Black World Research Articles

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (review)

Reviewed by: The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature Oyekan Owomoyela The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature By Adélékè AdéèkóBloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. ix + 203 pp. ISBN 0-253-34596-0 paper. Narratives of slave revolts, Adélékè Adéèkó's discussion demonstrates, express their authors' dissatisfaction with inhumane reality and their preferred strategies for amelioration. Focusing primarily on the Americas, it analyzes works spanning [End Page 238] the spectrum from antebellum North America (Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave) to the Cuban revolution (Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World). The modes they adopt (or inaugurate) are equally varied, ranging from the realist fictional of the antebellum writers to Carpentier's magical realism. In addition to "refashioning the present" they also aim at "preserving the past and sketching the trajectory [. . .] that the future developments should follow" (174). Ex-slave Madison Washington's career vindicates the writers' strategy: the account of Singbe (alias Cinque) Pieh's rebellion on the Amistad later inspires Washington, when he finds himself again captive on a slave ship, to lead an insurrection that succeeds in steering the vessel to a free port. Although convinced that the particularizing operations of "nationalist and ethnocentric will" (12) preclude any uniformity of historical and social processes across the black world, Adéèkó nonetheless seeks African examples to fit into his scheme. Finding none, he attributes the silence on the subject in "African creative cultures" to "a general anxiety of African intellectuals about the possible culpability of Africans in the Atlantic trade" (123). In practically the same breath, though, he cites the absence of records to bolster his skepticism about suggestions that Africans did resist the slavers: "something is amiss," he quips, "in the fact that popular African oratures do not preserve discursive records of these struggles against slavery [. . .] on the continent" (123). More problematic, however, is his use of his chosen texts, the lineage oríkì (praise poetry) of Olúfè and Oníkòyí, two renowned warriors, and Akínwùmí Ìsòlá's fiction Efúnsetán Aníwúrà. The title of the chapter on the latter is revealing: "Prying Rebellious Subaltern Consciousness Out of the Clenched Jaws of Oral Tradition." In the discussion of the texts, "prying" means subordinating fact to speculation and invention: "The African section of the book proceeds on the premise that domestic African slaves would have resisted their captivity" (4); "the poetics and politics of exclusion [. . .] might be responsible for the effacement of slavery in what have become African classical traditions" (4); Ifè and Ìkòyí are "two groups that would have played significant roles in slavery" (4); and Olúfè and Oníkòyí "were in all likelihood deeply involved in domestic slavery" (127; emphases added in all cases). The author's antinativist distaste for the Yoruba societies he discusses is evident—every day, in Olúfè's realm, "priests show up in pristine white outfits [. . .] and clean-shaven heads [. . .] to kill slaves [. . .] and offer their innards to the Gods"; and "the slave and the chicken [. . .] are of the same order" as sacrificial objects (128); Oníkòyí's career, for its part, is one of "brigandage," "war-mongering," "looting, slave raiding, [and] stealing"(129). The smear on what we see of the Yoruba past, however, also devalues the quite interesting exegesis of narratives of American slave rebellions. Oyekan Owomoyela University of Nebraska-Lincoln Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

Environmental monitoring in a gas production area on the northwestern Black-Sea shelf

The results of long-term seasonal oceanographic observations conducted by YugNIRO from 1955 to 1991 in standard cross-sections on the northwestern shelf of the Black Sea and data obtained by monitoring oil and chemical pollution of the marine environment from 1987 to 1993 in the area of gas deposit development are systematized and statistically treated. The oceanographic conditions of pollution field formation in this region are studied. The dynamics and distribution of total concentrations of oil products and microelements (Hg, Cu, Pb, Cd, and Cr) in water and bottom sediments are examined in the areas in Karkinitskii Bay where permanent offshore platforms are operated. The obtained results are compared with data on the background environmental pollution of the Black Sea and World Ocean. A hypothesis is offered to elucidate the possible causes and mechanisms through which offshore gas production affects the hydrochemical conditions on the shelf. The monitoring data are said to be a necessary information basis for the prediction of pollution dynamics in Karkinitskii Bay with the use of a box-type hydroecological model of petroleum hydrocarbon biotransformations in water, and approaches for the use of these data for this purpose are outlined.

