspective"
October 26: Tucker Childs
(Portland State University)
"The disappearance of African languages, who cares?”
November 2: Laurence Breiner
(Boston University)
"'Your presence is our past': Anglophone Caribbean Poets and Africa"
November 9: Ann & Robert Seidman
(Boston University)
"Using Law for Good Governance and Development: The Boston University Africa i-Parliaments Legislative Policy and Drafting Clinic"
November 16: Michael A. Grodin
(Boston University MED & SPH)
“Caring for African Survivors of Torture and Refugee Trauma”
The Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at BU Medical Center
November 23: No seminar (after ASA)
November 30: Richard Werbner
(University of Manchester)
"Holy Hustlers: Charismatic Youth and Apostolic Reformation in Botswana"
December 7: Magaly Koch
(Boston University)
"Agroecology of Malaria: Images of a Changing Landscape"
Mondays, 12 Noon – 1:30 pm
The African Studies Center
232 Bay State Road, Room 505
Boston, MA 02215
617-353-3674
http://www.bu.edu/africa
Everyone is welcome. |
 Here's
some good news. Our poster, "How Big Is Africa?"
can now be purchased on line with a credit card, making us
the first academic dept. at the university offering on-line
purchasing. Come see for yourself how easy it is. Please let
interested colleagues and friends know too.
Click here to order poster
PUBLICATIONS
International Journal of African Historical Studies
Books and Papers
Francophone
Africa Research Group (GRAF) Newsletter
African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC) at Boston University
Read a description
here.
State
of Africa Report 2008
PSAE Presentation
INTERNET COURSE
The Environmental History
of Africa James McCann
PEOPLE AND BOOKS
Melissa Graboyes recently published a paper through the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future (Learning From the Past: The Future of Malaria in Africa). Melissa is a
doctoral candidate in the
Department of History
at Boston University,
currently writing her
dissertation about the
history of medical research
in East Africa. She has
master’s degrees in public health and history. Luckily,
despite nearly three years
working in Africa in five
different countries, she is yet to get malaria.
Congratulations to Barbara Cooper (Ph.D., History, 1992) who teaches at Rutgers
University, is Director of the African Studies Program at Rutgers, and the author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. For this book Barbara Cooper received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the Best Book in African Studies for 2006 from the African Studies Association.
Congratulations to Drs. Linda Heywood and John Thornton on their published book, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521770653
Congratulations to Parker Shipton, Professor of Anthropology on his published book The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007 - yalepress.yale.edu/book).
For this book Parker Shipton received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the Best Book in African Studies for 2007 from the African Studies Association.
Drawing on his years of research among Luo people in western Kenya, Parker Shipton provides a general ethnography with a new theme and theoretical approach. In particular, he focuses closely on non-monetary forms of exchange and entrustment, moving beyond anthropology's traditional understanding of gifts, loans, and reciprocity and taking into account not just movements of inanimate goods and services but also exchanges and offerings of animals and humans. Shipton proposes a rounder view of the social and symbolic dimensions of economy over the full life course, encompassing transfers between generations and shows why the enduring cultural values and aspirations of East African people -- and others around the world -- complicate issues of credit, debt, and compensation. The book examines how Luo people assess obligations to intimates and strangers, including the dead and the not-yet-born. Shipton shows that borrowing, lending, and serial passing along have ritual, religious, and emotional dimensions no less than economic ones and also that insight into these connections demands a broad rethinking of international aid plans and programs. James C. Scott, Yale University states "Shipton's concept of entrustment is artful, engaging, and intellectually powerful. He moves us from quotidian observation to high theory with beguiling prose and rigor. If I could press this book on every World Bank economist, every formal theorist of political economy, every practitioner of cost-benefit analysis, and everyone who wants to understand how social 'structure' is created and sustained, I would be very happy."
Congratulations to Cynthia J. Becker, Associate Professor of Art History, on her recently published book Amazigh Arts in Morocco – Women Shaping Berber Identity. (University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006-utexas.edu/utpress). The University of Texas Press writes "In southeastern Morocco, around the oasis of Tafilalet, the Ait Khabbash people weave brightly colored carpets, embroider indigo head coverings, paint their faces with saffron, and wear ornate jewelry. Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful – and they are typically made by women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these Ait Khabbash women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women’s roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues.”
Congratulations to Jim McCann, Professor of History and recipient of the 2006 George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History and also Honorable Mention 2006 Melville J. Herskovitz Award, African Studies Association. His book is Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New Crop, 1500-2000 (Harvard University Press, 2005 - hup.harvard.edu/catalog/)
“Maize and Grace shows how a New World crop contributed to the emergence of modern-day Africa. Some parts of Africa now have higher maize consumption per capita than Mexico and Guatemala, where the crop originated…Rather than describing sweeping historical currents, the book offers the reader a series of vignettes that provide opportunities to appreciate the paradoxes of maize development policy and to contemplate some enduring themes in agricultural
history.” —Robert Tripp, NATURE see poster.
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