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    The Postcolonial Cultural Transaction: Rethinking the Guinea crisis within the French cultural strategy for Africa, 1958-60

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    In 1958 Guinea voted to become independent. Historians have argued French administrators left Conakry as a form of punishment while Soviet aid offers turned Guinea into a Cold War frontline. This article, however, argues that the French handling of the Guinea crisis was fundamentally shaped by disagreements about cultural assistance. French culture, which in the early 1950s was viewed as a tool aimed at cultivating African loyalty, during the crisis became a modernising force uniquely suited to boosting African development. In 1960, cultural assistance became explicitly transactional: African countries that were expected to remain loyal to France received culture in return. The story of cultural assistance, therefore, elucidates the French understanding of empire and the Cold War in Africa

    The Politics of Socialist Education in Ghana: The Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, 1961-1966

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    This article reconstructs the trajectory of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII) to shed light on the politics of socialist education in 1960s Ghana. On the basis of archival evidence, it explores the changing role of the institute in the making of Nkrumahism as public discourse and documents the evolving relationship between the universalism of Marxism-Leninism and the quest for more local political iconographies centred on Nkrumah's life and work. Secondly, the article analyses the individual motivations and experiences of a sample of foreign lecturers. The article suggests that ideological institutes offer insights into the processes by which official ideologies were created and disseminated, a foil through which to interrogate the usages and appropriation of social sciences education, and a window onto the multiple ways in which local and foreign agents negotiated their identities and political participation in African socialist experiments

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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