Emory University> African Studies > Graduate Studies

Institute of African Studies | Emory University | 1385 Oxford Road | Atlanta, GA 30322

Irene D'Almeida
Dissertation: “The Making of an African Literary-Critical Tradition.” (PhD, 1987, ILA)
First Position: Associate Professor, French ,University of Arizona
Email: dalmeida@u.arizona.edu

Pamela Franco
Dissertation: “Masquerade, Performance and Gender Politics in Trinidad Carnival” (PhD, 2001, Art History)
First Position: Assistant Professor, Art History,,Tulane Univeristy
Email: pfranco@tulane.edu

Franco’s Dissertation Abstract

“Masquerade, Performance and Gender Politics in Trinidad Carnival”

This dissertation is a historical examination of Afro-creole women's masquerade style in nineteenth-century Trinidad Carnival. In the extant Carnival literature, certain Afro-creole male portrayals, specifically those who engage in verbal and/or choreographic performances, are constitutive of the authentic in mas'. As a result, female maskers, who generally do not engage in such performances, are marginalized and positioned as inauthentic. This examination of nineteenth-century Afro-creole female maskers is an attempt to recoup an early history of the women's Carnival portrayals, and to determine why they did not engage in the oral and choreographic styles. The initial results reveal that nineteenth-century Afro-creole women's performance is centered in (un)dress. They loved to dress up, a strategy that enhanced their appearance and provided them with some visibility in the public arena. They also manipulated dress, and undress, to "voice"their opinions and concerns. In this way, the women were able to create meaning in their Carnival portrayals. In sum, nineteenth-century Afro-creole female maskers may have opted to forego orality and stylized choreography because (un)dress, over which they exerted some control, enabled them to create their own "voice"and mode of articulation.

“A Historical Ethnography of Civil Society in Mali”

Since 1991 the Malian state has conducted one of the more earnest democratic decentralization processes on the African continent, a process with three goals: a) liberalization of the economy, b) democratization, and c) decentralization. This study investigated the extent to which Mali might be a model of democratization for Africa and the extent to which the Malian case replicates patrimonial elite structures of power and inequality. The study reveals that democratic decentralization in one rural zone of Mali has minimal impacts on three outcomes central to most rationales for democratization: 1. greater participation and influence of the marginalized in decision-making; 2.greater accountability of officials; and 3.greater equality among citizens. Evidence suggests that programs reinforce and deepen inequality and exclusion of some social groups in some cases. The study's most important contribution, however, is in its analysis of the web of determination that influences these outcomes. Those are: 1.Mande notions of power that conflict with neoliberal, democratic norms; 2.strategies at least two centuries old by which Pondori elites insulate villages from states or state-like regimes; 3.general and widespread acceptance by Pondori residents of the norms of participation and forms of accountability entailed by 1-2 above; 4.the absence of important, consensus-based leaders from formal roles in electoral and civil society arenas; 5.development actors who underestimate the sophistication and historical depth of factors 1-3 above for residents; 6.development actors who are unable to incorporate into their programs the historical, constitutive role they themselves have played in 1-5 above; and 7.factors 1-6 are effects of antipolitics (Ferguson 1994) that underpin global development discourses. The unevenness of Malian democratization's impact on increasing the influence of the marginalized, heightening accountability of officials, and ensuring equality among citizens, springs from these seven factors. The patchiness of success is, however, the result of a tacit collaboration between local elites, developers, and the state. The study argues that this outcome is not a result of "failure" of democratization strategies but their success. Success reinforces and deepens structural inequality and marginalization and perpetuates two parallel systems of political power: modern democratic, on the one hand, and Mande consensus based on the other.

“Negotiating Illness and Misfortune in Post-Socialist Tanzania: An Ethnographic Study in Temeke District, Dar Es Salaam”

