2018–19 African Studies Program Newsletter

2018–19 NEWSLETTER

Director’s welcome Student features Student awards Program news

p. 3 p. 4 p. 18 p. 22

Events Outreach Faculty/student updates Reading list

p. 42 p. 58 p. 68 p. 80

Promoting greater understanding and appreciation of the African continent and its people through diverse research, teaching, and outreach activities

2

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

DIRECTOR’S WELCOME Dear African Studies faculty, students & alumni, 2019 has been an active year for the African Studies Program. The ASP’s return to status as a Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) for Africa in 2018 allows us to build on the ASP’s strengths and to extend them in new directions. The ASP also continues to undertake initiatives beyond NRC grant activities.

African languages are at the heart of the ASP. With NRC support, the ASP added Kinyarwanda to the roster of regularly-scheduled African language courses at IU. Kinyarwanda is relevant to IU students who participate in Books and Beyond, a servicelearning initiative that takes them to Rwanda. Indiana also is home to a growing number of former residents of Rwanda: the ASP is offering Kinyarwanda to heritagelearners in Indianapolis through a program to high school students, and we hope to have increasing numbers of heritagelearners attending IU in the near future.

The ASP’s academic initiatives continue. In October, the ASP joined with the IU Islamic Studies Program and other partners to organize a workshop on “Religious Authority in Muslim Africa: Fragmentation and Plurality” at the IU Europe Gateway in Berlin, Germany. IU President’s International Research Award funds helped extend NRC support to fund a workshop involving emerging and established scholars from Africa, Europe, and the US. I plan to co-edit an anthology based on the revised papers.

The NRC grant has allowed the ASP to expand its outreach activities. Dr. Tavy Aherne, associate director, is supervising an innovative and compelling set of outreach activities for

multiple constituencies, such as Indianapolis schools, rural Indiana schools, and several minority-serving institutions, including Huston-Tillotson University, a Historically Black College/University in Austin, Texas, in an initiative renewing ties with ASP alumnus Professor Alaine Hutson (1998 African History PhD). The Huston-Tillotson initiative involves assistance in integrating African Studies into the curriculum and sending their faculty members to the West African Overseas Research Center in Dakar for an integrated set of activities.

The ASP is moving forward on other fronts.

IU has had a long-standing relationship with the University of Bayreuth, and the ASP became an active partner in the relationship during the past two years.

The ASP organized two events at the IU Gateway in Berlin in collaboration with Bayreuth, the first in December 2017 and again in October 2019 (the workshop described above), in which Bayreuth’s Institute of African Studies Director Rüdiger Seesemann was involved in planning and including scholars and PhD students at Bayreuth. This collaboration will be enhanced with Bayreuth’s recent receipt of a Cluster of Excellence grant from the German Federal Government for its “Africa Multiple” projects that include the ASP as a preferred partner.

Please read about these activities and others, as well as the accomplishments of current and former students, faculty and emeriti, and other friends of the African Studies Program. Please keep in touch and let us know how your involvement with and in Africa deepens in 2020.

Sincerely,

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

3

STUDENT FEATURES DANIELLE OSBORNE

UNDERGRADUATES

MAJOR: RELIGIOUS STUDIES MINORS: NON-PROFIT MANAGEMENT & SWAHILI

IU sophomore Danielle Osborne spent three weeks last summer volunteering in Morombo Village near Arusha in Tanzania. As a business consultant intern with a Utah-based nonprofit called Marafiki Africa, Osborne had already studied Swahili culture and the Kiswahili language for one year at IU before departure. Out of the 30 volunteers, she was one of only a few with prior language knowledge – making her an asset to the non-profit and enriching her experiences.

Osborne became interested in East Africa through her grandmother, who had done some traveling in Kenya. Her grandmother’s experiences “just stuck with me.” She said that being conversant in the local language was definitely a game-changer.

“It gave me a different level of closeness,” she said of working with local small-business owners like snack venders, maize millers and piki piki motorcycle taxi drivers. “It was really cool to connect with them on that level.”

Osborne and the other volunteers, who were mostly college-aged, lived in Morombo Village in tents at a campsite and drove in dhala dhala vans thirty minutes to one hour away to the work sites. She and five others worked on business consulting initiatives while the rest of the volunteers focused on public health or other general service projects like well digging. Working one-onone with each client in 90-minute consultations and follow-up visits, Osborne used a business curriculum workbook to teach concepts of inventory, record-keeping, and other business management and promotion skills.

“It was hard (for the clients) to adapt at first to those business concepts,” she recalled. But she noticed “how exuberant they were after the consultations…they could show they were comprehending the lessons and excited to use them to grow and benefit their businesses.”

At just 19 years old Osborne is already hoping to one day start her own non-profit. She envisions her ideal career path as having something to do with distributing Type I diabetes medical supplies in areas like Morombo Village, where access is limited.

And, as is often the case, it is those little things about a culture that become the things most missed and most cherished. For Osborne, it is the delicious soup in the camp, the local church services on weekends, and the kids always waiting to greet her—in Kiswahili. It is all those personal connections and confidence-building encounters that she knows will nourish her growth and lead to bigger endeavors later.

4

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

SYDNEY PLEAK

MAJOR: ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT MINOR: ISIZULU

IU junior Sydney Pleak has served as an Undergraduate Outreach Ambassador for the African Studies Program since 2018. In this merit-based position, Pleak has presented on South Africa and the isiZulu language to classes in Indianapolis, including all classes at Perry Meridian 6th Grade Academy.

Now as an advanced isiZulu student, she is also going into her second year working with the Clear Creek Elementary Zulu Club through the Bridges: Children, Languages, World early language acquisition program. Bridges offers children in the community exploratory language learning in languages not normally taught in schools, as well as corresponding cultural awareness, free of cost. Bridges language programs are taught by IU student volunteers such as Sydney, who are advanced in their studies of the specific languages, and mentored by faculty from the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education in the Wright School of Education, with support from several of IU’s National Resource Centers (including the African Studies Program). They use both performative and communitive techniques, teaching vocabulary and expressions through fun activities such as games, songs, crafts and dance. IU students acquire valuable teaching experience, while engaged in service-learning in the community. It can also be eye-opening for the volunteers: “I realized kids have a lot of misconceptions about Africa. My goal is to incorporate not only language but also the culture.”

As one of three Bridges volunteers of isiZulu at Clear Creek, Pleak works with K-6 students once per week for an hour. Zulu Club has had as many as 22 students involved, and a waiting list. Through training and on-going feedback by IU’s Bridges program coordinator, Pleak introduces basic vocabulary and culture through group and one-on-one activities. As well, the adage that one learns by teaching has proven true for her.

