This book boldly unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a compelling new perspective on global interconnectivity in the ...nineteenth century. Jeremy Prestholdt examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of rich and often-surprising vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it powerfully demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.
This article examines the perceived interdependence of territorial rights and social identity in colonial Kenya. In the early 1960s, attempts to win full autonomy for a narrow strip of Indian Ocean ...coastline – the Protectorate of Kenya – encouraged an exclusivist discourse of autochthony. To establish their historical ownership of the coast, both political thinkers who supported and decried coastal separatism emphasized the correlation of race, ethnicity, religion, and physical space. Through competing claims to ‘the soil’, all parties articulated a dually integrative and divisive language of citizenship. As a result, autochthony discourse exacerbated tensions within coastal society, fortified divergent visions of the postcolonial nation, and highlighted reductive definitions of the coast as either maritime or continental in orientation.
The networks of human relation that define the Indian Ocean region have undergone significant reconfiguration in the last half-century. More precisely, the economic insularity of the region has ...diminished while the postcolonial nation has both restricted movement and reoriented the political imaginations of people along the rim. At the same time, the Indian Ocean has been revivified as a unit of social exchange and analysis, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This article explores the meaning of Indian Ocean Africa in the context of a multipolar world by focusing on how the dictates of nations have transformed the region and how the petroleum economy as well as shifting means of social engagement have engendered new linkages. The essay argues that although the postcolonial era affected the closure of certain historical routes of connectivity, relationships structured by contemporary nations and air travel, among other things, have encouraged perceptions of regional coherence. What we might term basin consciousness has begun to reverse the introverted politics of the early postcolonial era and animate the Indian Ocean as an idea.
Jeremy Prestholdt considers how seemingly marginal people affected larger patterns of global integration in the nineteenth century by demonstrating how diverse and changing East African consumer ...demands had repercussions for locales as distant as Bombay and Salem, Massachusetts. As their connections to distant regions deepened in the second half of the nineteenth century, East Africans developed specific and highly differentiated consumer tastes. To profit from the East African trade, foreign manufacturers had to appeal to those changing demands. In the cases of Bombay and Salem, the manufacture of textiles for the East African market offered new economic opportunities and provided important stimuli to the industrialization of both cities. Prestholdt's vignettes of trans-regional engagement suggest that negotiated transactions and the consumer desires of people considered marginal to global systems have, at times, been just as important to patterns of global integration as have been "peripheral" adjustments to the demands of international capital. In tracing the international repercussions of African consumerism, Prestholdt demonstrates how a global narrative can be attentive to local contingencies. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This essay addresses myths about al Qaeda operative Fazul Abdullah Muhammad and their implications for American foreign policy. The essay demonstrates how Fazul's legend mirrors broader genealogies ...of information that shape contemporary perceptions of terrorism. Fazul orchestrated two major al Qaeda attacks in Kenya, including the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy, but he has also become the object of fantastic speculation-the product of a psychology of fear combined with a popular imagination saturated with the layered syntax of the entertainment industry's imagery. Fazul's myth reveals how, in declaring war on terrorism, we have likewise waged a shadow war against the projections of collective paranoia.
The popularity of slain American hip-hop star Tupac Shakur has become a global barometer of youth malaise. Taking a multidisciplinary approach that weaves social history, cultural studies and ...globalization studies, this paper highlights the convergence of socioeconomic alienation and media proliferation since the early 1990s. I argue that this confluence has given rise to new global heroes such as Tupac, icons that have become components of a planetary symbolic lingua franca that has yet to gain significant analytical attention. I outline the transnational import of Tupac by considering combatants' evocations of him during the Sierra Leone civil war (1991-2002). Militant factions' attraction to Tupac - their use of Tupac T-shirts as fatigues and incorporation of his discourse into their worldviews - offers insight on how young people have sought broader relevance for their particular experiences through the imagery of global popular culture. Tupac references allow for a powerful stereoscopy; they reveal mediated communities of sentiment as well as the psychological traumas of violence and social alienation. The symbolic discourse of Tupac imagery during the Sierra Leone war thus expands the relevance of a civil war to broader patterns of alienation while revealing planetary sentiments in the minutia of Sierra Leone's devastation.
This essay examines U.S. security aid to Kenya, the experiences of those affected by counterterrorism initiatives, and the ways in which Kenya's internal sociopolitical dynamics shape America's ...counterterrorism agenda. U.S. counterterrorism strategy on the African continent entails the coordination of diplomatic pressures and aid-related incentives. In response to multiple terrorist attacks and American stimulus, Kenyan authorities have expanded their efforts to apprehend violent extremists, yet these efforts have led to a variety of human rights abuses while exacerbating historical frictions between the Kenyan government and minority Muslim communities. Evidence from Kenya suggests that unless U.S. policymakers and their African allies address the social tensions upon which counterterrorism is being grafted, security aid may produce few results beyond the alienation of Muslim communities and the empowerment of domestic security forces with greater martial resources. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This book boldly unsettles the idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon—and one driven solely by Western interests—by offering a compelling new perspective on global interconnectivity in the ...nineteenth century. Jeremy Prestholdt examines East African consumers' changing desires for material goods from around the world in an era of sweeping social and economic change. Exploring complex webs of local consumer demands that affected patterns of exchange and production as far away as India and the United States, the book challenges presumptions that Africa's global relationships have always been dictated by outsiders. Full of rich and often-surprising vignettes that outline forgotten trajectories of global trade and consumption, it powerfully demonstrates how contemporary globalization is foreshadowed in deep histories of intersecting and reciprocal relationships across vast distances.
This essay examines U.S. security aid to Kenya, the experiences of those affected
by counterterrorism initiatives, and the ways in which Kenya's internal
sociopolitical dynamics shape America's ...counterterrorism agenda. U.S.
counterterrorism strategy on the African continent entails the coordination of
diplomatic pressures and aid-related incentives. In response to multiple
terrorist attacks and American stimulus, Kenyan authorities have expanded their
efforts to apprehend violent extremists, yet these efforts have led to a variety
of human rights abuses while exacerbating historical frictions between the
Kenyan government and minority Muslim communities. Evidence from Kenya suggests
that unless U.S. policymakers and their African allies address the social
tensions upon which counterterrorism is being grafted, security aid may produce
few results beyond the alienation of Muslim communities and the empowerment of
domestic security forces with greater martial resources.
