Books
- with Beth A. Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson. Hard Work, Hard Times: Ethnographies of Volatility and African-Being-in-the-World. The University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, (also published in hardcopy) University of California Press, 2009. (Forthcoming)
(last updated on 2008/12/01)Abstract:
Hard Work, Hard Times: Ethnographies of Volatility and African Being-in-the-World reconsiders the African continent’s place in a larger world, specifically in the post-Area Studies moment, and seeks to theorize volatility and social agency--two key concerns of much Africanist literature. The volume’s contributors are concerned with problematizing the common association between “Africa” and “crisis” and think creatively about how African subjects act in the world to redefine its limitations, at times to reproduce the world as it already exists, and most often to attempt some form of each. The collection ranges from accounts of youth culture and hip hop in Ghana, to transnational Murid trade networks, to struggles over bare life in the context of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.