“Getting to teach Bridges helps me keep the basics of the language so I don’t forget it,” she said.

Pleak, a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) awardee both her sophomore and junior year, stumbled upon isiZulu purely by accident. As an incoming freshman she was mistakenly paired with an advisor from the College of Arts and Sciences, which requires the study of a language. Not knowing what to choose, the advisor suggested Pleak try an African language. The rest is history.

And her future plans? Pleak’s interests are varied, but they converge with the possibility of fitting them into an African context.

One idea is to continue to study entomology and the benefits of eating bugs to lessen the environmental impact of food production. And after taking a one-on-one course with Dr. Tavy Aherne on gender in Africa, she is also interested in working with women. But for now, she’s enjoying teaching a language that she has grown to love.

“We end each class with gumboot dancing,” she smiled.

And what could be better than that?

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

5

STUDENT FEATURES MACY RICHARDSON

UNDERGRADUATES

MAJOR: BIOLOGY MINOR: AFRICAN STUDIES

Macy Richardson, a senior majoring in Biology with a concentration in the biology of disease, studied abroad in Gaborone, Botswana last summer where she participated in an eight-week course focusing on public health issues such as water shortage and HIV/AIDS. As part of the program, she had the opportunity to do weekly observations in rural clinics as part of the course’s community health practicum. As one of eighteen participants from various U.S. universities (one of two from IU), what struck her the most was the fact that Botswana, the country with the third largest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the world, is also the first country to offer free anti-retroviral drugs for treatment of HIV/AIDS. The free access to medication and the quality of care impressed her.

“They really wanted people to understand their condition and how to manage it, which I thought was cool,” said Richardson.

“Botswana has under one percent mother to child transmission.”

Another benefit of the program for Richardson was the chance to live with a host family – a mother with two sons and a daughter.

“That taught me a lot of things that I wouldn’t have learned living in a dorm,” she said. “It really makes your experience so much more enriching.”

Minoring in International Studies and pursuing both a minor in African Languages (Swahili) and a Certificate in African Studies at IU, Richardson was able to take her previous experiences learning Swahili and volunteering in Tanzania to pick-up some Setswana, another Bantu language spoken in Botswana. Her program also afforded some free time to do a little sand-boarding and camel trekking in Swakopmund, Namibia and take in Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

When not volunteering abroad, Richardson is one of the African Studies Program’s key undergraduate student volunteers, participating in both Swahili language and cultural outreach programs at IU and beyond. Recently, she presented for nine elementary classes in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is one of two undergraduates who serve as ASP undergraduate Outreach Ambassadors, a merit-based position.

For her next adventure, Richardson just received the exciting news that she has been accepted to join a public health project with the Peace Corps in Rwanda. It looks like Kinyarwanda may be her third African language! Congratulations, Macy!

6

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

KUDZAI ZINYEMBA

MAJOR: ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT MINOR: ISIZULU

Freshman Kudzai Zinyemba, a Cox Scholar, works part-time at the National African Language Resource Center (NALRC) at IU where, among other things, she is helping to create a national database of where African language teaching may be dense or sparse across the U.S., pulling from the records of about 300 universities. As a heritage speaker of Ndebele, Shona, and even some Xhosa, Zinyemba has a vested interest in preserving endangered African languages and other less commonly taught languages.

“English is the lingua franca (in Zimbabwe),” she explains. “People speak Shona and Ndebele in their homes and churches, but I hear (from relatives still living there) that that is less and less common.”

In her own home growing up, her parents rarely spoke Shona or Ndebele due to her older brother being delayed in beginning to talk as a baby. Some doctors suggested it was because he was hearing too many languages [though research points to a myriad of benefits of being bilingual].

“That’s not how it works,” Zinyemba countered, but continued with a laugh. “So, I always say that it’s (my brother’s) fault that we are not bilingual.”

Majoring in Linguistics and minoring in Philosophy, she enjoys dissecting these kinds of arguments and analyzing basic opinions.

Growing up with Zimbabwean heritage in a white majority and English dominant context, she has reflected on her position occupying a kind of third space between her parents’ home country, Zimbabwe, and the place she was born, the United States.

“I had to make a lot of conscious decisions about what I did and how I perceived the people around me,” she said. “There wasn’t a specific group of people for me to just mimic.”

This likely explains her broad array of personal interests, ranging from religious-themed studio art to reading and analyzing novels to K-POP. Wait, K-POP? “My best friend in high school was really into K-POP,” she explained. “Another friend’s mom taught English in Japan for six years.”

Now Zinyemba lives in the Global Living-Learning Center and is taking Beginning Korean at IU. She hopes to teach English in South Korea after she completes her undergraduate studies.

And while not yet a lover of kimchi, Kinyemba already knows that culture is fluid, not fixed: “I can live in one country and still participate in my own culture.”

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

7

STUDENT FEATURES

GRAD STUDENTS

BENJAMIN ALE-EBRAHIM Benjamin (Ben) Ale-Ebrahim is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology with a PhD minor in African Studies.

He earned a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Religious Studies at the University of Kansas before beginning graduate studies at IU in the fall of 2017. He is interested in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology with an emphasis on the study of gender/sexuality, technology, and Islam. He plans to conduct his dissertation research in Morocco, investigating the role that social media platforms play in shaping how young Moroccans perform their multiple religious, gendered, and national identities. He has spent time studying and conducting research in Tajikistan, Mexico, and the United States, in addition to his current research in Morocco.

In the summer of 2018, Ben studied Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Moroccan Arabic in Tetouan, Morocco for eight weeks with FLAS funding from IU’s African Studies Program. Building on this experience as well as his previous Arabic study, including a year as a FLAS fellow with African Studies in 2017-18, he has developed advanced proficiency in MSA and intermediate proficiency in Moroccan Arabic. Ben returned to Morocco in the summer of 2019 for seven weeks to conduct pre-dissertation research on LGBTQ communities in Marrakech, Rabat, and Tangier, interviewing people in Moroccan Arabic, French, and English.

His preliminary research suggests that social networking platforms provide new opportunities to imagine LGBTQ subjectivities, forge affirming communities, and meet romantic partners. Yet, social media technologies also increase the chances of LGBTQ people being “outed” and surveilled.

These are acts which can lead to significant reputation loss, potential imprisonment, and/or violence in Morocco.

Ben has applied for dissertation research funding from Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He intends to return to Morocco in fall 2020 for twelve months of ethnographic field research, investigating the role of social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in mediating religion, morality, and gender in contemporary Morocco.

8

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

CATHRYN JOHNSON Cathryn Evangeline Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in political science. Her research interests are in political participation, gender, civic participation, and colonial legacies. She is currently completing her dissertation, Women’s Participation in Community Life and Politics in Mali and Burkina Faso: French Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Associational Life. Through the project she explores why and how women’s local political participation in Burkina Faso is more extensive than the local political participation of women in neighboring Mali.

