The Hum of Progress: Motorcars and the Modernization of West Africa

Author(s):  
Lindsey B. Green-Simms

Chapter 1 focuses on the history of motorization from the colonial moment to the decolonizing decades following World War II. Examining various events or episodes alongside key literary and cinematic texts, this chapter explores the many ambivalences and conflicts present in the process of motorization. The chapter also discuss how African entrepreneurs took the lead in importing automobiles and establishing a system of transportation while Europeans were often ambivalent or even hostile to the idea of motorizing Africa.

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
Oliver Coates

The National Negro Publishers Association (NNPA) Commission to West Africa in 1944–1945 represents a major episode in the history of World War II Africa, as well as in American–West Africa relations. Three African American reporters toured the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Congo between November 1944 and February 1945, before returning to Washington, DC to report to President Roosevelt. They documented their tour in the pages of the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Their Americans’ visit had a significant impact in wartime West Africa and was widely documented in the African press. This article examines the NNPA tour geographically, before analyzing American reporters’ interactions with West Africans, and assessing African responses to the tour. Drawing on both African American and West African newspapers, it situates the NNPA tour within the history of World War II West Africa, and in terms of African print culture. It argues that the NNPA tour became the focus of West African hopes for future political, economic, and intellectual relations with African Americans, while revealing how the NNPA reporters engaged African audiences during their tour.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Cezary Zalewski

Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse.


Aletheia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hu

Grievabilty, as Judith Butler outlines in Precarious Life, is when individuals are valued, loved, and respected. When they are of value, and thus when they pass, they are worthy of being grieved for. Throughout history, including the present day, we are constantly reminded of those who are ungrievable and those who have been derealized, whether that be Indigenous people, those who died in the war, those exploited by corporations, those who endured slavery, the list is endless. One group, in particular, is that of ‘comfort women’ these are women who were captured by the Japanese military during World War II and unwillingly become sex slaves for the entire army, they are among the many who were lost to this war. Therefore, this paper will be examining the history of ‘comfort women’ during World War II through the lens of Judith Butler's Precarious Life. By applying the concept of greivability, and understanding the process of derealization, this paper was able to not only critically recognize that the circumstances of war and the cruel nature of the Japanese military led to the derealization of ‘comfort women’, but that the survivors were also able to use their trauma as strength, empowering them in a new era, with the help of media and women’s rights groups, to undo their derealization and reclaim their power.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dierk Hagedorn

In this paper I will describe the adventurous history of an important late medieval German fechtbuch—a fighting manual—that belongs to a number of manuscripts known as the Gladiatoria group. In the beginning, the extent and the characteristics of this group of codices are explained; later on I will deal with one specific specimen that formerly belonged to a library in Germany—the Herzogliche Bibliothek in Gotha—from where it vanished during or after World War II. Until quite recently this manuscript was believed to be lost. I was able to identify a Gladiatoria manuscript from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as that missing manuscript. The article presents a detailed description of the manuscript; it follows the path of the many places the codex passed through from the days of its creation until the present time; it offers a thorough line of argument that proves on one hand that the manuscript from New Haven is in fact identical to the one that disappeared from Gotha, and that verifies on the other hand an assumption by the renowned researcher Hans-Peter Hils that it is identical to yet another believed-to-be-lost manuscript that was sold by auction in Heidelberg in the 1950s and 1960s as single leaves; and finally it makes an attempt to reconstruct the original structure of the manuscript after it had been pulled apart.


Author(s):  
Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia

Since antiquity and through the modern era African societies maintained contacts with peoples in Europe, the Near and Far East, and the Americas. Among other things, African peoples developed local forms of Christianity and Islam, contributed large amounts of gold to European medieval economies, and exported millions of slaves through the Sahara, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Despite this, by the 19th century historians and philosophers of history thought Africa was a continent without major civilizations, whose peoples passively rested at the margins of history. These ideas persisted into the 20th century when historians undertook the challenge of writing histories that explained how communities around the world were connected to one another. In their early iterations, however, these “world narratives” were little more than histories of the Western world; Africa continued to be largely absent from these stories. After World War II, increasing interest in the history of African societies and a more generalized concern with the study of communities that were both mis- and under-represented by historical scholarship called for a revision of the goals and methods of world historians. Among the most important critiques were those from Afrocentric, African American, and Africanist scholars. Afrocentric writers argued that Africa had in fact developed an important civilization in the form of Egypt and that Egypt was the foundation of the classical world. African American and Africanist writers highlighted the contributions that peoples of African descent had made to the world economy and many cultures around the globe. Africanists also questioned whether world historical narratives, which meaningfully accounted for the richness and complexity of African experiences, could be achieved in the form of a single universal narrative. Instead, historians have suggested and produced new frameworks that could best explain the many ways in which Africa has been part of the world and its history.