Reclaiming our minds; reclaiming our souls; reclaiming our people: A call to the black world

From Barbados to Burundi and from New Guinea to Nigeria, almost all that is known about crucial developments in other black nations comes from white world news organisations ‐ BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and other corporate‐controlled media. Owing to this, as well as to the general longstanding relationship between the white world and the African Diaspora, our peoples, our strivings, our triumphs ‐ are either routinely ignored or grotesquely distorted. There is no structural mechanism for the sharing of information throughout the African Diaspora. As a result, we truly are at the mercy of a corporate‐controlled media that not only presents either no information or distorted information about the African Diaspora to the rest of the world, but feeds these distortions to us throughout the African Diaspora. In the process, the international media promotes and inculcates standards and values that are philosophically and culturally discordant with the global African reality. Governments and peoples of the African Diaspora must begin to discuss, debate, and re‐think for ourselves, and amongst ourselves, those circumstances and conditions, those values and realities, those yardsticks by which we will measure and judge ourselves. It is based on these standards that we should judge and assess the health and appeal of all nations. There are certain priorities, of course, that all nations and peoples should embrace ‐ an informed and educated populace; affordable health care for all; employment that serves the needs of the individual and the interests of the nation. Beyond that, however, throughout the Diaspora we in the African Diaspora must recognise the strengths that are uniquely ours, and build on them. The giraffe becomes a pathetic caricature when it attempts to be a gazelle. The time has come for us to reclaim and re‐assert our essential African‐ness; to build societies where the social, economic, and spiritual development of the human being is paramount; to recognise all that is ours materially and spiritually ‐ the minerals in the earth, the forests above it, our waterways, our God‐given resources that for so long have been the source of enormous wealth for everyone but us; our traditions, our values, culture, our kinship networks, our humanity.

Africana: the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience

A landmark in reference publishing, Africana is an incomparable one-volume encyclopedia of the black world - a vital resource for families, students, and educators everywhere.. Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora. This single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia. }Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora.Beautifully designed and richly illustrated with over a thousand images - maps, tables, charts, photographs, hundreds of them in full color - this single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. The interplay between text and illustration conveys the richness and sweep of the African and African American experience as no other publication before it. Certain to prove invaluable to anyone interested in black history and the influence of African culture on the world today, Africana is a unique testament to the remarkable legacy of a great and varied people. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia.More than a book for library reference, Africana will give hours of reading pleasure through its longer, interpretive essays by such notable writers as Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early, Randall Kennedy, and Cornel West. These specially commissioned essays give the reader an engaging chronicle of the religion, arts, and cultural life of Africans and of black people in the Old World and the New. }

Remembering John H. Johnson, 1918-2005

John Harold Johnson, the founder and Chairman of Johnson Publishing Company, died at Chicago's Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Monday, 8 August 2005. With Johnson's passing the national African American community lost a major advocate for civil and human rights, and the Association for African American Life and History (ASALH) lost a staunch supporter. Born into poverty in Arkansas City, Arkansas, on 19 January 1918, he was the son of Leroy and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson. In 1926 his life was further impoverished following the death of his father, however, his mother, who believed passionately in education, saw to it that her son attended school. Johnson received his early education in Arkansas City public schools, but because the system provided no public high school for African Americans, his mother moved the family to Chicago in 1933. Despite the hardships imposed by the Great Depression, in 1936 John H. Johnson graduated from DuSable High School with honors, received a partial scholarship to the University of Chicago, and secured a job at the Supreme Life Insurance Company. In 1939 he became the editor of the Supreme Life's in-house magazine and by 1941 held a full-time position with the company. Using his mother's furniture as collateral for a $500 loan, and $6,000 raised from charter subscriptions, Johnson obtained office space in the Supreme Life Insurance Company building and in 1942 began publishing the Negro Digest (later Black World), modeled after Readers' Digest. In 1945 he launched Ebony Magazine and followed with the pocket size news weekly, Jet Magazine in 1951. Johnson Publishing Company became, and remained so for the next sixty years, the largest black-owned publishing company in the world. In addition to publishing magazines and books, over the years John H. Johnson expanded his company's holdings in various directions, including radio stations, television production, cosmetics, and traveling fashion shows. In 1982, forty-nine years after his youthful arrival in Chicago, John H. Johnson made Forbes Magazine's list of wealthiest Americans. Johnson was a member of the board of directors of numerous Fortune 500 corporations, and a trustee of several national organizations and institutions. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including over thirty-five honorary doctoral degrees from colleges and universities around the country. Johnson also received half a dozen presidential appointments from three different U.S. Presidents, and in 1996 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian commendation, by William Jefferson Clinton. John Harold Johnson's legacy is extensive and multifaceted, but can be broadly categorized in terms of his professional achievements, his successful publications, and the mentoring and assistance he provided to others. …