Cathryn conducted immersive fieldwork in two similar villages in a cross-border zone of Mali and Burkina Faso in 2016-2017. In these rural research sites, she found that women’s associational participation, particularly in savings and credit associations, is vibrant.

However, Malian and Burkinabe women’s participation in associations leads to different kinds of participation in the broader village political economy. In Burkina Faso, participation in associations helps women develop the capacity and efficacy needed to make claims on local government as women and as farmers, while in Mali, participation in associations leads to the development of capacity and efficacy that women deploy to engage in business activities.

Through this research, Cathryn connects citizens’ individual-level experiences of the state and civic life to larger, long-term processes of state building that began during the late colonial period and continued after independence. Rather than assume that colonial subjects across French West Africa experienced colonial rule in the same way, she examines variation in how different experiences of French colonialism continue to affect how citizens relate to the state and participate in politics in the present. Cathryn conducted archival research at the National Archives of Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou and the National Archives of Senegal in Dakar, where the Archives of French West Africa are housed.

A Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Council (SSRC) provided support for twelve months of Cathryn’s research in 2016-2017. Pre-dissertation research in 2015 was supported by the Indiana University Ostrom Workshop and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for International Affairs.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

9

STUDENT FEATURES

GRAD STUDENTS

LIAM JAMES KINGSLEY I am a Ph.D. student in History interested in postcolonialism, state formation, queerness, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in twentieth and twenty-first century Namibia and Southern Africa more broadly. I am finishing up my coursework in IU’s History Department and preparing to propose my dissertation project.

I plan to research the formation of the Namibian state in 1990, arguing that the government’s response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, developed in concert with international institutions and organizations, served as a legitimating tool for the fledgling nation. I track the effects and consequences wrought by this mode of state-building and the governmental rationalities that emerged from it.

I argue that the state-sanctioned homophobic rhetoric that exploded into the public sphere in 1995 was one such result. I hope to make sense of its impact by analyzing the history of the Namibian queer rights movement that emerged several years later in the late 1990s.

With support from the History Department’s John Bodnar Fellowship, Robert F. Byrne’s Fellowship, the Hill Fellowship, and the Friedlander Fellowship, I was able to take research trips to Windhoek—Namibia’s capital—during the summers of 2018 and 2019. These stays gave me the opportunity to engage in preliminary archival research at the National Archives of Namibia. Additionally, I built connections with local queer rights organizations like Out-Right Namibia, the NGO home of many of the activists who participated in the late-1990s movement. Oral histories produced in collaboration with these and other activists will serve as a significant primary source base for my dissertation research. I also reached out to local medical professionals at the forefront of the epidemic, and plan to interview the officials, both in the Namibian government and the U.S. CDC, who constructed the HIV/AIDS response plan in 1989 and 1990.

I will return to Windhoek for the entirety of the 2019–2020 academic year in order to conduct further research.

Influenced by my education in IU’s African Studies Program, my research aims to speak to scholars in a multitude of disciplines.

While it should be of interest to historians of Southern Africa, it may also be of use to researchers aiming to disrupt and decolonize the historical determinism of human rights narratives; political scientists interested in the postcolonial state; and medical anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars, and policy makers seeking to make a more equitable response to HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

10

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

CHEIKH TIDIANE LO Cheikh Tidiane Lo recently earned a Ph.D. in Folklore Studies, with a minor and Anthropology.

He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the African Studies Program. His dissertation examines the impact of UNESCO’s World Heritage Listing on the Island of Saint-Louis of Senegal, highlighting the local communities’ degree of involvement in the preservation and/or subversion of both the tangible and intangible heritage forms. He also looks at the tourism factor and the ways in which it shapes the heritage preservation narrative and policies. Lo envisions expanding his dissertation into a published book soon.

Parallel to this primary work, Dr. Lo’s interests include religious expressive cultures in Senegal, more particularly the public celebration as a technology of memory and identity politics. He also studies verbal art forms of Sufi, and some occupational communities, through their songs and poetry in African languages. After an article on Sufi anecdotes as narrative practice, he is working on Wolof and Soninke religious poems and their performance from writing to orality. His forthcoming chapter in the volume tentatively intitled Critical Folkloristics is about fishing and farming communities’ songs as an ideological and critical tool of protest and social commentary. Lo is also drafting a manuscript on the intersection between Hip Hop music and Pan-African nationalism.

His future project relates to a new formative Mahdi movement in Senegal. He will explore the contextual framework out of which rose the new Mahdi, his theological claims and propaganda strategies, and the popular response to his proclamation as the awaited savior of the declining Islamic world.

MARGARET P. MWINGIRA Margaret P. Mwingira is an international student from Tanzania who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education. Her research interests focus on the inclusion of marginalized individuals—including those with disabilities— in educational settings in Tanzania.

Before beginning her studies at IU, Mwingera was a secondary school teacher in language and social sciences, and offered educational support in the areas of English language and mathematics. At IU, she has taught Swahili language and culture for the African Studies Program, taught Kiswahili at local elementary schools, engaged in numerous other ASP outreach programs, and was the lead instructor for this year’s STARTalk-Swahili summer language program for middle and high school students.

In 2010-2013 Margaret conducted a study on girls’ access to education in a secondary school in a coastal town in Tanzania. It explored the views and practices of teachers on inclusion as well as the influences of inclusion on the educational experiences of girls. Findings showed that the schooling provided was dependent on the teachers’ biases on the presence of girls in school, and Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

11

STUDENT FEATURES

GRAD STUDENTS

that acts of exclusion of girls were there regardless of the teacher’s gender. Other findings of the study indicated that these acts of exclusion then maintained a feeling that girls did not belong in the education system, thus creating negative impacts for the education of those female students.

Learning more about the exclusion of girls in a Tanzanian school motivated Margaret to focus her attention on other marginalized groups who have limited access to supports and services from the community and government, particularly individuals with disabilities and their caregivers. She is currently conducting a study on parents’ attitudes about education for their young children with disabilities in the Tanzanian context. She is also working with a colleague in the School of Education to adapt successful intervention strategies used in resource-rich educational contexts for children with disabilities in resource-poor educational contexts, such as those found in some schools in Tanzania.

JENNY PARKER In January of 2019, I took on the position of Director of the West African Research Association (WARA). WARA is a non-profit organization in its 30th year of existence. It has a rich heritage of promoting scholarship on West Africa by West Africans and other scholars across the globe, as well as providing a dynamic base for scholars doing research in West Africa at our center in Dakar, Senegal.