1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua B. Forrest

Amílcar Cabral was perhaps the foremost political thinker to emerge out of the many independence movements of post-World War II Africa. His insightful theory of class struggle in the continent, his informative analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau, his original concept of ‘class suicide’, and his notion of the relationship between national liberation and culture,1 helped convince many scholars of the viability of a class and ideological approach to the study of African politics.2


1981 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa

Of the many fascinating episodes that punctuate the diplomatic history of World War II, few have intrigued scholars more than the secret Balkan spheres-of-action agreement worked out by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Josef Stalin at the Anglo-Soviet conference (British code-named TOLSTOY) held in Moscow in the autumn of 1944. It was late in the evening of 9 October. In his first encounter with Stalin since the meeting of the Big Three at Teheran in 1943, Churchill, believing “the moment … apt for business,” appealed to the Soviet dictator to “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.” Specifically, he went on, “We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.


2009 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-85
Author(s):  
Aage Jørgensen

Finest frugt - om ‘den Vartou Kjællingepræst En guide til Grundtvig- Studier 1948-2008,I[Fruit of the finest - concerning ‘the Vartov Old Biddies ’pas torA guide to Grundtvig-Studier 1948-2008, I]By Aage JørgensenAs early as 1948, the Grundtvig Society of 8 September 1947 launched an annual journal, Grundtvig-Studier (Grundtvig Studies). Since then, the journal has published a significant part of the subsequent research on Grundtvig, including important debate on the many Grundtvig dissertations that have appeared since World War II. This anniversary article reviews the content of the sixty volumes that have hitherto been issued. Despite its cross-disciplinary character, the material is here presented in a traditionally systematised format.The opening section deals with studies in bibliography, diplomatics and biography, and is followed by a series of fairly lengthy sections characterising: (1) material pertaining to the history of ideas and concerned with Grundtvig’s views on life and history together with his relation to Romantic philosophy, Northern mythology and the contemporary way of thinking as a whole; (2) material relating to literary history and aesthetics, with emphasis upon a series of exemplary contributions by particular authors (Gustav Albeck, Helge Toldberg, Jørgen Elbek, Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, Sune Auken and, as regards the influence of Anglo-Saxon upon Grundtvig, S. A. J. Bradley); and (3) the theological material, with focus especially upon the impact of Kaj Thaning’s designation of 1832 as a decisive turning-point in Grundtvig’s life, and upon Grundtvig’s relationship to Luther, Kierkegaard and mystic tradition. The exploration of Grundtvig's hymns and sermons is treated in separate sections; and finally there is a section concerned with illustration of his political endeavours. For reasons of space, contributions to the journal on Grundtvig’s educational deliberations and their significance for Danish schools, especially the folk high schools, together with the overall subsequent reception of his thinking (within Denmark and out in the wider world) will be reserved for discussion in Grundtvig-Studier 2010.


1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (01) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
G. Wesley Johnson

In September and October of 1964, I visited the various centers once forming links in the archival system of French West Africa. Contrary to what occurred in Equatorial Africa, the French left these archival holdings in place, except for current material which was shipped to the rue Oudinot (Ministry of Colonies) in Paris. The center of the West African system was the Archives of the Government-General in Dakar (later the High Commission). Based originally on the Senegalese holdings, this archive became an independent agency of the federal government and was the parent organization of subsidiary archives for Senegal, Mauritania, Soudan, Upper Volta, Niger, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. It was parallel in structure to the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), which also had its headquarters in Dakar and maintained subsidiary centers for each territory. In some cases, the archives and IFAN centers were amalgamated (during World War II) and the history of the two organizations is often inseparable. This survey is an attempt to describe the establishment and development of these archival centers, how their material was organized and can be used for research, and their current status in the independent countries.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-208
Author(s):  
Dierk Hagedorn

Abstract In this paper I will describe the adventurous history of an important late medieval German fechtbuch—a fighting manual—that belongs to a number of manuscripts known as the Gladiatoria group. In the beginning, the extent and the characteristics of this group of codices are explained; later on I will deal with one specific specimen that formerly belonged to a library in Germany—the Herzogliche Bibliothek in Gotha—from where it vanished during or after World War II. Until quite recently this manuscript was believed to be lost. I was able to identify a Gladiatoria manuscript from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as that missing manuscript. The article presents a detailed description of the manuscript; it follows the path of the many places the codex passed through from the days of its creation until the present time; it offers a thorough line of argument that proves on one hand that the manuscript from New Haven is in fact identical to the one that disappeared from Gotha, and that verifies on the other hand an assumption by the renowned researcher Hans-Peter Hils that it is identical to yet another believed-to-be-lost manuscript that was sold by auction in Heidelberg in the 1950s and 1960s as single leaves; and finally it makes an attempt to reconstruct the original structure of the manuscript after it had been pulled apart.


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