In 1991, Tanzania formally abandoned its commitment to a socialist health policy and undertook measures to privatize the country's health sector. Entrepreneurs were encouraged to set up "for-profit" health facilities and government physicians were given the right to legally treat private patients after hours. The government also discontinued the provision of free health care and patients were required to pay user fees at public health facilities. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, this study documents the lived experience of marginalized people who are caught in a process of rapid social transformation engendered through market reforms. It examines what privatization of health care has meant for marginalized people at a time of mounting financial burdens, uncertainty, and increasing prospects of being afflicted by life-threatening diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. The study addresses three key questions: (1) Has privatization of the health sector resulted in a tendency among the poor to avoid/delay seeking medical treatment for their illnesses and remain sick for longer periods of time? (2) Do the poor people resort to alternative forms of therapy such as consulting a traditional healer, and engage in self-medication with drugs bought over-the-counter, presumably because these options are less expensive than biomedical treatment? and (3) Are people in Tanzania becoming "individualized" in their treatment seeking behavior by relying more on themselves than on a "therapy management group" i.e., family members, friends and neighbors, in negotiating possible treatment options? In using a combination of ethnographic methods, and relying mainly on illness narratives, the study highlights the cultural meanings of local illnesses, the contingent circumstances and structural and social relational factors that account for variations in patterns of therapy seeking. By narrowing down the analytic focus on the dynamics of health care decision making specifically in regard to childhood febrile illness, the study grapples with some thorny issues associated with cost recovery measures and their impact on treatment delays and child survival. Finally, the study explores the practical logic guiding lay peoples' negotiation and manipulation of the health system toward felt needs in a period of rapid social transformation.

“Shaping the future, wearing the past: Dress and the decorated female body among the Afran Qallo Oromo in eastern Hararghe, Ethiopia”

Oromo women live as traders, wood carriers, shepherds, and farmers in and around the ancient trade center of Harar in Hararghe Province, Ethiopia. They have lived with the uncertainties of drought, famine, war, and political unrest for several generations and experienced poverty, disease, and severe restrictions in personal freedom. These same women, both young and old, adorn themselves with an array of body modifications and supplements. This study seeks to understand why these women decorate their bodies in particular ways and why they invest so much time and effort in doing so. These questions will be addressed first by tracing the historical development of dress from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, then through an investigation of the changes brought about in the Oromo social system during this period, and finally by a closer examination of the objects activated on the body in particular contexts. This narrative of dress will uncover further ideas about the decorated body as an aesthetic and symbolic system as it relates to the construction of history, identity, and aesthetics. In order to locate the form, function, and meaning of dress and the decorated body in history and cultural practice, this thesis is divided into two parts. The first half examines the history in which formal and symbolic choices have been made in coiffure, jewelry, clothing, and skin markings. In particular, this section explores Oromo dress in relation to trade, the introduction to Islam, the disintegration of traditional Oromo institutions, and the political changes brought about by the incorporation of Harar into the Ethiopian Empire. The second half of this dissertation focuses on the use of dress and the decorated body as a means of examining Oromo social discourse. Here the body serves as a framing device to further explore the socially marked stages that occur in a woman's life as she moves from childhood through old age. In both the broad, historical overview and the more specific, body-centered investigation of dress, several diametrically opposed tensions resurface in the meanings of various body art practices. These include concealing versus revealing, repelling versus attracting, beautifying versus disfiguring, and tying versus cutting. It is my intention that these ideas function as conceptual threads that bind the two analytical approaches in writing together.

“Stealing the Neighbor's Chicken: Social Control in Northern Mozambique”

This dissertation adopts the concept of social control as an analytic framework in examining how the rural Makua have configured core components of their social system after a disruptive civil war (1984, 1992). Defining social control as those parts of the social system (beliefs, practices, and institutions) that are most actively involved in the maintenance of norms and regulation of conflict, the dissertation research revealed that three distinct fields of social control are particularly prevalent among the rural Makua: (1) local-level political structures; (2) beliefs and practices related to ancestral spirits minepa and sorcery enretthe; (3) a central concern with the reputational damages and experience of shame ehaya that may accompany moral transgressions. Chapter four reveals how the Makua's discussions of ancestral spirits minepa and sorcery enretthe often indicate that these beliefs and practices represent strong informal social sanctions on criminality and moral transgressions. Local theories about health and social fortune presume that death, sickness, and social misfortune are directly caused by malicious sorcery attacks. Thus, the dissertation argues that ideas about sorcery often constitute a preemptive informal version of social control (i.e., a deterrent) as individuals refrain from a variety of moral transgressions that might invite such a lethal response. Chapter five and six argue that the rural Makua tend to live in small-scale societies with qualitatively different dynamics for informational control over people's identities than large-scale societies. These chapters systematically explore the Makua's ideas about various stigmatized identities and their conceptions of shame ehaya as an emotional sanction linked to this central concern with reputation. Chapter seven and eight illustrate how the local-level political structures, including the headmen humo of matrilineal descent groups nloko and the centralized village authorities regulos, cabos, and secret rios, are involved in the handling of different phases and types of community disputes. Chapter eight contends that the rural Makua are currently reconciling the historical opposition between the traditional; leaders regulos, cabos, and humos, who derive their position from a matrilineal principle of descent, and the substitute class of local-level state bureaucrats.