My day-to-day consists of anything from financial planning to fundraising to event planning to distributing grants and sending scholars out in to the field to devising and executing social media campaigns. My Masters degree in French from the University of Wisconsin and advertising degree from the University of Texas obtained prior to beginning my PhD at IU have proved quite useful to my new position. Additionally, the knowledge I acquired while working in the IU Anthropology Department to revamp their website and create promotional material for the department translated immediately to important skills for my new position. However, the most invaluable experience I brought with me to this job comes from the years I spent at Indiana University helping to organize the Graduate Students of African Studies Symposium, contributing to outreach in IU’s African Studies Program, and assisting with some elements of the African Studies Program’s winning Title VI grant.

Now that I am almost one year into my tenure as director of an organization with such an important mission, I could not be more excited about the future of WARA and helping to grow and expand its reach (westafricanresearchassociation.org).

I continue to work towards completing my dissertation and earn my PhD in Anthropology with a minor in African Studies. My research proposes to expand the purview of polygyny beyond the home to understand how it affects the daily lives of women in Senegal. Though some scholars may have predicted that “modern and industrialized” urban spaces would contribute to dissipating the practice of polygyny in Senegal, it seems families are instead adapting and accommodating polygyny to their modern urban environment. This adaptation and persistence continues, despite strong expressions of dislike for polygyny expressed by older generations of Senegalese women, and possibly because the younger generation seems resolute in the fact that they will have to accept polygyny.

12

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

In short, polygyny’s persistence is central to Senegalese women’s experiences, shaping not only their experiences of family but also their broader economic and social relationships.

I would like to thank my African Studies family at IU for everything they taught me and the experiences they provided me with during my time in Bloomington. Every single exchange, experience and lesson brought me to this exciting new job and I am thankful for your part in getting me here.

EMILY STRATTON Greetings from Accra! I spent most of the 2018-2019 academic year in a few of Accra’s suburbs, conducting ethnographic fieldwork on young men’s livelihoods under a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award, but I continue to reside here with support of a COAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, while analyzing my data and writing up my chapters.

I’m happy to report that my research was not only quite fruitful, but highly enjoyable. I conducted many lively interviews, was able to attend a variety of key events in my interlocutors’ lives, and have been building up a large photographic collection that documents common sights and scenes in the areas my interlocutors frequent. As is often the case with ethnographic projects, however, some of the most informative and meaningful dimensions of my work came from extended participant observation—time spent hanging out with my interlocutors and their friends, girlfriends, neighbors, and families in relatively mundane settings. I’m forever grateful that they welcomed me into their lives in these ways, and that they continue to do so, despite the fact that being in writing-mode means I cannot actually be around them so often anymore. I do, however, occasionally step away from my laptop to visit them and spend some time mutually catching up on each other’s lives. These follow-up visits, although limited, have also been very helpful for my analysis and writing.

At present, I describe my dissertation as follows: tentatively titled, “Popular Pieties: Young Men, Digital Media, and Religious Form in Urban Ghana,” my project is ultimately a study of religious form(ation) in diverse, urban settings. It does so through an ethnographic exploration of young men’s livelihoods—what young men want from life, what sources of knowledge inform these ideas, and what occupies their time—in and around the Accra suburb of Lapaz. My central argument is that young men’s livelihoods are religiously generative. The imaginative practices, social performances, and varieties of cultural consumption in which young men routinely engage in their day to day lives—including in digital media platforms—amalgamize elements of Islam, Christianity, indigenous religious traditions, popular culture, and more, and in so doing, create something new. Put differently, through shared urban and digital experiences, young men from a variety of religious, ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds inadvertently, yet collaboratively, create popular pieties—forms of lived religiosity that defy the bounded confines of religious communities conventionally conceived.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

13

STUDENT FEATURES

GRAD STUDENTS

A few chapters in the making, which I have presented recently at the Ghana Studies Association (Accra, 2019), American Anthropological Association (San Jose, 2018), and the Association for African Studies in Italy (Bologna, 2018), focus specifically upon the mobile communication platform, WhatsApp. There, I have argued that the content circulated on WhatsApp Status posts function as popular religious text, and that its chat platform is a key domain in which young men develop textual hermeneutics and negotiate ways to evaluate religious authenticity and authority.

DANA VANDERBURGH During the months of May and June, I was able to continue my study of the Akan language as a FLAS fellow in Accra, Ghana. I was lucky enough to undertake an independent study with Dr. Kofi Korankye Saah at the University of Ghana. After having studied Akan with “Uncle Dave” (Dr. David Adu-Amankuah) here at IU for 2.5 years, this was an exciting step in my language learning.

More importantly, this marked a new step in my graduate career as a PhD Minor in African Studies.

Having done my BA and MA in International Studies at IUB with concentrations in African Studies, I have taken part in numerous courses and been a part of many programs offered by ASP. So, when I began my PhD degree last fall, my continued engagement with ASP felt like an extension of what had come before. However, over the course of the spring semester, I began to understand how I was not simply continuing to take classes in African Studies, but that the discipline was a foundational part of my academic and personal identity. I particularly began to feel this shift while taking John Hanson’s seminar in African History during the Spring 2019 semester. After developing a sense of being in a cohort of other Africanist scholars, the FLAS fellowship served as a very real marker of defining my scholarship within the realm of African Studies. It was inspiring to walk into the Linguistics Department at the University of Ghana every morning (after a way too early wake up call to fight the traffic to get into the city!) and feel that what I was learning was contributing to my future scholarship and career. Of course, it was also exciting to watch how my language capabilities in Akan expanded over the course of several weeks!

My emerging sense of becoming a scholar of African Studies has greatly influenced the ways in which I envision my future dissertation research and current work with ASP. After my FLAS in June, I had the opportunity to travel to Canada to do work with an organization that focuses on addressing the environmental and social impact of hydroelectric dams. While traveling around the province of Manitoba with my colleagues, I found that I was increasingly describing the similarities and differences I was observing between the impacts of large-scale development projects in both Manitoba and Ghana. I realized that I have a strong foundation in African Studies which enables me to see such connections and gives me the tools to engage in research that draws connections between the continent and other places in the world. I am now hoping to focus my dissertation

14

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

on the role that art and creative expression can play in facilitating the youth response to environmental and social impacts of development projects in Ghana and Northern Manitoba. I am very excited to continue researching this topic and splitting my time between the cold sub-arctic temperatures of Manitoba and the tropical Ghanaian climate!

