Underdevelopment and African Literature


Book Description

People looking for works in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phone and the urban hustle – more effective instigations to reading than decades of work by traditional publishers and development agencies. The legal publishing industry campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. They work with development industry officials to 'foster literacy' – meaning to grow the legal book trade as a contributor to national economic health, and police what and how the newly literate read. But harried cash-strapped audiences will read what and how they can, often outside of formal economies, and are increasingly turning to mobile phone platforms that sell texts at a fraction of the price of legally printed books.




How Europe Underdeveloped Africa


Book Description

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.




A Cultural History of Underdevelopment


Book Description

A Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba détente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of "underdevelopment." John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography, journalism, popular song, travel narratives, and development theory. For the United States, Latin America has figured variously as good neighbor and insurgent threat, as its possible future and a remnant of its past. By illuminating the conventional ways in which Americans have imagined their place in the hemisphere, the author shows how the popular image of the United States as a modern, exceptional nation has been produced by a century of encounters that travelers, writers, radicals, filmmakers, and others have had with Latin America. Drawing on authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, Leary argues that Latin America has figured in U.S. culture not just as an exotic "other" but as the familiar reflection of the United States’ own regional, racial, class, and political inequalities.




Ballads of Underdevelopment


Book Description




The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment in Africa


Book Description

While Africa is too often regarded as lying on the periphery of the global political arena, this is not the case. African nations have played an important historical role in world affairs. It is with this understanding that the authors in this volume set out upon researching and writing their chapters, making an important collective contribution to our understanding of modern Africa. Taken as a whole, the chapters represent the range of research in African development, and fully tie this development to the global political economy. African nations play significant roles in world politics, both as nations influenced by the ebbs and flows of the global economy and by the international political system, but also as actors, directly influencing politics and economics. It is only through an understanding of both the history and present place of Africa in global affairs that we can begin to assess the way forward for future development.




Underdevelopment, Development and the Future of Africa


Book Description

In view of the resilience of Africas underdevelopment, what do Africans make of their determined aspirations for development? The continent of Africa has constantly drawn global attention, most especially for both human and natural evils. Underdevelopment, it appears, is one of the most eminent threatening evils. It has plunged and promises to maintain the majority of Africa in abject poverty, insecurity, and vulnerability. What perpetuates the ghost and gory of underdevelopment in Africa, despite a proliferation of development rhetoric and initiatives? How do ordinary Africans react to repeated talk and claims of development with little evidence of transformation for the better in their material circumstances? This book interrogates the tenacity of underdevelopment amid calls for Africa to rise from its slumber and reclaim its position in global affairs as the mother continent of humankind. It contributes to the ongoing debates on why Africa remains trapped in the clutch of underdevelopment many decades after the purported end of colonialism. The book comes at a critical time in human history; a time when the talk on Africas [under-]development is louder due to the ravages of economic downturns and dysfunctional conflicts. It poses a challenge to development practitioners, civil society activists, statesmen, economists, political scientists and theorists to rethink and reconsider their role as technocrats, experts and ambassadors of positive change in Africa and the world beyond.




Extracting Profit


Book Description

Extracting profit explains why Africa, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, has undergone an economic boom. This period of “Africa rising” did not lead to the creation of jobs but has instead fueled the growth of the extraction of natural resources and an increasingly-wealthy African ruling class.




African Literature and the CIA


Book Description

During the period of decolonisation in Africa, the CIA covertly subsidised a number of African authors, editors and publishers as part of its anti-communist propaganda strategy. Managed by two front organisations, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Farfield Foundation, its Africa programme stretched across the continent. This Element unravels the hidden networks and associations underpinning African literary publishing in the 1960s; it evaluates the success of the CIA in secretly infiltrating and influencing African literary magazines and publishing firms, and examines the extent to which new circuits of cultural and literary power emerged. Based on new archival evidence relating to the Transcription Centre, The Classic and The New African, it includes case studies of Wole Soyinka, Nat Nakasa and Bessie Head, which assess how the authors' careers were affected by these transnational networks and also reveal how they challenged, subverted, and resisted external influence and control.




Women and Development in Africa


Book Description

Kevane explores gender issues in Africa in the context of the continent's poor economic performance.




The Missing Millions


Book Description

One of the most important political historians of Africa writes eloquently and in great detail on the reasons for the current underdevelopment of Africa Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.