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The Minerva Research Initiative: Social Scientific Knowledge Production as Organizational Strategy
No full textIn response to a number of military failures in a rapidly changing war environment, the Department of Defense put forth major efforts to incorporate social science research into the US national defense strategy. Three such efforts—Project Camelot, Human Terrain Systems, and the Minerva Research Initiative—represent iterative Department of Defense efforts to better understand and change their organizational environment through legitimate academic knowledge production. Our investigation of these efforts demonstrates that when the Department of Defense wants specific information and has a difficult time obtaining it, it eventually finds a way to produce it, in this case by employing tactics similar to those employed by economic elites when they want to develop knowledge that will help them achieve their goals
“The Face of the Buffalo”: Interspecies Relationality in Nawal El Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile
No full textIn several interviews, the Egyptian American writer and feminist Nawal El Saadawi has emphasized her commitment to women’s rights and gender justice in Africa and the Arab world. However, there is hardly any reference regarding her engagement with animals. Yet her writing is replete with animal subjectivity. Therefore, this paper examines animal representations in El Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile by unearthing what we conceptualize as her “complex animal imaginary,” a concept encompassing the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic currents in her novel. Although her narrative language constitutes and conveys such vocabularies, this hardly undermines El Saadawi’s recognition of interspecies relationality and how central the nonhuman is to the flourishing of humans. As such, we highlight her register of animality that presents humans in zoomorphic imagery, stressing that this strategy not only makes legible human suffering but also flattens animal subjectivity, thereby reducing the buffalo, named Aziza, in this case, to a figure of abjection. However, we argue that this representational strategy neither erases animal vitality nor reinscribes speciesism. But instead, it uncovers animal suffering in society. By focusing on interspecies relationality in God Dies, we amplify El Saadawi’s contribution to ongoing conversations on animal studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and posthumanism
State of the Field: African Literary Studies
No full textThis article considers the history and current status of African literary studies in the anglophone academy, especially in the United States. While African literary production has been valorized and validated in recent years, African literary studies lacks the recognition it deserves. In the US, African literary studies has always struggled to gain a foothold, tending to be marginalized within the marginalized. In African/Africana studies programs, literary studies can play second fiddle to political science, anthropology, history, and environmental studies. In language/literature departments, African literature courses—if taught at all—are likely to be infrequently offered electives. Outside of the big Title VI universities, the chances of finding an African literature specialist are slim—and those specialists are likely to be expected to teach a range of more general courses such as introductory surveys and upper-level courses in “rest-of-the-world”/postcolonial/Global South literature. African literary specialists have frequently expressed suspicion of the generalizing tendencies of literary theories, including postcolonial theory. Questions about the validity and applicability of postcolonial theory in the study of African literature still persist, but for grad students starting PhD programs since the mid 2000s what has dominated their experience has been the explosion not only of new primary texts and forms and modes of circulation, but the proliferation of ways of reading. Moving well beyond concerns with authenticity, tradition and modernity, language questions, questions about formalist or political approaches, contemporary scholars and their students are offering radically new kinds of readings, offering hope that the same kind of prominence enjoyed by Africa’s creative writers in recent years may yet be enjoyed by African literary scholars.
History as Sharing Stories: Crossing the Cultural Divide Through Kim Scott's Fiction
No full text"History as Sharing Stories: Crossing the Cultural Divide Through Kim Scott's Fiction" by Caterina Colomb
The (Re)turn to History
No full textPrem Poddar and David Johnson, eds. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Edinburgh UP, 2005. 608 pages.
John McLeod, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 272 pages.
Ronald Hyam. Understanding the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 576 pages. 
