Title:

Authors: John Prendergast & Michael Mattocks

Publisher: Crown

Call number: HV881 .P725 2011

From the Publisher:

“Peace activist and cofounder of the Enough Project, John Prendergast is known as a champion of human rights in Africa.

But the not-so-public face of J.P. is the life he’s led as a Big Brother to Michael Mattocks. As a curious, driven, and emotionally wounded twenty-year-old, J.P. made the life-changing decision to form a “Big Brother/Little Brother” relationship with then seven-year-old Michael, who was living out of plastic bags and drifting from one homeless shelter to the next with his mother and siblings. Lacking a connection with his own brother and distancing himself from a disastrous relationship with his father, J.P. formed a unique bond with Michael the moment they met. Michael and J.P. became like family, with Michael and some of his siblings even living with J.P. one summer. In the years that followed, J.P. took Michael and his brothers on outings, whether it was fishing, playing basketball, patronizing cheap restaurants, or going on road trips. This friendship would continue for over twenty-five years as the two coped with varying degrees of violence, instability, and trauma in their own lives. ”
About the Authors:

“John Prendergast is a human rights activist and best-selling author who has worked for peace in Africa for over 25 years. He is the co-founder of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity affiliated with the Center for American Progress.”  Michael Mattocks is the co-author of Unlikely Brothers.

On the Web:

Amazon

Enough Project

Enough Project video

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Title: The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970

Author: Goody, Jack

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Call No.: GN345 .S35 2010

From the Publisher:

About the Author:

Jack Goody (c.1918-) is one of the major figures in British anthropology. He was William Wyse Professor in Cambridge and has written many books on kinship, literacy, culture and many other subjects. (From http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/Jack_Goody.html).

On the Web:

About the editor: Arua E. Arua was chair of the International Reading Association’s International Development in Africa Committee (2002-2003) and is a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Botswana, Gaborone, Botswana.

On the web: Other books by Arua E. Arua

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Author :  Mahmood Mamdani

Publisher: Princeton, N.J.   Woodstock : Princeton University Press

Call number: DT450.435 .M35 2001

From the Publisher:

“When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population.” So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement is the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including even judges, human rights activists, and doctors, nurses, priests, friends, and spouses of the victims. Indeed, it is its very popularity that makes the Rwandan genocide so unthinkable. This book makes it thinkable.

Rejecting easy explanations of the genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, one of Africa’s best-known intellectuals situates the tragedy in its proper context. He coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutu to turn so brutally on their neighbors. He finds answers in the nature of political identities generated during colonialism, in the failures of the nationalist revolution to transcend these identities, and in regional demographic and political currents that reach well beyond Rwanda. In so doing, Mahmood Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa.

There have been few attempts to explain the Rwandan horror, and none has succeeded so well as this one. Mamdani’s analysis provides a solid foundation for future studies of the massacre. Even more important, his answers point a way out of crisis: a direction for reforming political identity in central Africa and preventing future tragedies.

About the author:

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of African history and politics. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Mamdani was a professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (1973-79), Makerere University in Uganda (1980-1993), and the University of Cape Town (1996-1999).  He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including being listed as one of the “Top 20 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy (US) and Prospect (UK) magazine in 2008. From 1998 to 2002 he served as President of CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa). His essays have appeared in the New Left Review and the London Review of books, among other journals.

He teaches courses on: major debates in the study of Africa; the modern state and the colonial subject; the Cold War and the Third World; the theory, history, and practice of human rights; and civil wars and the state in Africa.

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Title:

Author: Joyce Hansen

Publisher: Scholastic

Call Number: PZ7.H19825 Cap 1995

From the Publisher:

Kofi’s safe world is suddenly shattered. Ghostly white men, who have arrived from the coast, are stealing his people to sell into slavery. And Africans who speak and dress like the white man are helping them.

