Publications

Este libro es el resultado de mi investigación de maestría en Sociología que comenzó en 2012 y terminó en 2015 en la Universidad Federal de Pernambuco. Durante este período me interesó comprender las dinámicas sociales y culturales presentes en aquellos países llamados, muchas veces peyorativamente, el “tercer mundo”. En otras palabras, me propuse comprender lo que realmente se ha producido en términos políticos y poéticos en países que han vivido la experiencia del proceso colonial, desde una perspectiva decolonial y/o poscolonial. Inicialmente, mi enfoque estuvo en América Latina y la dinámica de la producción cinematográfica en el llamado Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Durante esta experiencia inicial me topé con algo hasta ahora insólito, pero aún poco cuestionado: la ausencia de estudios sociológicos sobre la producción cinematográfica africana. Recuerdo que la atención prestada a la producción literaria africana en ese momento gozaba de relativo prestigio dentro de la academia, con obras de autores angoleños y mozambiqueños traducidas y estudiadas en departamentos de sociología y literatura. Sin embargo, el cine africano, con raras excepciones, seguía siendo un tema marginado y poco discutido entre nosotros, sociólogos y académicos. La investigación buscaba, por tanto, abrir nuevas posibilidades de análisis dentro del campo de investigación sobre el arte y la cultura desde una perspectiva periférica y no hegemónica. Ahora con la publicación de este libro, existe la posibilidad de que un público no académico pueda leer y sumergirse en este mundo hoy un poco más debatido que en 2012, pero aún lejos de tener el merecido reconocimiento.

This chapter offers an overview of poetry in African languages from all over the continent, which is, on the one hand, the most universal and the most specific literary form. Most African cultures did not have a specific term for literature before colonialism, but have long traditions of rhythmically bound speech reserved for special occasions and used to promote the most important ideals and aspirations of society which have proved flexible to newly emerging styles. Given the beauty, vitality, and long history of poetry and its diversity rooted in its intimate connection with respective cultural contexts, concepts of aesthetics, and language form, the chapter starts by making heuristic use of generic categories, like epic and praise poetry, to be able to both draw comparisons and highlight cultural specifics. It pays attention to poetry’s changing media across time while also going beyond the typical dichotomy of “traditional” and “modern” poetry.

The problem of human trafficking in Kenya remains deeply entrenched. Although multiple regulatory efforts have been adopted to rein in this challenge, it rages on with the recent reports projecting its increase. As a result, the discrepancy between policy and realities and lived human trafficking experiences of domestic workers using the Kenya-Saudi Arabia route is not only glaring but also one that deserves scholarly attention, especially considering recent experiences. This chapter has examined the gap between the policy positions, including emerging and recent ones, and the reality of combating human trafficking. Using mixed methods consisting of doctrinal evaluation of the law and reports, and also interviews, the authors have explored the nature and extent of this discrepancy. The chapter makes a finding that the legal, regulatory and administrative efforts for ensuring the welfare of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, who are victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, have yet to fully and effectively address the challenge. To address the practical realities that cause or exacerbate this challenge, moving forward, the chapter recommends that the Kenyan government prioritise the ratification of certain treaty laws, demonstrate political goodwill through the implementation of parliamentary reports on the challenge, prioritise the human rights approach to the regulation of aspects of human trafficking, and provide meaningful financial and legal backing to the institutions tasked with combating human trafficking in Kenya.

Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. The two, despite many challenges, are often thought to have become separated during the process of modernisation. Tracing how this notion of separation becomes idealised and translated into various contexts, this book sheds light on its epistemological limitations. Combining otherwise-distinct lines of discussion within political anthropology and kinship studies, the selection of texts covers a broad range of intersecting topics that range from military strategy, DNA testing, and child fostering, to practices of kinning the state. Beginning with the study of politics, the first part of this volume looks at how its separation from kinship came to be considered a ‘modern’ phenomenon, with significant consequences. The second part starts from kinship, showing how it was made into a separate and apolitical field – an idea that would soon travel and be translated globally into policies. The third part turns to reproductions through various transmissions and future-making projects. Overall, the volume offers a fundamental critique of the epistemological separation of politics and kinship, and its shortcomings for teaching and research. Featuring contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds, it allows for critical engagement with knowledge production about the entanglement of politics and kinship. The different traditions and contemporary approaches represented make this book an essential resource for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology.

This article argues that not only changing kinship practices are deeply entangled with political change, but also processes of political ordering could be influenced by and engrained with kinship practices. The argument is exemplified with regard to the political history of child fostering in northern Benin. A common and widespread everyday practice already in pre-colonial times, child fostering has been overseen by colonial officers, but nevertheless contributed to means of resisting colonial ordering. After independence, foster practices underwent deep changes which were related to the changing political economy in the region.

This study is based on a discourse analysis of official COVID-19 addresses by South African national government ministers with a focus on linguistic choices. While access to healthcare is an obvious issue of social justice during the pandemic, language plays a covert role in processes of access and inequality. Linguistic understanding influences social participation and during an epidemic crisis, access to language plays a significant role in improving responses of affected individuals. Although English is widely accepted as a common lingua franca in the country, it excludes those who are not proficient in the language. In this article, we analyse code-switching practices, translanguaging, and increasing African language usage among ministers of parliament during official COVID-19 speeches and briefings. We argue that the growing use of multilingual resources among South African politicians carries ramifications on language politics, i.e. a shift away from an unquestioned monolingual discourse purporting English as ‘the’ lingua franca which has in the past characterised most national speeches. From this new multilingual perspective, the pandemic has effected an inward orientation rather than the previously dominating concern with international relations.

World Englishes research on pragmatics, especially in postcolonial contexts, has been slow in emerging since the 1970s. A possible reason for this could be the absence of coherent theoretical frameworks for the complex nature of these societies. In this regard, the theoretical framework postcolonial pragmatics offers analytical tools for investigating pragmatic phenomena in societies that were affected by colonial contact. Its underlying premise is that the contact of precolonial and colonial (social) systems resulted in hybrid yet coherent patterns of social interaction, meaning-making and societal cohesion that are evident in the discourses produced in these contexts. To investigate them properly, we must rely on frameworks like postcolonial pragmatics designed purposively for them. This framework identifies both fixed (e.g., age, gender, history) and fluid (identity, social status, religion, education, kinship) analytical components that are indispensable when studying social interaction in postcolonial contexts, irrespective of the languages used.

This article presents interesting early discoveries in the study of English-Hausa translations. They are the preliminary findings deducted from reading both primary and secondary texts, visiting libraries and research centers, and from holding interviews and discussions with translators, experts, and scholars. The paper identifies the aims of the English Hausa translations, examines the texts and background of the translators, and also analyses the reception of the documents by the target audience. These incidental findings include some unidentified English Hausa paratextual translation traditions, the wide range of differences between English source texts and Hausa translations, the unavailability of some important English Hausa translations that are supposed to be in high demand, how assumed Hausa source texts turn out as translations, and the profiles of the English-Hausa translation agencies.

En esta era de globalización, las “imágenes de los otros”, y sus historias, a menudo nos llegan en reportajes, videos y fotografías en los periódicos que revelan poco o nada sobre quiénes son estos “forasteros en la puerta”. La crisis migratoria se ha convertido en el mayor dilema moral contemporáneo y desafía rutinariamente nuestra comprensión de los estándares culturales y los derechos establecidos, al tiempo que denuncia un control cada vez mayor de los cuerpos y el espacio. Si tales imágenes reflejan nuestra cultura, también sirven a la vez como un elemento que la constituye. Por lo tanto, el presente estudio se propone comprender cómo el "fenómeno migratorio", como "desplazamiento en el espacio" - ya sea exterior o interior, físico o imaginario - fue reapropiado y problematizado por cineastas africanos contemporáneos (ellos mismos sujetos migrantes y diaspóricos), a partir del análisis de películas producidas en los últimos años. Como películas que asumen una postura histórica comprometida, aquí se pretende comprender las diferentes estrategias estéticas que subyacen a la “puesta en escena fílmica”, en cuanto a la trayectoria de sus personajes dentro del espacio social y simbólico del mundo recreado en cada obra. Por ello, es interesante pensar cómo en el cine se “articulan” estratégicamente nuevas subjetividades estéticas y políticas, reconfigurando la tensión entre lo “global” y lo “local”, el “aquí” y el “allí”, al presentar otras formas posibles de “comunidad”, “espacialidad”, “territorialidad”, “memoria” y “pertenencia”, más allá de las fronteras tradicionalmente delimitadas.

Generational conflicts are increasingly addressed in media and in academic debate. Against this backdrop Karl Mannheim’s investigation of generational change can be brought back into focus. He argues that every generation is a potential for change, but this often goes hand in hand with a conflict between generations. From a postcolonial lens we challenge this universal conceptualisation of generational conflict: drawn from case studies in Benin and Austria we show that Mannheim’s argument has to be provincialised. Despite the different settings and methodological approaches, our results are similar: while young people perceive themselves as distinct from the older generation, and despite the rhetoric of rupture, no conflict can be observed in the concrete behaviour of the actors. Despite these similarities, it is important to witness the particular contexts, with specific, generational locations and specific spatial and temporal conditions. Only taking this into account, can it be said why, in what form, and in which contexts young people contribute to social change through the way they interact with other generations. Therefore, we want to question Mannheim’s assumption of a generational conflict and highlight the need to provincialise it as an engine of change.

Locating items in large information systems can be challenging, especially if the query has multiple senses referring to different items: depending on the context, Amazon may refer to the river, rainforest, or a mythical female warrior. We propose and study Personalised Semantic Query Expansion (PSemQE) as a means of disambiguating short, ambiguous queries in information retrieval systems. This study examines PSemQE’s effectiveness in retrieving relevant documents matching intended senses of ambiguous terms and ranking them higher versus a base query without expansion. Synthetic user profiles focused on narrow domains were generated to model well-defined information needs. Word embeddings trained on these profiles were used to expand queries with semantically related terms. Experiments were conducted on corpora of varying sizes to measure the retrieval of predetermined target articles. Our results show that PSemQE successfully disambiguated polysemous queries and ranked the target ar ticles higher than the base query. Furthermore, PSemQE produces result sets with higher relevance to user interests. Despite limitations like synthetic profiles and cold-start issues, this study shows PSemQE’s potential as an effective query disambiguation engine. Overall, PSemQE can enhance search relevance and user experience by leveraging user information to provide meaningful responses to short, ambiguous queries.

In the current moment, we are witnessing a resurgent political urgency around demands to overthrow the inequities that are entrenched in oppressive structural formations such as racism and colonialism. Debates about race and racism are also unfolding in academia. While there has been a long tradition of speaking plainly about race within international relations (Doty, 1993; Grovogui, 2001), the past decade has seen a re-engagement not just with race as an analytical category but also with racism (Anievas et al., 2015; Muppidi, 2018; Rutazibwa, 2016; Vitalis, 2015), frequently articulated in terms of, or alongside calls for, the decolonization of academia. As editors of a scholarly journal, we believe that our role is to foster academic debate on matters such as these. This special forum is born out of Security Dialogue’s ongoing commitment to the creation of a structured, reflexive space for critical attention to the question of race and racism in critical security studies.

From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intel-lectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through com-mon human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices of measuring and classification reveals how the genomic archive is implicated in the his-tory of apartheid and its racialized subjectivities. Similarly, individual interpretations of genetic ancestry show that race is constantly brought forth in this archival process. The genomic archive interweaves measuring practices in the sciences with the politics of social and biographical experience—a relationship that is at the heart of genetic genealogies.

On the work of Hannah Arendt and Saidiya V. Hartman

Academic knowledge production continues to marginalize voices of minoritized majorities, while privileging those of majoritized minorities. At the core of this exclusionary practice are moral questions of whose knowledge counts as right, valid and legitimate. How can researchers share their power of definition with communities structurally excluded from academia, but directly affected by the results of academic knowledge production? Which kind of spaces and institutional settings allow for an inclusive and collaborative research process that enables mutual learning and empowerment? To provide some answers to these questions, I give insights into an ongoing process of participatory research-creation developed with Afro-diasporic communities from Brazil and Colombia. Thereby, an artistic meta-language co-created with different community actors and artists enables the participants to relate to each other through and beyond diversity. Although huge challenges arise with regard to institutional boundaries, impact measurement and translatability, the project confirms that it is possible to produce valid and mutually beneficial knowledge in collaboration with marginalized communities. Apart from solidarity, however, such a relational research process requires the co-creation of a space for mutual learning based on human equality, dignity and reciprocity.