Oil, Blood and Money: Culture and Power in Nigeria

Oil, Blood and Money: Culture and Power in Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 334 pp. Images of crisis dominate the circulation of representations regarding contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Stories and photographs of grinding poverty, brutal wars, unfathomable famine and the devastation of HIV/AIDS permeate global collective consciousness about the continent, too often producing mix of resignation and despair. Few people realize or remember that just 30 years ago, only decade after much of Africa achieved independence from colonial rule, the situation in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, was one of heady optimism and apparent economic boom, fueled by unprecedented oil wealth. Andrew Apter's splendid historical ethnography examines how Nigeria's oil-rich state utilized its petroleum revenues in an extravaganza of cultural production that attempted to transform oil money into national identity. The Pan-African Nation offers an engaging and intellectually provocative account of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which hosted in 1977, an event better known as FESTAC 77. spent hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even several billion dollars, of its oil wealth to organize FESTAC, spectacle that displayed Nigeria's newfound riches and repackaged its many diverse cultural traditions so as to try to create Nigerian national culture that would at once bind the nation and establish as the center of the black world. Apter's brilliance, and the enduring contribution of the book, is in showing not only the complex history and ethnography that situate and explain the Nigerian state's invention of tradition and culture, but also the ways in which the manipulation of signs and symbols in FESTAC both obscured and reflected the contradictions inherent in Nigeria's oil economy. FESTAC foreshadowed and contributed to the politics of illusion and the extreme corruption that have plagued the country in recent years. Apter traces this legacy by following the shifting connections and disconnections between money and meaning and truth and value as they unfolded during the military dictatorships that ruled following the economic bust of the 1980s. The Pan-African Nation chronicles fascinating phenomenon whereby the signs of wealth and development became unattached from their real material bases in process that paralleled the ways in which FESTAC invented cultural traditions that were privileged as more authentic than the people they supposedly represented. In the ultimate irony, Nigeria's notorious industry of scams and fraud, which has become the country's second largest source of foreign exchange after oil, relies on the dissociation of signs from their referents for its success. During the oil boom, the wealth from petroleum revenues masked and exacerbated dwindling agricultural productive base. In the years since the bust, much of the real money to be made in is generated in confidence schemes, political deceptions and fraudulent deals wherein trickery produces more value than truth. The Pan-Africa Nation offers compelling account of the relationship between culture and power. The book weaves together in an artful tapestry of the material and cultural transformations wrought by the influence of oil wealth. It demonstrates the centrality of cultural production in statecraft, providing what Apter describes as a political economy of the sign in postcolonial Nigeria (17). FESTAC: A Festival for the Study of Culture and Power Several different audiences will find The Pan-African Nation valuable book. Readers interested in the history of African and black identity and the relationship between the continent and its wider diaspora as it is mediated through notions of authenticity and the invention of cultural traditions will find an important contribution and fascinating case in The Pan-Africa Nation. …

Walter White and Passing

Walter White, the blond, blue-eyed Atlantan, was a voluntary Negro, that is, an African American who appears to be White but chooses to live in the Black world and identify with its experiences. He joined the NAACP national leadership in 1918 as assistant secretary and became secretary in 1931, serving at this post until his death in 1955. His tenure was marked by an effective public antilynching campaign and organizational stability and growth during the Depression years and by controversy over his leadership style. For him, posing as a Caucasian—and then telling all who would listen about his escapades—had three interrelated purposes. First, he developed inside information about mob psychology and mob violence, publicity of which was critical to the NAACP's campaign against lynching. Second, White hoped to show Whites in particular the fallacy of racial stereotyping and racial categorization. Third, by emphasizing the dangers he courted—and even embellishing on them—he enhanced his racial bona fides at key times when his Black critics called into question his leadership.

