Sudanese Intellectuals In The Global Milieu

Sudanese Intellectuals in the Global Milieu: Capturing Cultural Capital propels Sudanese intellectuals into the global intellectual milieu and argues for their place in world intellectual history. The contributors posit that Sudan is currently in its most uncertain and perhaps most generative period, as the unrest, conflicts, and upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries threw Sudanese intellectuals and activists into identity, economic, environmental, religious, and existential crises. Despite these crises, the unrest has created a period of knowledge production and cultural production in Sudan. The contributors to the collection are Sudanese intellectuals who explore the history and evolution of knowledge production, thought, and cultural capital in Sudan.

This book starts from the premise that the study of "exceptionally normal" women and men - as conceived by microhistory - has radical implications for understanding history and politics, and applies this notion to Sudan. Against a historiography dominated by elite actors and international agents, it examines both how ordinary people have brought about the most important political shifts in the country's history (including the recent revolution in 2019) and how they have played a role in maintaining authoritarian regimes. It also explores how men and women have led their daily lives through a web of ordinary worries, desires and passions. The book includes contributions by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists who often have a dual commitment to Middle Eastern and African studies. While focusing on the complexity and nuances of Sudanese local lives in both the past and the present, it also connects Sudan and South Sudan with broader regional, global, and imperial trends. The book is divided into two volumes and six parts, ordered thematically. The first part tackles the entanglement between archives, social history, and power. The second focuses on women's agency in history and politics from the Funj era to the recent 2018-2019 revolution. Part 3 includes contributions on the history and global connections of the Sudanese armed forces. In the second volume, part 4 intersects the themes of urban life, leisure, and colonial attitudes with queerness. In part 5, labour identities, practices, and institutions are discussed both in urban milieus and against the background of war and expropriation in rural areas. Finally, part 6 studies the construction of social consent under various self-styled Islamic regimes, as well as the emergence of alternative imaginaries and acts of citizenship in times of political openness.

The book offers a history of the discourses and diplomacies of Sudan’s civil wars. It explores the battle for legitimacy between the Sudanese state and Southern rebels. In particular, it examines how racial thought and rhetoric were used in international debates about the political destiny of the South. By placing the state and rebels within the same frame, the book uncovers the competition for Sudan’s reputation. It reveals the discursive techniques both sides employed to elicit support from diverse audiences, amidst the intellectual ferment of Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and Black liberation politics. It maintains that the interplay of silences and articulations in both the rebels' and the state’s texts concealed and complicated aspects of the country’s political conflict. In sum, the book demonstrates that the war of words waged abroad represents a strategic, but often overlooked, aspect of the Sudanese civil wars.

Travel and the Pan African Imagination explores the African Atlantic world as a productive theater or space where modernity, racialized dominance, and racialized resistance took form. The book stresses the importance of placing three Atlantic figures—the Charleston, South Carolina-based armed resistance leader Denmark Vesey; the West African emigration advocate Edward Wilmot Blyden; and the Christian missionary and teacher in Liberia as well as the United States, Alexander Crummell—within an Atlantic context and as African world community figures between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book also examines the religious origins of Black Power ideology and modern Pan Africanism as products of the intense dialogue within the African world community about concepts of modernity, progress, and civilization. Tracy Keith Flemming identifies how travel and social mobility led to the generation of an ever more complex and dynamic Atlantic world and of a fluid and adaptive African world community imagination for those figures who were forced to operate within and against a racially framed universe. The vexing social position and symbolic figure of “the African” was central to the dilemmas facing the racialized imagination of African world community figures and the discipline of Africology.

In The Trial of Hissein Habré: The International Crimes of a Former Head of State, Emmanuel Guematcha recounts the trial of Hissein Habré, the former head of state of Chad. Accused of committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, and torture while ruling Chad between 1982 and 1990, Hissein Habré was tried in Dakar, Senegal, by the Extraordinary African Chambers. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2016 and the sentence was confirmed in 2017. . In a narrative style, Guematcha examines the process that led to this achievement in Africa, including the failed attempts to try Hissein Habré in the Senegalese, Chadian, and Belgian courts. Guematcha discusses the mobilization of victims and the involvement of nongovernmental and international organizations. He describes the particularities of the Extraordinary African Chambers, analyzes the establishment of Hissein Habré’s criminal responsibility, and presents the trial through the testimonies of several victims, witnesses, and experts. These testimonies shed light on what it means for individuals to be subjected to international crimes. The author also questions the impact and significance of the trial in Africa and beyond.

Religion, Gender, and Wellbeing in Africa argues that, in many African societies, ideas and practices of wellbeing and gender relations continue to be informed and shaped by religious epistemologies. The contributors affirm that for many Africans, it is through religio-spiritual frameworks that daily experiences, interactions, and gender relations are understood and interpreted. However, for many African women, religions have functioned as a double-edged-sword. Although they have contributed to the struggle against issues such as colonialism, gender justice, climate justice, and human rights, they have also endorsed and perpetuated sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, and the denial of human rights for a wide variety of people on the margins. The chapters within this collection demonstrate that most religions and religious formations in Africa have not yet positioned themselves as forces for wellbeing, gender justice, and security for African women and children. The contributors challenge simplistic and superficial readings and interpretations of religio-spirituality in Africa and call for deeper engagements of the interplay between Africa’s religio-spiritual realities and the wellbeing of women, particularly around issues of gender justice, reproductive health, and human rights.

Kakaamotobe, meaning to scare, is known across southern Ghana, West Africa, as Fancy Dress performance. Masqueraders dress in colorful costumes and wear fancy and fierce masks; they dance energetically to drums or brass band music through the main streets of town during holidays, especially during Christmastime. Competitions held in two towns are intense annual events. This lively secular masquerade is a carnival form that has been practiced for well over a century primarily by coastal Fante people, and many additional ethnicities participate today. Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana explores the fascinating history, aesthetics, performance, and underlying messages of this masquerade with ties to other carnivalesque practices in the Black Atlantic. While Fancy Dress may engage with global cultures through some of its aesthetics, the practice is profoundly African. The utilization of elaborate costumes, masks, and brass bands expresses not a desire to imitate outside cultures, but rather the impulse of youth to adapt traditional culture to the contemporary environment. Courtnay Micots argues that the outward impression of folly belies the more serious refashioning of power, identity, and modernity in the community.

Ama Mazama: The Ogunic Presence in Africology is a critical analysis of the ideas of Ama Mazama, a prominent and leading female theorist in Africology and African American Studies. Molefe Asante studies the creative and productive power of Mazama’s intellectual work as it emerges from the personal wrestling with spiritual elements of consciousness as well as Mazama’s attention to ancestral and perhaps epigenetic relationships to African spirituality in the making of theory and practice. Painting a picture of an activist intellectual concerned as much with mental as well as spiritual liberation, Asante demonstrates how and why Ama Mazama has evolved into one of the most popular Africologists in the field.