“'Long ago we were still walking when we died': Disability, aging and the moral imagination in southeastern Botswana”

This dissertation explores the progress of a hidden epidemic of disability and the effects of an aging population in Botswana over the course of the twentieth century. I describe the epidemic as "quiet"or "hidden"because most disability in Botswana is out of public view. Despite this quiet character, however, an estimated one in six rural households is home to a disabled family member. What remains invisible as a collective problem is quite visible to many Batswana as they move within their networks of friends and relatives. The high incidence of disability has arisen out of and occurred within a changing historical context. Though there have always been disabled Batswana. In the 1930s as men began migrating to work on the South African mines, many returned home debilitated by industrial accidents and tuberculosis. Improved nutrition and the spread of bio-medical services, since the 1960s, enabled increasing numbers of people to survive disabling illness or trauma and many more to experience the frailties of age. Beginning in the 1980s, an alarming number of road accidents began damaging limbs and spines, further adding to the epidemic. Starting in the wake of World War II, however, safety nets which historically protected the aged, the sick, and the disabled from destitution began rapidly reconfiguring, while able-bodiedness took on new significance as people became increasingly dependent on wage labor. Many Batswana refer to this growing incidence of disability, its origins and shifting meanings when making moral commentary on historical change. This dissertation explores why this is so, arguing that misfortune and suffering are key themes in popular Tswana historical analysis. Batswana commonly discuss major historical transformations: colonization, independence, regional industrialization, and post-colonial development, through an examination of the shifting moral underpinnings of society. Thus, the story of this epidemic tells us not only about situations which affected large numbers of people, but also offers a window into local experiential dimensions of broader historical change.

“Crossroads of Culture: Religion, Therapy, and Personhood in Northern Malawi”

At the end of the nineteenth century, Presbyterian missionaries from the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia Mission began a project to spread Christianity, commerce, and "civilization"in the regions to the north and west of Lake Nyasa, in southeast Africa. In the process, the heterogenous residents of the region, including Tumbuka-speakers, Ngonis, and a mix of other peoples, were confronted with a powerful new player on the local scene, and the past century-plus has in part been a history of accommodation, innovation, and resistance to the Mission's transformative agenda. Within the broader purview of the Livingstonia Mission's project was a focused effort to transform local religious and therapeutic practices. Most Livingstonia missionaries argued for a fundamental incompatibility between their own religion and medicine and those characteristic of the region. In constructing such an oppositional model, Livingstonia missionaries sought to replace local practices of ancestral spiritualism and therapeutic divination with the institutional forms of Christianity and biomedicine. This substitutive logic was promulgated in their teaching and preaching, as well as enforced through both disciplinary and employment mechanisms. Combining history, ethnography, and theories derived from cultural psychology, this thesis explores the ways wherein Tumbuka-speaking residents in one locality in northwestern Malawi, Embangweni, have responded to this missionary substitutive logic. In particular, I elaborate some of the imaginative ways residents have resisted the missionary oppositional model and instead constructed new models that combine, synthesize, and correlate facets of Christianity and biomedicine with ancestral spiritualism and divination. En route, I also examine the syncretic process itself, and explore the use of analogic reasoning within aesthetics, ethics, and ritual symbolism, to subvert and overcome the effort to construct a model of incommensurability between Western and vernacular religio-therapeutic systems. In the process, I suggest that some of Embangweni's residents have done more than simply resist the missionary oppositional model, but have also challenged a deeper, underlying dualism within the Western ontological framework itself.