Of Masks and Masquerades: Performing the Collegial Dance

Of Masks and Masquerades:Performing the Collegial Dance Anu Aneja (bio) In the aftermath of the age of multiculturalism, pluralism, and postmodern celebrations of plenitude, we are now, it seems, once more faced by a growing anxiety about "otherness" that has been spurred by a nationalistic rhetoric which concentrates our attention primarily on issues of security and coerces us into adopting all manners of defensive postures. Within academia, and especially in many small liberal arts colleges today, such posturings take the form of a pervasive rhetoric of collegiality which often covers over the anxiety generated by the current climate of global political unrest. In academic cultures, such as those of departments, programs and committees, this rhetoric comes to employ certain formulaic axioms, like the phrase, "we are all one big happy family." In situations of potential disagreements between un-likeminded colleagues, such axioms can function in insidious and undermining ways, intervening at crucial points of the dialogue to equate difference of opinion with atomization and conformity with collegiality. The axiom of the happy departmental or institutional family replicates the national political dictum that is often supported by the media—such a dictum tells us that we might differ in our opinions, but when it comes down to it, we will all rally around the same grand narratives, such as that of "fidelity" to a department or institution, or "patriotism" to the nation. At both levels, the national and the institutional, such an agenda ensures that established paternalistic laws are not disturbed and that the inferiors of the family carry on their assigned functions in circumscribed spaces, diligently and efficiently producing non-threatening and pre-approved discourses of alterity which re-enforce the center's control. Many small liberal arts colleges are currently experiencing the effects of a national malaise which forces a sizeable part of the citizenry to choose between a liberal left-wing agenda that has traditionally included a show of solidarity with the marginalized other, and an [End Page 144] anxiety about "otherness" generated by the current climate in the nation, a reflection of recent global events. For instance, at an institution where I was employed in recent years, the theme for the annual National Colloquium, in the aftermath of September 11, was called "The Search for Security in an Age of Anxiety" and all colloquium events were linked to issues of national security and personal safety. The rhetorical question posed by this title is, of course, a question of identification: "whose anxiety?" It is a question that must force us to locate and identify that odd place where academics find themselves at this juncture of American history. In a sense, the moment feels something like a culmination of a long drama. It is a drama in which we have all been given our parts at the outset, a script, as it were, to perform. Dramatic irony has been especially sharpened for those academics who are based in traditional "Great Books" programs but hold positions that are described as non-western or third wordlist, or in any other way "left-identified" (such as black world studies, or queer theory). Such "left-identified" positions that are used to fill up existing lacuna at the margin often end up investing a person/space with expectations of a certain alterity. The new hire then must live up to these expectations by embodying an otherness that is already, in many ways, pre-determined. In such situations, the term "collegiality" becomes a particularly loaded one, offering very little potential for dissent and almost no possibility for an escape from the circumscription and institutionalization of difference. In what follows, I want to take a brief look at why, in many liberal arts institutions, such a definition of collegiality has become institutionalized. Two dictionary definitions of the word "collegial" offer us the following possibilities: i. characterized by the collective responsibility shared by each of the colleagues (Random); and ii. power shared equally between colleagues (Encarta). But both of these concepts of "collective responsibility" and "equal power" seem to get displaced by an unequal power system where responsibilities are allocated, power is delegated, and collegiality comes to imply an absence of conflict for the sake of...

Signifying blackness: the black aesthetic revisited

Este pequeno texto procura problematizar certas noções que vão contra a tentativa de formulação de uma teoria da arte negra. Para isso, são utilizadas, em parte, as teorias relacionadas com o público para delinear um caminho alternativo para uma teoria da estética negra. Mas, principalmente, é defendido que uma teoria da arte negra que queira ter uma certa credibilidade, deve reconhecer as preferências compartilhadas pelas várias populações negras no mundo. ademais, esta teoria deve também reconhecer o vínculo entre as várias formas de expressão cultural -- literatura, música, pintura, teatro e cinema -- existentes dentro do universo cultural do mundo negro.

