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12. 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
13. Editor's Note
- Author:
- Ahmed I. Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 06-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- As Bildhaan ends its ninth year of existence, Somali society in the Horn of Africa enters yet another phase of its endless descent into violent contest over an already pestilent present. Nearly half of the Somali population in the country are now designated as malnourished and, thus, increasingly dependent upon international food assistance. This fact and others make Somalia the worst country in the whole world in terms of the Quality of Life Index.
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Somalia
14. Battling on Two Fronts: Introducing Maryan Omar Ali
- Author:
- Ahmed I. Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 06-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- It is a bit muggy but still a gorgeous and clear morning in Toronto, Canada, in early August 2008. A brief and comfortable train ride from the center of the city, one of North America's most cosmopolitan urban concentrations, delivers me to the stop where Ms. Maryan Omar Ali, Aryette, was waiting for me to visit with her. After a few minutes of looking for each other among a throng of people in the arrival area—I have not seen Maryan for more than 17 years—we greeted warmly and then left the station together for the very short bus ride to the large building where her residence is located. Maryan, despite the passage of so many years and some testing health-related experiences, looked buoyant, tranquil, and eager to show me around and then engage in a thorough conversation about her background, passion for Somali literary aesthetics and production, and developments in her life in recent years. We arrived at her compact and neat apartment. Her mother, Sahra Omer Goud, whose strong and kind voice I have heard over the telephone on numerous times, was at the door with a genuine welcoming smile. Once I entered, I could smell the appetizing aroma of the legendary Zeila cooking—perhaps the most sophisticated culinary tradition in all of the Somali-inhabited territories in the Horn of Africa. As is customary, we took off our shoes and walked into the living room. Before we sat, I requested to go to the bathroom to put on a comfortable macawis that I had brought with me for the occasion. We washed our hands and began to devour a tasty lunch of spiced and grilled wild-caught salmon, delicious rice cooked with cloves, cumin, and cardamom and flavored with a dash of raisins, followed by lots of fresh salad and fruits. Soon, Maryan and I were sitting opposite each other with the tiny but powerful recording machine between us. We were surrounded by numerous artistic artifacts, almost all Somali, and stacks of carefully labeled disks—a testimony to her well-established reputation, among those in-the-know, as a premier cartographer and archivist of types of Somali literary production. We agreed to divide the interview into three main parts: her background; her collection and knowledge of popular songs; and her courageous fight against an onslaught of breast cancer—an illness heretofore not publicly discussed by Somalis with the misfortune of contracting it.
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Canada, Somalia, and Toronto
15. 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
16. Response to Monson - 1
- Author:
- Miriam Larson
- Publication Date:
- 08-2008
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Macalester International
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- I am very pleased to have been invited to be part of this Roundtable and it has been a special pleasure to respond to the insights Professor Monson has offered about music and globalization. As a student of music and of critical race studies, I have encountered very little work that brings together these two fields so fluently. In particular, Professor Monson's critical analysis of Malian and African-American music suggests that music participants, including musicians, listeners, businesspeople, and so on, have the potential to change the inequalities that exist in our musical cultures. In my critical race studies courses, the application of critical theory to everyday practice is known as “praxis.” In other words, a frequent discussion question is how to apply critical analysis to everyday life in order to address the inequalities that exist in our world. Unlike many areas in academia, music departments are actively involved in teaching both analytical and technical aspects of musical performance. However, while the proximity of analysis and practice have the potential to form a critical praxis, music students are rarely challenged with reading material that integrates social critique with musical analysis as provocatively as Professor Monson does, and even less frequently are they encouraged to apply this analysis to their playing and performing.
- Political Geography:
- Africa and America
17. Ethiopian Ethnic Federalism and Regional Autonomy: The Somali Test
- Author:
- Abdi Ismail Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 07-2005
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- In the 1990s in Africa, two sharply contrasting models of state-society relations and the role of ethnicity in national affairs have emerged. The first is the unitary dispensation that rejects the ethnic classification of its citizens while cognizant of the ill effects of a race and ethnicbased apartheid order. The African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in South Africa opted for a strategy they thought would ensure the country's political and administrative restructuring but would not perpetuate sectarian ethnic identity at the expense of citizenship. Consequently, the post-apartheid regional administrative structure and boundaries are not based on ethnicity. Further, the populations in these regions elect their provincial councils, and have gained some degree of fiscal autonomy, although South Africa remains a unitary state. A key manifestation of the system's competitiveness is the fact that opposition parties have governed two of the wealthiest and most populous regions for most of the past decade and the ANC has been unable to dislodge them until the most recent election in 2004. Although the ANC won the most votes in Kwa Zulu–Natal and the Western Cape, it lacks a majority in these provincial councils to unilaterally form regional administrations. This openness of the political process has made possible a significant degree of regional autonomy in a unitary system.
- Political Geography:
- Africa, South Africa, and Somalia
18. For the Record: International Crisis Group Report on Somaliland: An Alternative Somali Response
- Author:
- Ahmed I. Samatar and Abdi Ismail Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 07-2005
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- The International Crisis Group's (ICG) most recent report on the Somali Republic deals with developments in the Northern region (Somaliland). It narrates what the informed knew all along: (a) that peace has been restored in most of the North for the past decade while the rest of the country, particularly Mogadishu and the southern third, are mired in violence; (b) that some semblance of constitutional order and administrative structure is in place; (c) that most of the public refused to accept naked force as a political instrument to deal with political problems; and (d) that corruption is pervasive among the political elite. Conceptually, the ICG report is divided into three parts. First, it provides a brief review of Somali political history. Second, it sketches the evolution of the region since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991 and the declaration of the region's breakaway status from the rest of the country. Finally, it focuses on three elections organized in the last three years, in order to buttress the claim that the region deserves to be recognized as a sovereign country. This information raises pivotal questions about the profile of the region as well as the fate of the Somali people. Together, these two points invite a timely, wide, and thoughtful debate among Somalis and others concerned. After serious cogitation upon the details of the document, we submit that the Report presents important points for the international community to come to the aid of the people of the region to consolidate their communal achievements—particularly in the areas of stability, economic advancement, and institution building. However, the Report fails to clinch the argument for international recognition of a new sovereign Somaliland state in the Horn of Africa. The rest of this critical assessment elucidates this proposition.
- Political Geography:
- Africa and Somalia
19. Somali Mental Health
- Author:
- David McGraw Schuchman and Colleen McDonald
- Publication Date:
- 07-2004
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- Over the past seven years, there has been a vast influx of Somali refugees and immigrants making their new home in Minnesota, with the overwhelming majority residing in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis and St. Paul. While official estimates indicate that less than 20,000 Somalis are in Minnesota, it is well accepted that there are actually 50,000–75,000. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact number due to limitations in census data collection and the continual growth resulting from such factors as secondary migration. Since Minnesota has welcomed African immigrants, family members who live in other states within the U.S. and Canada continue to join many newly arrived families. The prospect of Somali immigrants and refugees returning to their homelands is unlikely. Continuing war, civil strife, and economic crises make the outlook for return bleak. Therefore, it is important that Minnesota continue to embrace and welcome Somalis into the community and assist in their acculturation process.
- Political Geography:
- Africa, United States, and Canada