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Begin New Search Political Geography Nigeria Journal Macalester International

1. Response to Watts - 2

Author:
William G. Moseley
Publication Date:
08-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
Let me start by noting what a pleasure and inspiring opportunity it is to be commenting on the scholarship of Michael Watts. When I embarked on my field research for my master's thesis in the West African nation of Mali in 1991, I carried three texts with me into the field. These books were Paul Richards' Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (1985), Piers Blaikie's Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985), and Michael Watts' Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (1983). While the books by Richards and Blaikie were fairly compact, Michael Watts' tome added considerable heft to my baggage (so I showed real commitment in lugging it along). At the time I was not familiar with geography as a field of study, but rather was a student of natural resources management. It was Richards, Blaikie, and Watts who brought me to geography, and in particular to an interdisciplinary subfield known as political ecology. Only later would I learn in my Ph.D. studies what a pivotal figure Michael Watts had been in my chosen discipline and subfield.
Political Geography:
Africa and Nigeria

2. Global (Re)vision: Musical Imagination in African America

Author:
Ingrid Monson
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Macalester International
Institution:
Macalester College
Abstract:
African American music has always been global, for it would never have come into being without that international trade in human beings known as the Atlantic slave trade. As historians of the slave trade have noted, Americans of African descent came from a variety of ethnic groups primarily from Central and West Africa. Many stopped first in the Caribbean before being transported for sale in various American cities of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. In the United States, unlike in the Caribbean, large groups of enslaved Africans from the same cultural group often did not reside together, which resulted in a synthesizing of diverse African cultural practices and values. People taken from what was then known as Senegambia (present day Senegal and Guinea) predominated numerically in the 17th century, but by the end of the North American slave trade approximately 40% of Africans in America came from central Africa (present day Cameroon, Gabon, both Congos, Central African Republic, Angola), 30% from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin (present day Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Benin), 15% from Senegambia, and 15% from elsewhere on the continent. As Robert Farris Thompson's book Flash of the Spirit noted long ago, many traces of Yoruba, Kongo, and Mande cultural expression, religion, and visual arts can be found in North America.
Political Geography:
Africa, America, North America, and Nigeria