“Unmasking the State: Developing Modern Political Subjectivities in 20th Century Guinea”

This dissertation uses the 1961-63 Demystification Program of the Guinean socialist government as the focal point for a historical ethnography of a West African postcolonial state. The Demystification Program aimed at eradicating the indigenous religion and accompanying masquerades of Guinean ethnic minorities, including Loma speakers, the subjects of the study. Drawing on both the regional idiom of Muslim conversion and the developmentalist idiom of Marxism, the Guinean state claimed that Demystificatory iconoclasm was a necessary step in the transformation of former colonial subjects into modern national citizens. With the Demystification Program as prism, the dissertation does the ethnography of one state elliptically, from the point of view of the "mystified" Loma people living on its geographical and cultural margins. It shows how struggles within the dominant ethnic and political blocs of the nation had unintended consequences in the margins. It also shows how the dramaturgy of Guinean state power was enacted in out-of-the-way places not only to bring their inhabitants into line with the dominant culture, but also to serve an exemplary function. The imputed savagery of Loma practices thus became an indispensable foil to the self-presentation of the Guinean nation. The dissertation's first six chapters present the building blocks necessary to understand the enactment and attendant violence of Demystification in the Loma-speaking region. They analyze the regional sociology of warfare and its links to intergenerational conflict; Loma conceptions of personhood and power; clanship and interethnic fluidity; politics of autochthony and sacrifice; and the multiplex relations between Mothers' Brothers and Sisters' Sons. The last four chapters show how these elements combined within the context of the state to catalyze the emergence of new forms of ethnic and national identity. They describe the political uses of history; introduction of notions of ethnicized territory in the context of changing land tenure laws; the relations between the Demystification Program and intergenerational conflict; and a flirtation with genocidal violence in the context of the regional (Liberian/Sierra Leonean/Guinean) war. The dissertation shows how Loma speakers came to think of themselves as "a people" largely as the result of the denigrations (including Demystification) they had experienced at the hands of the state. However, the same project of national subject-formation of which these denigrations were a part had acted on them in ways that made them identify as Guinean national citizens as well as Guinea's exemplary Others.

“White Lies"and Black Mythopoeia: The Politics of Memory and Representations of Africa in Contemporary Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures”

The impulse to refute the racial prejudices underlying Eurocentric presuppositions about Africa has generated diverse theoretical formulations of "the idea of Africa" Centered on Francophone sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and combining literary and philosophical texts, this dissertation analyzes some of these formulations while underscoring the limitations specific to each of them. To explore the appeal to "Africa" as a sign that has authorized the articulation of discourses of self-representation, it looks at ideologically dissimilar but interrelated modes of imagining Africa. The study starts with Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History to analyze the Eurocentric and logocentric thought that shoves Africa outside the realm of history while, at the same time, setting up theoretical paradigms that foreground racial difference. Focusing on the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris, it then examines critical responses attempting to refute the Eurocentric racial biases. These refutations tend to operate through an imagining of Africa that binds racial difference to a history of victimization while engaging in a symbolic construction of a comprehensive black world. Aim Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal provides a framework for analyzing such a construction. The study then uses Maryse Cone's Heremakhonon and Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane to investigate the challenges posed by the rhetoric of sameness running through the formulation of the relationships between Africa and its diaspora, as conducted by Cesaire. This urge to envisage Africa as an embattled notion is further explored by Daniel Biyaoula's novel, L'impasse. Even though Biyaoula seems to intimate he seems to place it into an Afropessimistic abyss. Conde Warner-Vieyra, and Biyaoula all suggest critical modes of reading "Africa" that challenge racial binarism. Yet they hardly move beyond the negativism and hopelessness that have often characterized reflections on Africa. The anchor point of the dissertation is that these reflections must rise beyond a simplistic rhetoric of difference, which deploys a rhetoric of binarism and a Self/Other paradigm. They should also avoid being entrapped in a negativistic discourse. The study thus concludes by calling forth the necessity of imagining Africa as a site of open-ended options, which does not capitalize on difference, but takes account of the ambiguity of the "sign"as one that rather defines a flexible field of critical potentialities which resist rigid confinements

“Nigerian Art in the Independence Decade, 1957-1967.”

This dissertation examines the emergence of Nigerian artistic modernism during the decade of political independence, between 1957 and 1967. By focusing on the work of a generation of artists, particularly a group of young artists whose careers began while students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, I argue that in proposing the idea of Natural Synthesis, these artists inaugurated a uniquely Nigerian modernism. In doing this, they were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism initiated by early black nationalists, and later by apostles of Negritude and Pan-Africanism. I show that although these artists built on the achievements of their modern predecessors in Nigeria, their work was radically different. Working under the premise of Natural Synthesis, they developed work that rigorously explored the formal potentialities of specific indigenous art forms and design principles. The results, I argue, are works of art that show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. In mapping the emergence of this new work during the period of national independence, I demonstrate how political sovereignty, in the hands of young Nigerian artists, translated into an artistic modernism freed from the thralldom of western stylistic modes. Finally, I argue that although this new work is unprecedented in Nigeria, it is a local manifestation of an international phenomenon, described variously as alternative or parallel modernism, associated with formerly colonized nations.

