Northwestern Events Calendar

Jan
11
2019

PAS L+L: South Africa and its Discontents: Contemporary Politics and Social Mobilization

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When: Friday, January 11, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, room 106, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Join the Program of African Studies as we provide lunch and a lecture.

Jan
16
2019

PAS Research Cluster Meeting: Avant-Garde Africa

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When: Wednesday, January 16, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, conference room, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

This year, the Program of African Studies has formed three interdisciplinary research clusters: Avant-Garde Africa, Health & Healing, and Security & Development. Research clusters are composed of Northwestern faculty and graduate students whose research focuses on the cluster theme. While they form the base of the cluster, other Northwestern and community members are welcome to attend cluster discussions and events.

In this first Avant-Garde Africa research cluster meeting, attendees will discuss themes and ideas that the group is keen to pursue, suggest speakers/programming for winter and spring quarters, and discuss the possibility of applying for relevant grants.

Avant-Garde Africa research cluster is focused on enhancing PAS’s role as an international hub for African writing, visual arts, and performance by drawing attention to emergent literary and artistic trends in Africa and its Diasporas. The humanities broadly conceived offer exciting responses to problems and opportunities on the continent and foreground new issues that preoccupy African artists (e.g. human rights, migration, environmental justice, gender and sexuality).

Jan
23
2019

PAS L+L: Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch - Beyond the Nkrumah State: Cultural Policy and its Afterlives in Post-independent Ghana

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When: Wednesday, January 23, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, room 106, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Join the Program of African Studies as we provide lunch and a lecture.

Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, PAS Visiting Scholar; African History, Dartmouth College

Title: Beyond the Nkrumah State: Cultural Policy and its Afterlives in Post-independent Ghana

Abstract:

This paper explores the development of cultural organizations in Ghana’s post-independence era. It traces how cultural organizations formed during the Nkrumah-era lived on in later years, highlighting the ways in which civil society organizations such as the Arts Council of Ghana became alternative sites for Ghanaians to envision the development of the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. The Arts Council of Ghana also engaged with international bodies through shared cultural projects despite the volatile political and economic climate of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper exemplifies the ways in which transnational explorations of cultural life in post-independence Africa move us beyond the metropole/former colony binary and empire- and state-centered framings of African history. Moreover, post-independence historical narratives of Ghana (and other African countries more broadly) during this period have focused heavily on the violent political and economic landscapes that dramatically shaped the lives of the country’s citizens. But this historiography has neglected--albeit as the result of inaccessible archival records--the ways in which civil society groups utilized new arenas at home and abroad in generative ways, to fashion concrete projects for cultural and intellectual development through the arts. I utilize previously unused archival records to trace the development of cultural projects and the goals of the Arts Council of Ghana during the transformative era of post-independence Africa.

 

Bio:

Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch is Associate Professor of African History at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on 20th century Ghanaian and West African history. She is author of The Politics of Chieftaincy: Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana: 1920-1950. Her articles have appeared in several journals including the International Journal of African History Studies, History in Africa, International Review of Social History and Journal of West African History. Sackeyfio-Lenoch is the recipient of an ACLS Frederick Burkhart Residential Fellowship for the 2018-2019 year. She will be in residence at the Program in African Studies to work on her current book about the history of Ghana’s internationalism, and the role the country played in the global and cultural politics of the independence and Cold-War era.

Feb
6
2019

PAS L+L: Sara Marzagora - Monarchical Nationalism in Ethiopia

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When: Wednesday, February 6, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, room 106, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Join the Program of African Studies as we provide lunch and a lecture.

Sara Marzagora, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, SOAS University of London

Title: Monarchical Nationalism in Ethiopia: Global Ideas of Sovereignty and the Reinvention of ‘Dynasty’ (1855-1941)

Abstract:

This paper traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastization of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination.

Bio:

Dr Sara Marzagora is an intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS University of London, where she is leading the Horn of Africa strand of a research project on global intellectual history and world literature. She has published articles on Amharic historiography, Amharic print culture and Ethiopian political thought, and is completing a book manuscript on Ethiopian conceptualizations of the “global” in the first half of the twentieth century.

Feb
13
2019

PAS L+L: Wendell Hassan Marsh - Shaykh Musa Kamara and the Genealogy of an African Islamic Modernity

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When: Wednesday, February 13, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, room 106, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Join the Program of African Studies as we provide lunch and a lecture.

Wendell Hassan Marsh, Buffett Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Title: Shaykh Musa Kamara and the Genealogy of an African Islamic Modernity

Bio:

Wendell Hassan Marsh conducts research and teaches on the encounter of Islam and the African world as mediated in Arabic and vernacular texts. Overall, his work seeks to decentralize the study of Islam from the classical Arab heartlands by locating debates over religious authority in French West Africa within an equivocal tradition of argument and dissent specific to the region. He has been awarded Fulbright, Ford, and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships for his work. Marsh is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.