Oppong, the family’s beloved slave, has always been trustworthy, but today he seems nervous and preoccupied. Why does he not tell Father when he thinks he senses danger? And why is he not dressed in his robe for today’s procession to Kumasi? Kofi’s worst suspicions unfurl before his eyes — and it is this ironic twist of fate that changes the lives of Kofi’s family irrevocably and leads Kofi, in chains, to a cold, somber New England farm owned by Puritans. How the boy eventually comes to find Paul Cuffe, and African American ship builder with a dream of taking Africans back to their homeland, reveals and unusual chapter in American history.

In a riveting novel laced with historic fact, award-winning author Joyce Hansen perceptively contrasts two cultures, while showing a unique picture of slavery in New England shortly after the American Revolution.

About the Author:

I write about what I know and what moves me deeply. My characters are greatly influenced by my childhood and my students. My love of books and writing came from my mother, who wanted to be a journalist. She grew up in a large family during the Depression, and though she was intelligent and literate, she couldn’t finish high school because she had to work.

From my father, I learned how to tell stories. He entertained my brothers and me with stories about his boyhood in the West Indies and his experiences as a young man in the Harlem of the 1920s and ‘30s. He also helped me to see the beauty and poetry in the everyday scenes and “just plain folks” he captured in his photographs.

I have also been inspired by my students’ creativity — the way they twist, bend, enliven, deconstruct, and sometimes even destroy language; their loves, hates, fears, feelings, and needs filter into my writing. I write for all children who need and can relate to things I write about — the importance of family, maintaining a sense of hope, and responsibility for oneself and other living things.

On the Web:

http://www.joycehansen.com/

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From the publisher: This book explains why African countries have remained mired in a disastrous economic crisis since the late 1970s. It shows that dynamics internal to African state structures largely explain this failure to overcome economic difficulties rather than external pressures on these same structures as is often argued. Far from being prevented from undertaking reforms by societal interest and pressure groups, clientelism within the state elite, ideological factors and low state capacity have resulted in some limited reform, but much prevarication and manipulation of the reform process, by governments which do not really believe that reform will be effective, which often oppose reforms because they would undercut the patronage and rent-seeking practices which undergird political authority, and which lack the administrative and technical capacity to implement much reform. Over time, state decay has increased.

About the author: Nicolas van de Walle (PhD. Princeton University, 1990) has been a professor in the department (Department of Government, Cornell University) since 2004. His primary field is comparative politics. His teaching and research focuses on the political economy of development, with a special focus on Africa; on democratization, and on the politics of economic reform. His most recent book is African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

On the web: Book review from Foreign Affairs (Published by the Council on Foreign Relations)

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Title: Burning in the sun [videorecording]

Directors: Cambria Matlow and Morgan Robinson

Produced by: Indieflix, 2010

Check It Out: TJ810 .B8 2010 DVD

From the Production Company: 26-year-old charmer Daniel Dembele is equal parts West African and European, and looking to make his mark on the world.  Seizing the moment at a crossroads in his life, Daniel decides to return to his homeland in Mali and start a local business building solar panels – the first of its kind in the sun drenched nation.  Daniel’s goal is to electrify the households of rural communities, 99% of which live without power.  BURNING IN THE SUN tells the story of Daniel’s journey growing the budding idea into a viable company, and of the business’ impact on Daniel’s first customers in the tiny village of Banko.  Taking controversial stances on climate change, poverty, and African self-sufficiency, the film explores what it means to grow up as a man, and what it takes to prosper as a nation.  An Official Selection of IFP’s Documentary Rough Cut Lab and Independent Film Week/Spotlight on Docs, and supported by LEF Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, and  Experimental Television Center.