“On Being a Person in Manenberg: Community, Gender and Personhood in South African Coloured Township”

This ethnography explores the meanings of personhood and agency in Maneneberg, a township located on the Cape Flats, in Cape Town South Africa. The township was a site of relocation for people who were classified coloured during the apartheid era and who were forcibly removed from newly declared white areas in the city in the 1960s. I argue that despite the old apartheid state's attempts to reify the meaning of colouredness through racial legislation, the residents of Manenberg created their own meanings of personhood, agency and community within the bureaucratic, social and economic interstices of the apartheid system. Yet at the same time they also reinstated the very structural processes at the heart of their racial and gendered subjugation. I indicate how the cohesiveness of the Rio Street community in Manenberg, the survival of its residents and their validation as respectable mothers, tough men and good daughters hinged on and effloresced from a moral economy that articulated with the structural location of coloured women in the apartheid economy and racial bureaucracy. I draw upon the writings of Fortes (1969), Giddens (1984) and Karp (1995) to elaborate upon the concept personhood in Manenberg. I show how the local understandings of personhood provide residents with agency, whilst connecting the latter to township history and apartheid social structure, thereby illustrating its limits. The concept personhood captures the duality of existence of Manenberg residents and maps out their negotiation and contestation about personhood and agency. I use Hobart (1990) and Kratz (2000) to indicate that agency in Manenberg is complex and is situationally determined. Finally I utilise the theoretical insights of Donham (1999) to indicate that Manenberg's social, economic and historical location in the South African context allows for several notions of personhood to prevail in the township. These notions are grounded in the multiple, interconnected, hierarchically ordered, competing cultural and economic systems of production at the local, national and global levels. This complex location of Manenberg residents generates multiple constructs of inequality, power and agency that impinge upon each other and that are reflected in the contestations about personhood in diverse township spaces.

“Imaging Art, Making History: Two Generations of Makerere Artists”

In this dissertation, I examine the history of art production and training at the Margaret Trowell School of Fine and Industrial Arts of Uganda's Makerere University. Focusing on the careers of two generations of artists trained at this School between the 1930's and 1990's, I take a two-fold approach. First, while tracing the history of the School through the changing scenarios of colonial and post-colonial periods, I pay special attention to the numerous ways artists from both generations exploit existing indigenous objects, materials, images, ideas, and social memories in their representations to make artistic statements. I examine how these appropriated elements transform as symbols, from one context to another, until many of them become remote from their traditional origins, acquire a new identity, and become integral with the process and enterprise of art-making. Second, I show that the academic legacy of the School plays a crucial role in this artistic process, providing a link among the numerous individual artistic endeavors to connect them into one historical continuum. I argue that though this demonstrates the making of an art history under local conditions, it ultimately claims a global identity for these artists.

“Having People: Fertility, Family and Modernity in Igbo-Speaking Nigeria”

In the popular Nigerian imagination, as well as in anthropological literature, the Igbo people are renowned for their receptivity to change. In contemporary Nigeria, Igbo people aspire to strikingly modern lives; they want education for their children, development for their communities, and consumer commodities for themselves and their families. In this context, one might expect that they would be a vanguard in Africa's fertility transition. Yet Igbo people continue to value large numbers of children. Especially among younger people, the idea of family planning has taken hold. But to Igbos, a planned family means having four or five children. The Igbo case challenges conventional assumptions in demography that becoming modern inevitably involves dramatic reductions in fertility preferences. To understand the continued importance of high fertility in contemporary Nigeria, this dissertation examines the relationships between family, fertility, and modernity. Ideas and practices related to fertility provide a thread by which to weave together a larger ethnographic project. The chapters explore: (1) the social context in which having people is so important for achieving modernity; in Nigeria; (2) the effects of transformations related to modernity; on the sexual and reproductive relationships of Igbo men and women; and (3) the ways in which internationally funded family planning projects are subverted and appropriated by Igbo actors to suit local priorities. Observing the lives of people in one Igbo community, and following the networks of kinship that they depended upon, produced the dissertation's three most important conclusions: (1) that fertility decision-making in Igboland cannot be understood as individual or even dyadic, because a much wider spectrum of voices and interests have a say and must be considered in the social reproduction of families; (2) that it is precisely by "having people"--especially kinspeople--that Igbos are able to get access to modernity and (3) that it is mostly in order to help, oblige and gain the recognition of their people that Igbos want to be modern. By exploring "modernity"; through the prism of one Igbo locality, the dissertation attempts to answer, for the Igbo, the question: "How many children does it take to be modern?"