Bill Cosby, Education, and the Lumpenizing of the Contemporary Black World

(2004). Bill Cosby, Education, and the Lumpenizing of the Contemporary Black World. The Black Scholar: Vol. 34, Black Education, pp. 21-26.

Analytical American Option Pricing: The Flat‐barrier Lower Bound*

In a Black and Scholes (1973) world, this paper studies the pricing performance of a closed‐form lower bound to American option values based on an exercise strategy corresponding to a flat‐exercise boundary. The lower bound has a simple two‐step implementation akin to Barone‐Adesi and Whaley (1987) formula and shows superior pricing performance in the out‐of‐the‐money region and for long maturities.

Black spaces, black places: Strategic assimilation and identity construction in middle-class suburbia

While white ethnics and immigrants of colour have been studied in terms of their attempts to assimilate into the American mainstream, sociologists assume that ongoing racial discrimination obviates the need for an extensive examination of the actual assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks. Many middle-class blacks travel from the black to the white world rather than existing exclusively in one racially distinct environment. Yet, we do not fully understand how middle-class blacks conceptualize their own integration into American society. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with middle-class blacks and ethnographic research in a white and a black suburb, I establish the link between an affinity for black spaces and the alternative assimilation trajectories of middle-class blacks. I find that middle-class blacks engage in a variant of segmented assimilation, privileging the black world as a site for socializing even if they live in a white suburb. This selective pattern of assimilation, what I term strategic assimilation, suggests that this population of middle-class blacks does not perceive itself as permanently constrained to the bottom rung of a racial hierarchy.

Season of anomy ? postmodernism and development discourse

African novels are sometimes regarded in the academic discourse as characteristically postmodern pieces of literature because of the combination of western art and non-western sources of inspiration. Third-World literature, however, tends to be deeply interested in the economic, social and ideological reality of postcolonial situation. This paper examines the interaction of postmodernist thrust with the subtext of development discourse on the example of Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomy. The narrative design of Season of Anomy exemplifies a characteristic disjoint: the creative universe of a postcolonial text implicitly suggests a hope of possibilities for the black world, while the explicit narrative formulates the difficulties of accomplishing these possibilities. In contrast with the events displaying the frustrations of the postmodern discourse in the postcolonial world the titles of the sub-divisions appear to affirm the possibilities in figural terms.

The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (review)

Reviewed by: The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism Michelle Stephens Brent Hayes Edwards. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. x + 397 pp. With The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Brent Edwards has changed the very landscape of transnational black studies, showing what we have lost by not developing a more multilingual approach to black cultural studies and texts. Retracing the encounters between black intellectuals from both the Anglophone and the Francophone world in Paris, during the early to middle decades of the twentieth century, Edwards is able to make broader theoretical and historical claims for the role of translation in shaping black diasporic cultures. As Edwards eloquently states, "the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation. It is not possible to take up the queston of 'diaspora' without taking account of the fact that the great majority of peoples of African descent do not speak or write in English. . . . [O]ne can approach such a project only by attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism . . . are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference" (7). The fascinating convergences in Edwards's account go well beyond the famous encounter of Negritude figures, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, with Anglophone Caribbean novelist Claude [End Page 792] McKay's text Banjo, the latter a fictional account of a group of black drifters in the seaport town of Marseilles. Rather, Edwards's cultural history also includes a discussion of the Francophone black women at the center of this world, specifically the Nardal sisters, Jane and Paulette, whom he argues were as much the "midwifes" of Negritude as Jesse Fauset was of the Harlem Renaissance (134). One of Edwards's most fascinating excavations: a discussion of the extensive black writing in black French journals and newspapers of the period, itself often a missing dimension in our accounts of the black cultural Renaissance on this side of the Atlantic. It is in the fragmentary, immediate, daily moments of the newspaper article and the essay that we find the kinds of convergences and encounters that lay bare lost intellectual histories of black Atlantic traditions and pan-African movements, just waiting to be discovered by the intrepid archivist willing and able to bridge the linguistic gaps separating black worlds. Other recent studies have attempted to tell the story of "the Negro" in France, such as Bennetta Jules-Rosette's Black Paris: The African Writer's Landscape (1998), Michael Fabre's From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1991), and Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996). Edwards adds to this discussion a sense of the archival richness of a multilingual space that exists in the interstices between American and Francophone black studies. He also adds a necessary theorization of the presence of language differences in both relations and deconstructions of black diaspora. However, what his work only suggests but does not fully articulate is the relevance such encounters may have for providing a window into the world of black proletarian internationalism that continues to elude scholars in Marxist historical and literary criticism of the period. In The Practice of Diaspora, Edwards follows both Fanon, and Marx before him, in continuing to see black transnationalism as a deviation from the revolutionary categories central in Marxist definitions of internationalism. Rather, as the richness of Edwards's own account demonstrates, like other Third World Marxisms, black internationalism adheres to one of the essential principles of Marxism itself, that each revolution would define itself according to its own histories and cultural traditions. Black subjects, both within and across the linguistic boundaries that divide them, have been charting their own internationalist movements and circumatlantic geographies in ways even Marx could not foresee from his vantage point in Europe. The "rise of black internationalism" forecasted and described in Edwards's account, and in the work of black studies scholars before him such as Robert Hill, Ernest Allen Jr., Penny Von Eschen, and [End Page 793] Robin D. G. Kelley, actually forces...

