Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through ...strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.
In Bottleneck, anthropologist Caroline Melly uses the problem of traffic bottlenecks to launch a wide-ranging study of mobility in contemporary urban Senegal—a concept that she argues is central to ...both citizens' and the state's visions of a successful future.Melly opens with an account of the generation of urban men who came of age on the heels of the era of structural adjustment, a diverse cohort with great dreams of building, moving, and belonging, but frustratingly few opportunities to do so. From there, she moves to a close study of taxi drivers and state workers, and shows how bottlenecks—physical and institutional—affect both. The third section of the book covers a seemingly stalled state effort to solve housing problems by building large numbers of concrete houses, while the fourth takes up the thousands of migrants who attempt, sometimes with tragic results, to cross the Mediterranean on rickety boats in search of new opportunities. The resulting book offers a remarkable portrait of contemporary Senegal and a means of theorizing mobility and its impossibilities far beyond the African continent.
Masters of the Sabaris the first book to examine the music and culture of Wolof griot percussionists, masters of the vibrant sabar drumming tradition. Based on extensive field research in Senegal, ...this book is a biographical study of several generations of percussionists in a Wolof griot (géwël) family, exploring and documenting their learning processes, repertories, and performance contexts-from life-cycle ceremonies to sporting events and political meetings. Patricia Tang examines the rich history and changing repertories of sabar drumming, including dance rhythms andbàkks, musical phrases derived from spoken words. She notes the recent shift towards creating newbàkkswhich are rhythmically more complex and highlight the virtuosity and musical skill of the percussionist. She also considers the burgeoning popular music genre calledmbalax.The compact disc that accompanies the book includes examples of the standard sabar repertory, as well asbàkkscomposed and performed by Lamine Touré and his family drum troupe.
In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, ...and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal.Your Pocket Is What Cures Youexamines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health.
While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies,Your Pocket Is What Cures Youremains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.
Building on extensive archival research, this book assembles a remarkable collection of unpublished materials scattered across three continents, from autobiographical compositions written by ...colonized students to the secret deliberations of literary prize committees.To readers interested in the world literature debate, the book opens new directions by investigating how the emergence of literary modernity is entangled with other textualities.Tackles complex theoretical questions of comparative method and postcolonial literary history in clear, elegant prose.This book offers a groundbreaking, new approach to the language question, one of the most fundamental debates in postcolonial and African literatures.Senegal has a highly visible francophone literary tradition - from Mariama Bâ and Léopold Senghor to Ousmane Sembène. This book charts an original, multilingual history of Senegalese writing, pairing studies of these widely-taught francophone authors with the more overlooked Wolof-language writers with whom they were in dialogue.For audiences in comparative literature, the book models fresh theoretical approaches to literary comparison and the study of translation.
Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century. But instead of asking whether language matters,The Tongue-Tied Imaginationexplores how the language question itself came to matter.
Focusing on Senegal, Warner draws on extensive archival research and an understudied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both French and Wolof, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals. In tracing the politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development, Warner reveals language debates as a site from which to rethink the terms of world literature and chart a renewed practice of literary comparison.
West African history is inseparable from the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. According to historical archaeologist François Richard, however, the dominance of this narrative not ...only colors the range of political discourse about Africa but also occludes many lesser-known—but equally important—experiences of those living in the region. Reluctant Landscapes is an exploration of the making and remaking of political experience and physical landscapes among rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal between the late 1500s and the onset of World War II. By recovering the histories of farmers and commoners who made up African states' demographic core in this period, Richard shows their crucial—but often overlooked—role in the making of Siin history. The book also delves into the fraught relation between the Seereer, a minority ethnic and religious group, and the Senegalese nation-state, with Siin's perceived "primitive" conservatism standing at odds with the country's Islamic modernity. Through a deep engagement with oral, documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic archives, Richard's groundbreaking study revisits the four-hundred-year history of a rural community shunted to the margins of Senegal's national imagination.
L'auteur soutient que les confréries soufies, en s'opposant ou en bloquant les ambitions conservatrices de l'État, participent -- entre autres instances sociales et institutions politiques de ...régulation --, à la consolidation et à l'amélioration de la démocratie et de la laïcité sénégalaises. The author argues that Sufi orders participate in the improvement and consolidation of democracy and secularism in Senegal. Often, in opposing or blocking the conservative ambitions of the state holders, several Sufi guides support the citizens and deepen democratic values in the country.
In Shifting Perceptions of Migration in Senegalese Literature, Film, and Social Media, Mahriana Rofheart proposes a revised understanding of Senegalese migration narratives by asserting the ...importance of both local and global connections in recent novels, hip-hop songs, and documentary videos. Much previous research on migration narratives in French from Africa has suggested that contemporary authors often do not consider their countries of origin upon departure and instead focus on life abroad or favor a global perspective. Rofheart instead demonstrates that today’s Senegalese novelists and hip-hop artists, whether living in France or Senegal, express connections to communities both in Senegal and abroad to cope with the traumatic experience of emigration and return. Ultimately, Rofheart asserts that Senegalese national identity remains significant to the way these authors and artists respond to migration. In her examination of novels in French, hip-hop songs in French and Wolof, and online documentaries, as well as the social and economic currents that influence the texts’ production and circulation, Rofheart engages with scholarship on transnationalism, postcolonialism, popular culture, and new media studies. The study’s initial chapters address well-known works from the mid-twentieth century, including Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, as well as the films of Ousmane Sembène, and Djibril Diop Mambéty. This book then demonstrates how novelists such as Aminata Sow Fall and Fatou Diome, as well as hip-hop artists including Simon and Awadi, break with previous tragic depictions of migration in novels and films to present successful responses to the contemporary context of frequent emigration from Senegal.
