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Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigo-rate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved around the role of Africanists in the United States as "gatekeepers" of knowledge about Africa and Africans, this volume of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the contested character of the production of knowledge itself. In every chapter, case studies and ethnographic materials, drawn from such regions as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Malagasy Republic, Angola, Ghana, and Senegal, demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.
List of contents
Preface -- Introduction -- Challenging Modes of Thinking: Making Maps and Mapping History -- "So Geographers in Africa Maps with Savage Pictures Fill Their Gaps" -- The Challenges of Writing African Economic History -- Contested Categories: Economy, Politics, and Society -- Structural Adjustment -- Poverty Profile in Sub-Saharan Africa -- Civil Society, Pluralism, Goldilocks, and Other Fairy Tales in Africa -- Beyond the State and Civil Society -- Silencing Power -- Negotiating Identity in Post-Settlement South Africa -- Negotiable Property -- Violence of the Word/Violence Against the Body -- Mapping Africa's Presences -- Contesting Terrains Over a Massacre -- Negotiating Postwar Identities -- Sex and the Politics of Space in Colonial Zimbabwe -- Girls, Sex, and the Dangers of Urban Schooling in Coastal Madagascar -- The Moving Frontier of AIDS in Uganda -- Contested Claims and Individual Bodies
About the author
Bond, George Clement | Gibson, Nigel C.
Summary
This book brings together intellectuals from backgrounds, generations and continents to deepen the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. It draws ethnographic materials from regions such as South Africa and Ghana, to demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.