Scalar Hair of Global Defect and Black Brane World

We consider a complex scalar field in (p+3)-dimensional bulk with a negative cosmological constant and study global vortices in two extra-dimensions. We reexamine carefully the coupled scalar and Einstein equations, and show that the boundary value of scalar amplitude at infinity of the extra-dimensions should be smaller than vacuum expectation value. The brane world has a cigar-like geometry with an exponentially decaying warp factor and a flat thick p-brane is embedded. Since a coordinate transformation identifies the obtained brane world as a black p-brane world bounded by a horizon, this strange boundary condition of the scalar amplitude is understood as existence of a short scalar hair.

Economic policy in the post‐colony: South Africa between Keynesian remedies and Neoliberal pain

The jury is out and the verdict is in, according to most leftist commentators on the African National Congress (ANC) government. The South African political leadership has forgotten its institution...

Black holes and brane worlds

Abstract We discuss properties of black holes in a spacetime with large extra dimensions.

Cartographies of Globalisation, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

AbstractBy locating the current usage of ‘diaspora’ within today's cultures, I make a case for the unacknowledged subject of Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic world being Western, urban and male. In order to consider the black Atlantic as the site of multiple and heterogeneouslyproduced subjectivities, I turn to the Jamaican performance poet, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, whose work stages modern black subjectivities that are Third World, rural, domestic and female. Her poems depict black female subjectivities that are both local and global, articulated more through dancehall culture and radio technology than a ‘cut‐and‐mix’ music style that tends to be male‐identified.

The New Dawn: Black Agency in Cyberspace

No other medium or information technology developed during the twentieth cen- tury mirrors the transnationalism of the black world much like the Internet. Broad- cast media have limited reach—broadcasts can only reach people within the bound- aries of airwaves and frequencies. Telephones and fax machines, although they enable people to communicate virtually anywhere in the world, are narrowcasting media that connect only a few people at a time. But it is Internet technology's transnational character —g lobally networked, media-rich computers unfettered by national or geographic boundaries—that allows for multiple users in multiple loca- tions to communicate, organize, and access data and transcend time and space by meeting in cyberspace. The increasingly broader use of the Internet comes at a time when scholars studying Africa and the African diaspora have called for research that transcends the constructed nation-state boundaries of the twentieth century as well as similar boundaries constructed by academe and that recognizes the interconnect- edness of the black world. A historian who studies the historic, transnational links between Afro-Cubans and African Americans during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Lisa Brock, for example, asserts that are and always have been solid ties between (Africa-descended) peoples and enough comparative 'transnational processes or recurring conditions' to make black world studies data rich and analyt- ically fertile.1 Furthermore, within the black world, there exists the consciousness,

Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil

Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil