The multidisciplinary essays in Configuring History describe how teachers can use virtual reality technology to teach the Harlem Renaissance. Describing in detail the construction of Virtual Harlem, Bronzeville, and Montmartre - all important sites in African American cultural history - the essays delineate the technologies employed in the construction of these cityscapes and the learning theory - configuring history - that informs the project. The book provides a model of a collaborative learning network, linking classrooms at universities in the United States and in Europe, and demonstrates the importance of collaboration between the sciences and the humanities for the future development of instructional technologies.

Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.

This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 1: Diaspora Representations and the Interweaving of Cultures explores the idea that, in and from their various locations around the world, the plays of the African diaspora acknowledge and pay homage to the cultures of home, while simultaneously articulating a sense of their Africanness in their various inter-actions with their host cultures. Contributions in Diaspora Representations and the Interweaving of Cultures equally attest to the notion that the diaspora – as we see it – is not solely located outside of the African continent itself, but can be found in those performances in the continent that engage performatively with the West and other parts of the world in that process of articulating identity.

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives emerging from the ongoing projects constructing political, cultural, and social imaginaries for and from the African continent. This book brings together and makes available to the English-speaking world the material presented at the 2016 Ateliers de la pensée – Workshops of Thought – in Dakar. The authors deal with a wide range of issues, including decolonization, the development of social utopias, and the pursuit of new forms of political, economic, and social production on the African continent. Running throughout is a constant concern to interrogate the categories and frames of meaning that have served to characterize the dynamics of the African continent and a shared desire to produce new frames of intelligibility through which to see Africa’s present realities and its future. The contributions also attest to the view that there is no African question that is not also a global question, and that the Africanization of the global question will be a decisive feature of the twenty-first century. To Write the Africa World and its companion volume The Politics of Time will be indispensable for anyone interested in Africa – its past, present, and future – and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.

This series of Classics in African Anthropology is primarily drawn from a distinct family of texts which dominated the academic analysis of society in mid-20th century Africa. The texts are significant yet often neglected, but have stood the test of time, according to the editors. Originally published in 1954. New edition published in association with the International African Institute North America: Transaction Books; Germany: Lit Verlag

This collection of essays explores cultural phenomena that are shaping global identities in contemporary Spain. This volume is comprised of twenty essays that examine literary, documentary, and film representations of the multicultural configurations of Spain. All of the essays treat multiculturalism in Spain, focusing on reconfigured Spanish cities and neighborhoods through Latin American, African, and/or Eastern European migrations and cultures. Principal themes of the volume include urban space and access to resources, responses to the economic crisis, emerging family portraits, public versus private spaces, the local and the global, marginalities, migrations, and public expression of human and civil rights. This project examines the intercultural exchange that takes place in recent productions against an imaginary homogeneous Spanish national identity. These films, documentaries, and narratives seek to unsettle the Spanish preconceptions of the “Other(s).” Therefore, these texts construct a hybrid concept of the nation in which perceived national identities can be altered by interactions with other cultures from a broader world. The originality of the work lies in its focus on contemporary Spanish literature, documentaries, and fictional film to foment exploration of how Spanish cities, big and small, are experiencing transformation in architecture, popular customs and festivals, economics, family dynamics, and social and political agency through the arrival of new residents from across the globe. Some of the essays question the very legitimacy of the term ‘multiculturalism,’ others examine the formation of new communities, and still others explore the changes in religious representations and the environmental effects of the tourist industry. Together, the essays offer a compelling portrait of the changing face of contemporary Spain.

Choreographies of African Identities traces interconnected interpretative frameworks around and about the National Ballet of Senegal. Using the metaphor of a dancing circle Castaldi's arguments cover the full spectrum of performance, from production to circulation and reception. Castaldi first situates the reader in a North American theater, focusing on the relationship between dancers and audiences as that between black performers and white spectators. She then examines the work of the National Ballet in relation to Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude ideology and cultural politics. Finally, the author addresses the circulation of dances in the streets, discotheques, and courtyards of Dakar, drawing attention to women dancers' occupation of the urban landscape.

Political stability and peaceful coexistence among Nigeria's diverse nationalities are imperative for development and democratic consolidation and could serve as a model for the region and Africa as a whole. This volume, put together by leading Nigerian scholars, addresses strategies for taming' the military to avoid future coups; solving the ethnic diversity question through national reconciliation; de-marginalising women in politics and society; reducing human rights violations through the law and many other issues.

This Special Summer 2007 (vol. V) Issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge includes the proceedings of the fourth annual Social Theory Forum (STF), held on March 27-28, 2007, at UMass Boston. The theme of the conference was “The Violences of Colonialism and Racism, Inner and Global: Conversations with Frantz Fanon on the Meaning of Human Emancipation.” The Social Theory Forum sought to revisit Fanon’s insightful joining of the micro and the macro—the everyday life and the increasingly global and world-historical—insights into critical social psychological and imaginative social analysis and theorizing in favor of innovative discourses on the meaning of human emancipation and toward disalienated and reimagined inner and global landscapes. Keynote contributions by: Winston Langley, Lewis R. Gordon, Marnia Lazreg, Irene L. Gendzier, Nigel C. Gibson. Contributors include: José da Mota-Lopes, Luis Galanes Valldejuli, Philip Chassler, Mazi Allen, Andreas Krebs, George Ciccariello-Maher, Kavazeua Festus Ngaruka, Phillip Honenberger, Judith Rollins, H. Alexander Welcome, Dilan Mahendran, Festus Ikeotuonye, Greg Thomas, David Gonzalez Nieto, A. C. Warner, Karen M. Gagne, Rajini Srikanth, Jarrod Shanahan, Adam Spanos, Eric Mielants, Paola Zaccaria, Tryon Woods, Patrick Sylvain, Hira Singh, Nazneen Kane, Lynnell Thomas, Steve Martinot, Jemadari Kamara, Tony Menelik Van Der Meer, Marc Black, Gary Hicks, Sean Conroy, and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.