Gaurav Desai

Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library

Subject to Colonialism provides a much needed revisionist perspective on the way twentieth-century Africa is viewed and analyzed among scholars. Employing literary, historical, and anthropological techniques, Gaurav Desai attempts to generate a new understanding of issues that permeate discussions of Africa by disrupting the centrality of postcolonial texts and focusing instead on the cultural and intellectual production of colonial Africans. In particular, Desai calls for a reevaluation of the “colonial library”—that set of representations and texts that have collectively “invented” Africa as a locus of difference and alterity. Presenting colonialism not as a singular, monolithic structure but rather as a practice frought with contradictions and tensions, Desai works to historicize the foundation of postcolonialism by decentering both canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire, and nation. To achieve this, he focuses on texts that construct or reform—rather than merely reflect—colonialism, placing explicit emphasis on processes, performances, and the practices of everyday life. Reading these texts not merely for the content of their assertions but also for how they were created and received, Desai looks at works such as Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnography of the Gikuyu and Akiga Sai’s history of the Tiv and makes a particular plea for the canonical recuperation of African women’s writing. Scholars in African history, literature, and philosophy, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, and anthropology will welcome publication of this book.

Commerce with the universe : Africa, India, and the Afrasian imagination

1. Ocean and Narration2. Old World Orders: Amitav Ghosh and the Writing of Nostalgia3. Post-Manichaean Aesthetics: Asian Texts and Lives4. Through Indian Eyes: Travel and the Performance of Ethnicity5. Commerce as Romance: Mehta, Madhvani, Manji6. Lighting a Candle on Mount Kilimanjaro: Partnering with Nyerere7. Anti Anti-Asianism and the Politics of Dissent: M. G. Vassanjis The Gunny SackCoda : Entangled LivesNotesSelected ReferencesIndex

Theater as Praxis: Discursive Strategies in African Popular Theater

Although over the last decade there has been a considerable growth in African theater research, the majority of such work has confined itself to the analysis of traditional theater practices or to that of contemporary literary theater. While acknowledging the functional dimensions of African theater, this research has focused on the aesthetics of African performance. When the social dimensions of theater have been evoked, they have been asserted mainly in terms of the propositional value of theatrical content. Playscripts have been analyzed for propositional claims and thematic concerns, and social critiques have then been constructed on such analyses. This essay presents an analysis distinct from that critical trend. It examines neither traditional theatrical practices nor contemporary literary theater but rather an ambiguous theatrical practice that can be labeled popular theater . The first section of the paper discusses the concept of the popular and suggests that it is best understood as a functional discourse which can legitimate or subvert the existing power structures of society. The second section focuses on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator whose work provides the theoretical basis for most popular theater projects in Africa. The essay then analyzes the discursive construction of popular theater in various African contexts including Botswana, Zambia, and Nigeria. Through the history of popular theater in Africa, the paper shows the growth of popular theater theory. The last section, on the Kamiriithu production of Ngaahika Ndeenda , illustrates some of these theoretical claims.

BETWEEN INDIGENEITY AND DIASPORA

This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author – one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign – the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.

Gandhi’s printing press: experiments in slow reading

From the author of the highly acclaimed The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Princeton University Press, 2003), we now have a new work that is equally compelling. A slimmer volume than the one that preceded it, Gandhi’s Printing Press embodies the many Gandhian values that it seeks to elaborate. Concerned with the production and circulation of ‘minor’ and more ‘populist’ texts such as newspapers and pamphlets rather than full-length books, Hofmeyr’s text will, I suspect, withstand the test of time and not suffer the transient fate of many of its objects of analysis. Furthermore, the lessons that the book has to offer will make waves in waters beyond those of the Indian Ocean. Summary, Hofmeyr tells us, was a key component of the publishing agenda of the weekly Indian Opinion, a not-quite newspaper founded by Mohandas Gandhi in 1903. ‘Energy should be devoted to the art of condensation,’ Gandhi instructed his editorial staff, so that in the attempt to reduce the size of the paper for financial reasons, important content should not be sacrificed (69). Condensing Hofmeyr’s attention to minutiae and detail is an impossible task, but in broad terms one could describe the book as presenting, on the one hand, a history of textual publication and circulation in the Indian Ocean world of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and on the other, an account of the emergence of a Gandhian theory of reading and writing and its integral role in the concept of satyagraha. The introductory chapter highlights the key indices of the chapters that follow. These include the

Introduction: Katrina, Ten Years Later

Published almost a decade after one of the most devastating disasters in US history, this cluster of essays on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reflects on the hurricane, the measures that could have been taken to prevent the massive devastation caused by it, and the immediate and long-term responses by the government, private industry, and civil society. How has Katrina left a permanent mark not only on the Gulf South but also on our larger national imaginary? What lessons, if any, have we learned, and what actions and policies have we adopted to better mitigate against future disasters? Haunting though the images may be, the flooded homes and emergency rescues from rooftops were not the only impact Katrina had — it altered fundamental social contracts in cities such as New Orleans, from public education to public housing. It also awakened a new activism focused on issues ranging from calls for better levee protection to addressing the loss of wetlands in coastal communities. Stephen A. Nelson, a geoscientist at Tulane University in New Orleans, starts off the discussion by providing correctives to five pervasive myths about Katrina: that the levees were breached the day after Katrina hit the city (they were breached on the same day), that it was the river that flooded the city (the river levees remained intact), that the corruption of the local levee boards was responsible for the negligence of the levees (it was an engineering failure on the part of the US Army Corps of Engineers), that Katrina was a storm so large that it could not possibly have been planned for (the storm was within the calculations of the levee system, with a force below what the levees had allegedly been designed to protect), and that the city was doomed to begin with since it was below sea level (some but not all parts of the city are below sea level). Nelson’s point in the essay and in the many voluntary tours that he leads for students and visitors to the city is not just to debunk these myths but to also ask why they are so pervasive. One reason, he suggests, was the power of the early media reports that remain in collective memory even after they were challenged, revised, or repudiated.