The energy generated by my summer studies in Ghana and the narrowing of my research topic has continued into the Fall 2019 semester. I have had many wonderful opportunities to continue staying involved in ASP beyond coursework. In September, I helped Dr. Vincent Bouchard, an affiliated ASP faculty member in the Department of French and Italian, organize a workshop around the important, yet far too often neglected, African filmmaker, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. Having the opportunity to bring Vieyra’s son and notable scholars of African cinema to IU was both humbling and inspiring! I also have begun helping the ASP with K-12 outreach and led my first outreach workshop about Ghana to a group of 2nd graders at Unionville Elementary. We all had a lot of fun and I can’t wait until the next outreach event.

I look forward to continuing to learn, grow, and explore through participation in the IU African Studies Program, and I am grateful for all of the support and opportunities everyone in the program continues to provide for its graduate students.

GRAD STUDENTS IN AFRICAN STUDIES Graduate Students in African Studies (GSAS) is a forum to bring together graduate students from across the university who are pursuing degrees in a variety of disciplines and in the professional fields to discuss their common interests in the study of Africa.

GSAS promotes dialogue on topical issues, fosters fellowship among students and faculty, and seeks to address the needs of African Studies students within the program. GSAS members elect the graduate student representative to the African Studies Executive Committee to act as a liaison and voice for graduate students.

Each spring, GSAS hosts a graduate students’ symposium that brings students from across the country to Bloomington to share their cutting-edge research and engage in important interdisciplinary discussions facing the field of African Studies today. GSAS also hosts film series, guest speakers, and more. If you want to get involved or assist with this year’s spring symposium, “African Space and Mind: Progress and Challenges in the 21st Century,” please contact Samantha Hyde (samhyde@iu.edu).

Ibrahim Odugbemi President

Barakaeli Mbise Vice President

Samantha Hyde Secretary

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Sylvester Makobi Representative to the ASP Executive Commitee

2018–19 Newsletter

15

STUDENT FEATURES

VISITING INTERNATIONAL

XI JIN Xi Jin, who prefers to be called by her Yoruba name of Titilayo (or “Titi”), is a Visiting Student from Peking University where she is pursuing an MA in African Literature and Cultural Studies. In residence at IU-Bloomington for the fall 2019 semester, Titi studies Modern African Literature with Professor Eileen Julien, African Cinema with Professor Akin Adesokan, and Yoruba with Graduate Student Instructor Victor Alabi. Her journey to the field of African Studies started as an undergrad in Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University when she attended a guest lecture on Nigerian traveling theater. The lecturer (Dr. Ying Cheng), an associate professor at Peking University in African Studies who later became her master’s thesis supervisor, showed her the “vibrancy of ordinary people and everyday life” on the continent.

“Dr. Ying Cheng’s lecture changed many of my opinions about Africa,” said Titi. “There are so many stereotypes I never even noticed. Africa is more than just animals, poverty, war, and disease.”

She soon realized that these narrow perspectives are often highlighted in the media and had sub-consciously influenced her views. In turn, she began to wonder about the lack of emphasis on Africa in Chinese educational curriculums. Thus began her quest to learn more.

An avid fan of the literary works of the award-winning Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Titi has read all of Adichie’s works in Chinese and recommends Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun as a good basis to start understanding Nigerian daily life, history, and culture. Now studying Yoruba both at Peking University and IU, she hopes to one day visit the continent, and especially Nigeria.

In recent years, funding for African Studies Centers has grown at Chinese universities but there are still few Chinese students specializing in the field. Titi, who is one of a handful of Chinese students at Peking University concentrating on African Studies, hopes to continue a Ph.D. abroad as the next step. For now, she is taking advantages of all the opportunities that the IU African Studies Program and its affiliated faculty have to offer. She recently attended a two-day workshop on African filmmaker Paulin Vierya and has not hesitated to borrow books and DVDs available for loan from the African Studies Program’s outreach collection.

16

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

UNDERGRAD ALUMNA

STUDENT FEATURES

MARY CHRISTIE Mary Christie traveled to Zimbabwe with her father, a physician, during the summer following her sophomore year of high school to volunteer at a Methodist mission in Mutare. It was 2002, just before the economic collapse in the country, but the situation there was already deteriorating and causing major food insecurity and political unrest.

“I’d been exposed to suffering in bad situations,” she recalled. But, “I didn’t realize the impact this was going to have.”

An impact that led Christie, originally from Indianapolis, to choose a minor in African Studies during her undergraduate career at IU to complement a minor in French and major in Art History.

“The (African Studies Program) kept my curiosity going,” she said. “It fueled my interest to learn things outside my bubble and gave me an opportunity to informally educate my peers and broaden their perspectives.”

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 2008, she completed an MSC in Global Health and Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh and focused on issues like the 2007-2008 cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, and wrote a dissertation that encouraged pharmaceutical companies to develop treatments for neglected diseases such as human African trypanosomiasis (or sleeping sickness).

She soon realized that she wanted a career where she could provide support in a more financial sense for organizations and individuals working on the ground in developing countries. A stint working in the medical field back in Indianapolis and pre-med studies didn’t seem to fit right, so she returned to IU to study at the Maurer School of Law where she also served as a graduate fellow at the Center for Constitutional Democracy.

“Something I am really passionate about is healthcare as a basic human right,” said Christie. “In the future, I can have a significant influence across the board.”

Christie graduated from law school in 2019 and is currently working as a paralegal at Maine Health’s corporate office in Portland, Maine.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

17

STUDENT AWARDS FOREIGN LANGUAGE & AREA STUDIES CONGRATULATIONS TO ASP’S FOREIGN LANGUAGE & AREA STUDIES (FLAS) FELLOWSHIP AWARDEES FOR SUMMER 2019 AND THE 2019–20 ACADEMIC YEAR! SUMMER 2019 Maggie FitzGerald Intermediate Zulu

Stuart Sones Advanced (4th year) Arabic

Marina Mecham Intermediate Zulu

Lance Spreacker Intermediate Arabic

Gaya Morris Advanced Wolof

Dana Vanderburgh Advanced (4th year) Akan/Twi-Fante

Avenel Rolfsen Advanced (5th year) Wolof

Jesse VonBergen Intermediate Arabic

ACADEMIC YEAR 2019–20 Issac Agbetuyi Advanced (4th year) Yoruba

Marina Mecham Advanced Zulu

Erin Anderson Intermediate Arabic

Trevor Phipps Beginning Kinyarwanda

Fashola Ayo-Igbala Advanced Yoruba

Sydney Pleak Advanced Zulu

Maggie FitzGerald Advanced Zulu

Macy Richardson Advanced Swahili

Meghan Halaburda Advanced Swahili

Caitlin Wischmeyer Advanced Swahili

18

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM CONGRATULATIONS TO THE PROGRAM’S STUDENT AWARD WINNERS!

