Download or read book Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies written by Diana Miryong Natermann and published by Historische Belgienforschung. This book was released on 2018 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The transcolonial approach is based on egodocuments from Belgian, German and Swedish men and women who migrated to Central Africa for reasons like a love for adventure, social betterment, new gender roles, or the conviction that colonising was their patriotic duty.
Download or read book Naming Colonialism written by Osumaka Likaka and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-12-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s in a name? As Osumaka Likaka argues in this illuminating study, the names that Congolese villagers gave to European colonizers reveal much about how Africans experienced and reacted to colonialism. The arrival of explorers, missionaries, administrators, and company agents allowed Africans to observe Westerners’ physical appearances, behavior, and cultural practices at close range—often resulting in subtle yet trenchant critiques. By naming Europeans, Africans turned a universal practice into a local mnemonic system, recording and preserving the village’s understanding of colonialism in the form of pithy verbal expressions that were easy to remember and transmit across localities, regions, and generations. Methodologically innovative, Naming Colonialism advances a new approach that shows how a cultural process—the naming of Europeans—can provide a point of entry into economic and social histories. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, Likaka encounters and analyzes a welter of coded fragments. The vivid epithets Congolese gave to rubber company agents—“the home burner,” “Leopard,” “Beat, beat,” “The hippopotamus-hide whip”—clearly conveyed the violence that underpinned colonial extractive economies. Other names were subtler, hinting at derogatory meaning by way of riddles, metaphors, or symbols to which the Europeans were oblivious. Africans thus emerge from this study as autonomous actors whose capacity to observe, categorize, and evaluate reverses our usual optic, providing a critical window on Central African colonialism in its local and regional dimensions.
Download or read book Recalling the Belgian Congo written by Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the author embarked on her study, her aim was to approach former colonial officers with a view to analyzing processes of domination in the ex-Belgian Congo. However, after establishing a rapport with some of these officers, the author was soon forced to revise her initial assumptions, widely held in present-day Belgium: these officers were not the "baddies" she had expected to meet. Exploring the colonial experience through the respondents' memories resulted in a far more complex picture of the colonial situation than she had anticipated, again forcing her to question her original assumptions. This resulted not only in a more differentiated perspective on Belgian colonialist rule, but is also sensitized her as regards the question of anthropological understanding and of what constitutes historical fact. These two aspects of her work are reflected in this study that offers specific material on the way Belgian colonialism is remembered and reflects on its conditions of production, thus combining ethnographic analysis with a theoretical essay.
Download or read book Historical Memory in Africa written by Mamadou Diawara and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the inner dynamics of memory in all its variations, from its most destructive and divisive impact to its remarkable potential to heal and reconcile. It addresses issues on both the conceptual and the pragmatic level and its theoretical observations and reflections are informed by first-hand experiences ...
Download or read book The Lumumba Generation written by Daniel Tödt and published by de Gruyter. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did the African elite turn from loyal intermediaries into opponents of the colonial state? This book wants to help better understand the dramatic political and cultural processes of decolonization in the Belgian Congo. Focusing on the ma
Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "meticulously researched and comprehensive" (Financial Times) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.
Download or read book Swimming in the Congo written by Margaret Meyers and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the childhood experiences of seven-year-old Grace Berggren, the daughter of foreign missionaries living on the banks of the Congo River, and her growing attachment to the African landscape and the people both indigenous and foreign, who surround her.
Download or read book Maison Rouge written by Liliane Leila Juma and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leila was 16 years old when her family home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was destroyed by rebel soldiers. In this gut-wrenching memoir, she gives an account of her life before and after her family was torn apart by the twin nightmares of civil war and invasion. Maison Rouge is a story of war and unspeakable loss. It is also the story of survival. Eventually, through the United Nations refugee programme, Leila and her family were finally able to relocate to Canada.
Download or read book Memories of Congo written by J. Hershey Longenecker and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Back to the Congo written by Lieve Joris and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Nervous State written by Nancy Rose Hunt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.
Download or read book Desegregating the Past written by Robyn Autry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.
Download or read book Prosthetic Memory written by Alison Landsberg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prosthetic Memory argues that mass cultural forms such as cinema and television in fact contain the still-unrealized potential for a progressive politics based on empathy for the historical experiences of others. The technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, to share collective memories--to assimilate as deeply felt personal experiences historical events through which they themselves did not live.
Download or read book The Leopard the Lion and the Cock written by Matthew Stanard and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thought-provoking reflection on culture, colonialism, and the remainders of empire in Belgium after 1960 The degree to which the late colonial era affected Europe has been long underappreciated, and only recently have European countries started to acknowledge not having come to terms with decolonisation. In Belgium, the past two decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the controversial episodes in the country’s colonial past. This volume examines the long-term effects and legacies of the colonial era on Belgium after 1960, the year the Congo gained its independence, and calls into question memories of the colonial past by focusing on the meaning and place of colonial monuments in public space. The book foregrounds the enduring presence of “empire” in everyday Belgian life in the form of permanent colonial markers in bronze and stone, lieux de mémoire of the country’s history of overseas expansion. By means of photographs and explanations of major pro-colonial memorials, as well as several obscure ones, the book reveals the surprising degree to which Belgium became infused with a colonialist spirit during the colonial era. Another key component of the analysis is an account of the varied ways in which both Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians approached the colonial past after 1960, treating memorials variously as objects of veneration, with indifference, or as symbols to be attacked or torn down. The book provides a thought-provoking reflection on culture, colonialism, and the remainders of empire in Belgium after 1960.
Download or read book Stringer written by Anjan Sundaram and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.
Download or read book Facing the Congo written by Jeffrey Tayler and published by Abacus (UK). This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book transports readers into the jungles and crocodile-infested waters of sub-Saharan Africa. The author travels a river barge teeming with merchants, mothers, prostitutes, fishermen, and spiritual followers, then launches his quest to confront the Congo River by descending its longest navigational stretch.
Download or read book Santeria from Africa to the New World written by George Brandon and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "On his own terms, Brandon more than fulfills his promise to take the reader on the transatlantic journey of the orisha and to explore the complexities of African memory in the diaspora." —American Historical Review "He adeptly addresses broader issues, such as power relations within Caribbean slavery, multiculturalism, and the forms of religious accommodation to cultural change. In addition, he offers a fresh and cogent assessment of the production and reproduction of African beliefs and practices in new contexts. Brandon's exemplary archival research is supplemented by skillful participant observation." —Choice The Yoruba religious tradition arose in West Africa, but its influence has spread beyond Africa to millions of adherents in the Americas as well. Santeria from Africa to the New World retraces one path taken by this tradition—a path from Africa to Cuba and to New York City. George Brandon examines the religion's transatlantic route through Cuban Santeria, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, and Black Nationalism. In following the historical and anthropological evolution of the Yoruba religion, Brandon discusses broader questions of power, multiculturalism, cultural change, and the production and reproduction of African retentions.