About the Directors:

Cambria Matlow, Director/Producer/Cinematographer: Cambria Matlow co-founded Birdgirl Productions in 2005 to support this project.  Prior to this Cambria directed and lensed several short narrative films, including THE SACRED CLOWN, an experimental film about Che Guevara that examines the cultural consequences of political idolatry.  She’s helped produce the Vermont International Film Festival and in New York she’s worked in development and production with social issue media organization Arts Engine on several documentaries including Rose and Nangabire and Nicaragua Dreaming.  Now, in her role as manager of non-theatrical programming at Film Movement, she leads nationwide distribution and outreach efforts for award-winning foreign and American independent feature films.  Cambria holds a Certificate in Film Production from Burlington College in Vermont and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies from Columbia University.  She has driven across the United States six times, lived in Spain and New Zealand, and traveled abroad extensively, including time spent in Morocco, Singapore, Central America, Mexico, and Eastern Europe.  BURNING IN THE SUN marks her documentary feature directorial debut.

Morgan Robinson, Director/Producer/Cinematographer: Morgan Robinson began his filmmaking career in the production department for Spike Lee’s HE GOT GAME and SUMMER OF SAM.  He attended the New York Film Academy and his narrative short CATABASIS won first prize at the Dominique Dunne Memorial Film Festival and a Golden Apple at the National Educational Media Network Film Festival.  Morgan assisted filmmaker John Halpern shooting and producing his documentary film ANGER on location in Mexico, Colorado and Arizona.  Subsequently Morgan took on the project of co-directing and photographing BURNING IN THE SUN, and has been working on every aspect of this film since 2005.  In addition he has produced the promotional video JI DUMA: BRING THEM WATER, as well as a narrative short, HANDS and a documentary short, THE DOMINO PROJECT.  Recently Morgan produced and photographed John Halpern’s latest documentary ONCE PARADISE on location in Kashmir, India.  Currently he is an associate producer at Punched in the Head Productions making the Emmy-winning show True Life for MTV.  Morgan studied religion at Columbia University and speaks English, French, Spanish and Mandarin.

On the Web:

Columbia Spectator

Trust Movies

NY Times

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From the Publisher: ‘Censorship may have to do with literature’, Nadine Gordimer once said, ‘but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.’ As the history of many repressive regimes shows, this vital borderline has seldom been so clearly demarcated. Just how murky it can sometimes be is compellingly exemplified in the case of apartheid South Africa. For reasons that were neither obvious nor historically inevitable, the apartheid censors were not only the agents of the white minority government’s repressive anxieties about the medium of print. They were also officially-certified guardians of the literary. This book is centrally about the often unpredictable cultural consequences of this paradoxical situation.

About the Author: Peter D. McDonald is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College and a Lecturer at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on the history of ‘literature’ as a category from the nineteenth century to the present day, on publishing history, and on the relationship between literary institutions and the modern state. His other principal publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1997) and Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D F McKenzie, co-edited with Michael Suarez (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

Book Website

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From the Publisher: In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse. In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. ..

About the Author: Dambisa Moyo worked at Goldman Sachs for eight years. Previously she worked for the World Bank as a consultant. Moyo completed a Ph.D. in economics at Oxford University….

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Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala read from and discussed his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation (Harper Collins, 2005), as well as his forthcoming nonfictional work on AIDS/HIV in Nigeria.

Beasts tells the story of a young boy soldier, Agu, who is forced into the army in an unnamed country in West Africa. Despite his love for school and dream to become a doctor, Agu finds himself in a guerilla warfare he finds both horrifying and fascinating. He faces a series of despicable crimes that begin with the killing of an unarmed soldier, ultimately causing him to lose his religious faith. Noted for its direct and idiosyncratic use of the first person narrative, as well as provocative content, Iweala’s book has received critical acclaim in numerous sources, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The London Times.

The son of a doctor and foreign minister for Nigeria, Iweala attended Harvard College and earned an A.B. in English and American Literature and Language in 2004. While there he received several awards, including the Hoopes Prize and Dorothy Hicks Lee Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis (2004); Eager Prize for Best Undergraduate Short Story (2003); and the Horman Prize for Excellence in Creative Writing (2003). In 2007, Iweala was named one of 20 best young American novelists by Granta Magazine. He is currently a medical student at Columbia University and conducting an internship at Saint Luke’s Hospital.

Iweala participated in a Book Talk at the Gottesman Libraries on April 8th, 2010.