CARLTON T. HODGE PRIZE

for outstanding commitment to African Studies Award winner: Sylvester Matete Makobi, PhD candidate, Jacobs School of Music Sylvester Makobi has been involved in IU African Studies Program events and outreach as a participant and attendee even before joining IU as a graduate student. In 2014, while touring the US with Taifa Mziki, a Kenyan singing group that he co-founded and was then director, he performed at IU and interacted with students taking Kiswahili.

Since joining IU’s graduate program, Makobi has donated generously of his time for numerous ASP outreach programs and events—at IU and in local schools—performing as a singer or instrumentalist. Among them, he has participated in the African Language Festival, African Languages Tea Times, taught or assisted the learning process of Kiswahili for the STARTALK Swahili program, worked as a Graduate Assistant in Field Methods in Linguistics (where the target language was the Nyĩrĩ dialect of Gĩgĩkũyũ, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya), and attended and presented in the African Studies Program Friday Colloquium Series (most recently presenting and doing a demonstration for a paper titled “Art Songs by African Composers Performed in Nairobi: Investigating Musical Idiomatic Expressions in Performance Practice”).

Sylvester is a member of Graduate Students in African Studies (GSAS), and was chosen by fellow graduate students as the 2019-2020 Graduate Student Representative on the ASP’s Executive Committee. Sylvester states, “I knew that the African Studies Program was a place I could call home and I have continued to have a deep connection, have numerous friendships, collaborations, invitations and referrals.”

We thank Sylvester for his commitment to African Studies, and wish him the best as he pursues his doctorate in the Jacobs School of Music.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

19

STUDENT AWARDS PATRICK O’MEARA TRAVEL AWARDS

Sponsored by the editors of Africa Today in support of conference travel for presenting research at professional conferences

Taiwo Ehinini Linguistics

Khaled Essessiah History

Sylvester Matete Makobi Music in Literature & Performance

ASP LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY AWARDS

Sponsored by the ASP in support of conference travel for presenting research at language pedagogy conferences

Victor Alabi

20

2018–19 Newsletter

Richard Nyamahanga

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Foluso Mary Okebiorun

IU COLLEGE OF ARTS + SCIENCES TRAVEL AWARD

Sponsored by the ASP in support of conference travel for presenting research at language pedagogy conferences

Taiwo Ehinini

Richard Nyamahanga

ASP STUDENT NOMINEES

Outstanding undergraduate and graduate students are nominated by ASP faculty. Awardees are presented with a Certificate of Merit in appreciation for their outstanding dedication to, and volunteer service in support of, African Languages and Cultures.

Students selected for special merit are noted by an asterisk (*).

Rochelle Adejei Victor Alabi* Madelyn Chassay Maggie FitzGerald Simone Gyan Gabrielle Hetrick Jessica Hynes

Susan Kavaya* Rene Lloyd Marina Mecham Alexandra O’Neal Sydney Pleak* Dana Vanderburgh Richard Wagner

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

21

PROGRAM NEWS THE AFRICAN STUDIES WEBSITE HAS A NEW LOOK! The new IU African Studies Program website launched in January! You should find it much easier to navigate on your smart phone than our older HTML-based site. All the features and information you were used to accessing are still there, plus increased functionality and links to IU resources.

You’ll also find student profiles, and a new calendar link to our events: events.iu.edu/afrist. Please check it outand let us know what you think! africanstudies.indiana.edu

NEWS FROM INDIANA UNIVERSITY’S AFRICAN LANGUAGES PROGRAM NEW LANGUAGE Kinyarwanda is officially in the Indiana University’s schedule of classes for academic year 2019-2020 starting with elementary level (and followed by higher levels in subsequent years). Students taking Kinyarwanda, like those taking other foreign languages, are able to fulfil IU’s foreign language requirement, and declare an African Language Minor – Kinyarwanda track. Kinyarwanda can also be used towards the African Studies Certificate, and Minor. There is a high demand and interest in Kinyarwanda due to IU’s decade long collaboration with Rwanda through the nationally recognized and award-winning Indiana University Books and Beyond Project, housed at IU’s Global Living-Learning Center.

The Books and Beyond project connects schools in Rwanda with IU students, faculty, as well as local elementary schools. IU students who participate in this project do internships in Rwanda, and learning Kinyarwanda language and Rwandan culture before their trip will greatly enhance their communicative skills. This fall, IU ASP awarded its first Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Kinyarwanda to incoming ASP Master’s student Trevor Phipps. This is a second language for Phipps, who as an IU undergraduate student participated in the IU Swahili Flagship.

HYBRID COURSE The introduction of Hybrid Elementary IsiZulu course in Fall 2018, with Hybrid Intermediate IsiZulu this fall, is more exciting news. Betty Dlamini, Senior Lecturer in the IU African Studies Program is teaching these courses, initially for IU students, with two days of on-line and two days of face-to-face for a total of 5 hours of instruction. There is a possibility of making the course completely on-line in the future with the opportunity for students from other institutions interested in IsiZulu to enroll in the class. Students taking the hybrid course have found it very useful as the following comments from end of semester course evaluations show: • “If this class was all ‘in class’ I would not have enrolled.”

• “I have found this class and this language the easiest to learn. In high school I studied [a] language for 5 years, and I can still not talk, but in one semester I am able to communicate meaningfully in IsiZulu.”

• “The online lessons prepare me for class activities.”

22

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT Betty Dlamini, through the Indiana University Books and Beyond Project conducted a professional development workshop for 50 English teachers at Kabwende and Nyabitsinde Primary Schools, in Musanze, Rwanda, in summer 2018. She trained the teachers on best practices in language teaching and learning. Participants in the workshop were subsequently invited to participate in a Creative Writing competition, sponsored by the African Studies Program. This summer, Betty returned to continue her workshops [see story in this Newsletter for more details], and has launched a second writing competition.

On December 14, 2018, Alwiya Omar, together with a colleague from Yale University, John Kiarie, and a colleague from State University of Zanzibar (SUZA), Haroun Maalim, led a workshop on best practices in language teaching and learning for Kiswahili instructors. The workshop was part of the 4th international conference organized by Chama cha Ukuzaji wa Kiswahili Duniani (CHAUKIDU) in collaboration with SUZA from December 14 to 18. After the workshop, Omar taught a Discourse Analysis course for SUZA’s Kiswahili graduate program, and a Pragmatics and Language Learning course for students from the Teaching Kiswahili as a Second Language (TEKSOL) program. Alwiya continues working with the students via on-line resources, and has returned to Zimbabwe to work with them this year.

LOCAL ENGAGEMENT & OUTREACH The African Studies Program continues to prioritize language outreach, with multiple forms of outreach to area schools and the community. Faculty, graduate Associate Instructors, and student volunteers who are at the intermediate and advanced levels in their African languages, provide free language lessons at local schools (ex. Harmony School), through the Bridges early language acquisition programs for preschool and lower elementary children (offered as after-school programs at schools and community locations in Monroe County), through in-class presentations to schools about language and culture, and in participating in events to promote the African languages to the wider community (ex: at the Monroe County Public Library).