“Art, Politics and Patronage: A History of Three Southern African Workshops for San/'Bushman' Artists (1990-2003)”

This dissertation examines the history of art created in three workshops for informally trained San or Bushmen artists from 1990 to 2003. They are the Kuru Art Project in D'Kar, Botswana, the !Xun and Khwe Art Project at Schmidtsdrift and Platfontein, South Africa, and the informal project at Witdraai, also in South Africa. I examine the relationship between contexts of mediation, brokerage, and patronage related to tourism and First Nation politics and their effects on the production of art. Two distinct phases of art production were noted at D'Kar and Schmidtsdrift. A period of intense experimentation generated works with no ties to First Nation and tourism discourse. Subsequently, heterogeneous styles and content were synthesized into a shared repertoire of folkloric subject matter and a naïve picturesque style. At D'Kar this process relates to the politically driven heritage-making Cultural Project, where global First Nation discourse was localized. However, the shift to a folkloric group style within the !Xun and Khwe Art Project reflects a very different set of influencing factors. Here the art and tourist market shaped art production, rather than First Nation politics. But at Witdraai artists bypassed the period of experimentation because they could transform a pre-existing pictorial style generated for tourists to represent First Nation identity. Each of these case studies illustrates that the same types of images and styles are produced for tourism and politics, but communicate different values depending upon the context in which they are placed. The dissertation then examines brokerage in contexts of mediation: exhibitions, commercial sales catalogues and "tourist theater."I examine how the display of artworks generated during the initial period of experimentation disrupted the mediating narratives generated in several international and regional art exhibitions where the interests of multiculturalism and First Nation discourse intersected to produce otherwise stereotypical representations of San or Bushmen culture. I also contrast the primitivist frameworks generated in commercial sales catalogues designed to move these novel art forms onto the art market with those created by San tourist workers who mediate art in the context of "tourist theater"to reflect hybrid self-representations.

“The Fate of an African Revolutionary Curriculum: Forest Youth and the Cultural Production of Guinean Nationalism”

"The Fate of an African Revolutionary Curriculum" explores shifts in political and artistic portrayals of Guinean youth over colonial and postcolonial periods, and differently situated youths' responses to institutional reforms aimed at changing their lives. The imaginative, literary qualities of official and unofficial formulations of youth development are stressed throughout the dissertation. Its critical discussions of different late colonial (1950-1958), revolutionary (1958-1984), and postrevolutionary (1984-present) moments pivot around juxtapositions of treatments of youth in documents ranging from official political tracts, state and popular newspapers, and education journals to novels, short stories, poems, plays, films, photographs, personal histories, and written questionnaires. The particular complexity of conflicts over youth and diverse experiences of revolutionary nation building in Guinea's remote southeastern forest region constitute the primary focus of the latter chapters. The dissertation begins (chapters 1 and 2) by juxtaposing colonial and early postcolonial (revolutionary) representations of ideal African youth, foregrounding differences in colonial and nationalist assessments of the potentialities of rural spaces and rural youth for territorial/national development, as well as a radical shift in framings of the types of contributions urban elite youth should make to society. Chapters 3 and 4 study official critical discourses on specific pedagogical domains. Examining documents from the colonial period through the 1970s, they explore unstable official evaluations and reforms of schooling and "militant theater" as the two institutional fields most critical for bringing diversely situated youths into line with the moral and material requirements of revolutionary nation building. Chapters 5-7 address the remote southeastern forest region's career as embarrassment and threat to official invocations of national unity. Chapter 5 depicts the region's ecological, religious, and sociocultural distinctiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the country, and explores the causes, stakes, and ramifications of a brutally iconoclastic "demystification campaign" (1959-1962). The regional importance of "demystification" as event and ideology also shapes the focal discussions of chapters 6 and 7, which feature contemporary forestier histories of participation in domains of reformed schooling and militant theater. Changes in constructions of ideal youth and pedagogical process since the death of President Sekou Touré and the demise of the revolutionary regime in 1984 constitute the focus of the dissertation's final chapters (8 and 9). The study of post-1984 Guinea foregrounds tensions between immediate postrevolutionary/postsocialist calls for cosmopolitan openness and more recent official and popular nationalisms focused against politico-cultural influences borne largely, though not exclusively, by Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugees, who have circulated in greatest numbers within Guinea's forest region. "The Fate of an African Revolutionary Curriculum" challenges some of the core historical premises and analytical frameworks that have driven recent Africanist research on political and cultural processes within postcolonial states. It productively counters current scholarship's tendency to flatten variations in African political and cultural processes over time-a tendency that threatens to impoverish twenty-first century historiographies of modern Africa and distort critical approaches to its current myriad problems and possibilities.