The ASP is also involved in different promotional activities at the IU campus and in the community. On campus, bi-monthly Tea Time sessions are held to provide information on the different African languages offered at IU: Akan, Bamanankan, IsiZulu, Kiswahili, Wolof, Yoruba, and Kinyarwanda. At these events, IU students and faculty can stop by the information tables, learn about the languages and get a taste of traditional snacks and teas.

Another event is the bi-annual African Languages Festival held at the end of each semester. Students from different African language courses come together to celebrate what they have learned and share their experiences with each other. This is a student-led event organized by the African Languages and Cultures Club, with funding from the IU Funding Board for food catering, and event logistics support from ASP. Other IU students, faculty, friends and family also attend the festival.

Then there is an ASP teacher-led event that includes students: African Music and Dance Bonanza. This event is held on campus as well as off campus (Spring 2019 it was held at the public library), and it showcases different aspects of African languages and cultures through drumming, songs, proverbs, riddles, and clothing, among other aspects.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

23

PROGRAM NEWS LIBRARY NEWS ACQUISITIONS The library has recently acquired the African Newspapers: The British Library Collection database. This searchable database features 64 newspapers from throughout Africa, originally archived by the British Library. The newspapers indexed by the database were all published before 1901 and as such, are a great complement to the Libraries’ already vast holdings of African newspapers. An electronic access subscription to Africa Education Review is also now accessible via IUCAT, and in support of the new Kinyarwanda language offering, significant additions of Kinyarwanda language print materials have also been made to the Libraries’ holdings.

COLLECTIONS The papers of Senegalese author, screenwriter, and “father of African cinema” Ousmane Sembène are now available for research at the Lilly Library. Consisting mainly of correspondence, photographs, writings, professional files, film scripts, and related material, the Sembène materials are primarily in French, Russian, and Wolof, with a small amount of material in English.

The archive of Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop has also been acquired by the IU Libraries, with the cost of acquisition being shared between the Lilly Library and the Wells Librarybased African Studies collection. The Diop papers, consisting of notebooks, drafts, writings, correspondence, teaching materials, and born-digital materials, are also available for research at the Lilly Library. Both the Sembène and Diop collections have searchable finding aids posted on the Lilly Library website libraries.indiana.edu/lilly-library.

The Lilly Library will close for renovation, beginning December 6, for a period of approximately two years, but the collections will be available for research by appointment in Wells Library during that time.

PROJECTS The Librarian for African Studies, Mireille Djenno, had the opportunity in October 2019 to visit the Library of Congress Regional Office in Nairobi, Kenya. Djenno had very productive meetings with the staff of the regional office, the most significant outcome of which will be to increase the Kirundi and Kinyarwanda language materials being acquired through the Nairobi office’s Cooperative Acquisitions Program (AfriCAP).

While in Nairobi, she also visited the library of the United States International University, which hosted the 2019 African Studies Association of Africa Conference.

24

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

CONTEMPORARY AFRICA SEMINAR 2019: “ON PLANETARY POLITICAL VIOLENCE” The Program’s Spring 2019 Contemporary Africa Seminar was conducted by Associate Professor Akin Adesokan (Comparative Literature/Media School), through his graduate seminar titled “Biopolitics and Postcolonial Discourse.” The seminar was cosponsored by the department of Comparative Literature and the Cultural Studies Program. The seminar pitched selected classics of postcolonial studies against biopolitics, a major current of critical theory, and examined these readings in light of compelling contemporary ideas about unequal exchange, actual human suffering, economic logic, and the politics of knowledge. The questions at the heart of the seminar discussions included: How do we make sense of the ubiquity of acts of impunity across different parts of the world at a time when legalism is perhaps at its strongest? What is the relationship between “disorder” and “inventiveness”? What does culture (as in “local culture” or “high culture”) mean today?

During March 2019, two internationally recognized scholars in the fields of Comparative Literary Studies and Anthropology presented lectures to the seminar and to the larger IU community. The first speaker was Tim Brennan, the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities at the University of Minnesota, who visited Bloomington on March 3-5. Known for his work in the areas of cultural theory and sociological study of literature, Brennan gave a lecture titled “Biopolitics: The Limits of the Liberal Imagination.” By looking at the work of two Italians from different generations – Antonio Gramsci and Giorgio Agamben –he posed the question: if biopolitics is a new form of control (or resistance) – as so many argue today in a misreading of Hannah Arendt -- then what politics at any point in history did NOT involve control and manipulation of another’s body? Looking at new forms such as turn-of-the-century technologies like fingerprints, facial recognition from police photos, solitary confinement, diets of bread and water, torture by inflicting pain, torture by depriving prisoners of sensual stimulants, and so on, Brennan asked: Why does biopolitics, in an age of gene-splicing, anti-depressant over-prescription, and the deliberate mesmerizing of the “dark mirror” so rarely talk of such things, opting instead for the body’s identity?

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the anthropologist Kristin Peterson of the University of California (Irvine) was only able to present her lecture via Skype, later in the month (March 25). Titled “Viral Geopolitics: A Eulogy for Muammar Gaddafi,” the lecture’s central questions were two: what happens if the anthropologies of infectious disease and the STS of biomedical infrastructures were analytically located in geopolitics instead of global health. And what if we linked it to histories and aspirations of African liberation? The lecture was pre-circulated, but Professor Peterson took her virtual audience through its history, starting with a speech that Gaddafi, the late head of state in Libya, gave in Abuja, Nigeria, five months before the 9/11 attacks. In his speech, Gaddafi spoke about a court case that was taking place in Libya where one Palestinian doctor and eight Bulgarian nurses were on trial because they were accused of infecting over 400 children in a Benghazi children’s hospital with HIV. Although her interest was in geopolitics, Peterson was able to use the speech and the context that produced it to discuss the aspirations of African liberation at the turn of the century.

Neither physical distance nor technology could dampen the enthusiasm generated in the discussions that followed. Several participants confessed to feeling as if Peterson was in the room!

Brennan’s visit also had a side attraction because he appeared as a guest on Interchange, a public affairs program on Bloomington’s community radio, WFHB. The podcast of the hour-long talk with host Doug Storm is available here: wfhb.org/news/interchange-politics-lost.