“The Tropicalization of the Anglo-Caribbean: The Picturesque and the Asethetics and Politics of Space in Jamaica and the Bahamas.”

In the late 19th century, colonial governments in Jamaica and the Bahamas made their first concerted efforts to start tourism industries on both British colonies. This dissertation examines the "picturesque photographs" as they were called, which tourism promoters used in international lantern lectures, photography exhibitions, picture books, and postcards to reinvent the islands as landscapes of touristic desire at that time. I explore how these representations encouraged tourist travel and informed certain ways of seeing and representing the islands. I argue that what tourism promoters often identified as picturesque were parts of the landscape that most readily exhibited ideals of a tropical landscape; they contained recognizable tropical plants, organized into tamed, orderly, and garden-like displays. The very forms of tropical vegetation, however, which became popularized as characteristic of the islands in photographs (most famously, banana and palm trees) were those transplanted into the islands' landscapes by various colonial regimes and planters. Many representations also featured transplanted picturesque natives; black (and Indian) inhabitants who seemed loyal, disciplined, and clean British colonial subjects. These picturesque photographs of the tropical landscape did more than create an ideal of the islands in the realm of visual representation; some parts of the island were actually recreated or "tropicalized"; in the image of these representations. Hotel landscapes, in particular, became spaces where ideals of the picturesque tropical landscape were recreated in miniature. By examining this process of tropicalization, I investigate colonial representations as they relate to and materially shaped the specific geographical spaces they pictured, unlike many postcolonial studies of the colonial discourses and imagery in the past. I also examine how the picturesque ideal of an orderly colonial society featured in photographs affected the politics of space on the islands and variously justified and naturalized certain colonial practices. In particular, I argue that colonial authorities attempted to exert certain social controls on the islands' inhabitants, by asserting that their respective societies had to live up to the picturesque touristic image of disciplined, law-abiding, and clean society. In doing so, I show how photography became central in both visualizing and exerting social order.

“When Men are Women: Opposition and Ambivalence among Gabra Nomads of East Africa”

The nomadic Gabra of East Africa generally denigrate women and feminine things. So why do they regard the d'abella, their most prestigious men, as women? The answer, according ta the dissertation, begins with understanding a central paradox in nomadic life: Gabra must constantly separate from one another, spreading out over a vast arid landscape in search of water and fodder for livestock; yet they must also form close, enduring social attachments. These are contradictory imperatives, and they are never perfectly resoluble. This dissertation argues that imperatives of separation and attachment manifest themselves at different levels of Gabra experience; that structural and psychodynamic processes gender these moments; that their mutual necessity combined with their basic incompatibility generates ambivalence, which Gabra represent and attempt to resolve symbolically; and that d'abella, the older men who are women, reflect this ambivalence and embody its symbolic resolution. The discussion begins by exploring the theoretical opposition between structuralism and poststructuralism, and argues that--like the Gabra opposition of attachment and separation--the fixed and certain structures emphasized by structuralism and the variations and differences emphasized by poststructuralism are intimately related to each other. It goes on in chapters two, three, and four to describe Gabra oppositions, showing how these play out in society, in individual lives, and in ritual performances. Finally, using structuralist theory with a poststructuralist attitude, it shows how Gabra use the d'abella institution to imagine a unification of contradictory imperatives, such as separation and attachment, and of symbolic opposites, such as masculinity and femininity. By encompassing oppositions, the d'abella represent the ambiguous and polysemic 'space between' the poles of separation and attachment, outside and inside, junior and senior, masculine and feminine.