-Akin Adesokan Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

25

PROGRAM NEWS FACULTY RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT DR. BÁRBARO MARTÍNEZ-RUIZ’S FIELD RESEARCH IN MBANZA KONGO During the summer of 2019, African art historian Dr. Bárbaro MartínezRuiz spent several weeks in Mbanza Kongo, the site of the capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, which flourished between the 13th-19th centuries. The Kingdom encompassed an area about twice the size of Great Britain and was located in present-day northern Angola, the western portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, as well as the southernmost part of Gabon. Martínez-Ruiz is in the process of writing a book focused on Kongo religions, including a chapter that will interrogate what he believes are understudied elements: “What is the Kongo religion?

How do the Kongo people describe this religion? How did the religion change as a result of exposure from influences outside of Africa (e.g., Catholics in 1482 and later Protestants)?”

Martínez-Ruiz, Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art in the Department of Art History, discussed the territorial nature of research in this region: whereas American and Belgian scholars tend to focus on the Kongo Kingdom from the perspective of the Belgian Congo, Portuguese scholars write from an Angolan perspective.

However, as Martínez-Ruiz is quick to point out, Kongo with a K denotes a culture and a people that crosses political boundaries.

Much like other separatist movements (e.g., Europe’s Basque Country), there are some present-day Kongo youth who believe strongly in restoring the Kingdom of Kongo to its former boundaries and to restrict colonial languages. The name of this movement is Bunda Dia Kongo (BDK), which means “all Kongo people united.”

Martínez-Ruiz, thinking about his new project on rock painting history in Kongo, felt some of this tension in the village of Padua, high up on a hill in northwest Angola. In talking with local elders, he became interested in investigating an engraving on the bark of a baobab tree buried 20 miles deep in the neighboring rainforest and protected by two rivers. Some locals who were part of the BDK movement were suspicious about his research, but several elders and his own tenacity to endure a two-day hike through difficult terrain sufficiently convinced the skeptics.

“Tree engravings are very important in that area and on the whole continent of Africa,” said Martinez-Ruiz.

Local Padua oral history claims that the tree is an archive of an event that has been passed down in the local oral tradition since the 16th century when the village founder, a matriarchal princess named Isabel Biasi kia Mpemba, challenged the power and authority of the then Kongo King (the Manikongo).

“The fact that they remembered that person of power (Isabel) for over 400 years is remarkable,” noted Martínez-Ruiz. “The Kongo Kingdom was a matriarchal culture and still is today.”

26

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Oral history states that Princess Isabel, founder of Padua village on the hill, requested a meeting to challenge the Kongo King’s power and authority, and secretly plotted to kill him. The Manikongo, upon learning of Isabel’s plan, threw caution to the wind and proceeded to travel towards the hill as she had requested, seated in a kipoyo (a traditional means of transport) with his gun held upside down in a sign of peace. Isabel, impressed that the Manikongo had carried out her wishes, instead asked to become part of the hierarchy of the Kongo Kingdom. She soon became one of the most important advisors to the King and the tree stands as a monument to history, to power, to loyalty, and to heritage. Inscribed on its trunk is a gun pointed upside down in a sign of peace.

“Memory in history is very important to what I do,” emphasized Martínez-Ruiz.

“How people have inscribed memory and history, why they remember, and the mechanisms people use to reconstruct memory.”

Dr. Martínez-Ruiz’s ideas and perceptions on African art and the African diaspora will be the subject of an upcoming book of critical essays to be published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. He plans to return to Padua village in December 2019 to continue his research and will publish an essay about the Padua findings in ART AFRICA (artafricamagazine.org) later in 2019.

JEANNE SEPT RETIRES AS PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY Jeanne Sept retired this past spring after more than 30 years as a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and as an affiliate faculty member of both the African Studies Program and the William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Lab. Sept also served as an Associate Dean of the Faculties from 2000 to 2003. A paleoanthropologist, Sept came to IU Bloomington in 1987 from Harvard University where she had been a research associate, teaching assistant, and visiting lecturer since 1983.

Dr. Sept’s research interests have focused on the archaeology of human origins in Africa with special attention to the behavior ecology and ancient diets of our ancestors. With the belief that proto-human subsistence ecology is fundamental to understanding human origins, she has conducted extensive research in Kenya and Eastern Congo (DRC) National Parks to study early hominid foraging strategies. Because of chimps’ close evolutionary relationships to humans, she studied various savanna chimpanzee sites in Eastern Congo, in the Ugalla region of Western Tanzania, and Cote d’Ivoire to find clues to interpret early hominid archaeological records.

In addition, she and her students used Agent Based Modeling, a tool often used to analyze ecological and social processes, to test hypotheses about our earliest ancestors through fossil and archaeological evidence.

During her tenure in the Department of Anthropology, Sept served as Chair of the department, and won two Teaching Excellence Recognition Awards. As an innovator in the use of educational technology, she published and presented extensively on the topic with her website recognized as one of the best instructional sites by Archaeology magazine.Sept pursued both undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. degree in Anthropology in 1984.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

27

PROGRAM NEWS ASP WELCOMES FULBRIGHT FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING ASSISTANT TWALHA TWAHA ABBASS Twalha Twaha Abbass is the 2019-2020 Swahili Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) with the African Studies Program.

Twalha has been actively engaged in teaching as well as outreach for the African Studies Program since arriving at IU this fall.

As the second eldest of five children from a small city in Western Tanzania, he is the first in his family to attend secondary school where he specialized his studies in Swahili, History, and English.

Growing up in a country where the medium of instruction is Swahili in grades 1-7 and English in grades 8-12, Abbass has made a conscious effort to excel in both languages. As a teen, he got a job as a radio news announcer for a local Swahili language radio station, but he also took care to read regularly in English, including books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, his favorite author.

“Since I grew up, I had developed a dream of becoming a teacher of the English language,” said Abbass. “I always read books in English even if I did not understand them.”

But even so, he has a driven desire to preserve his native language given what he describes as a book writing and book reading crisis in Tanzania. As a writer of fiction in the Swahili language since age 13, he succeeded in publishing his first novel, Kilio cha Mfamaji (The Drowner’s Cry), in 2017.

“I have sometimes been overwhelmed by how people destroy our language—the Swahili language,” he said, explaining that he views Swahili as his primary language and English as a subject of study.

He is currently writing an autobiography in English where he discusses some of the challenges faced by Tanzanian teachers and students when the language of instruction is English: “Even teachers have been demonstrating a very low ability to teach all subjects in English, and thus train and produce well trained students. I remember coming across students in groups discussing about how their teachers had been teaching them a subject in Swahili, while an examination was expected to be in English. And my love for Swahili as a language has always made me want to change this situation completely. Teachers are not free when teaching in English. “ Working as an English tutor and mentor and later an Academic Master at a secondary school, he has seen some of these problems firsthand. Now as an FLTA of Swahili in the U.S., he says that he feels proud to pass on his native language in a place that he has long dreamed of visiting. “…I am finally travelling to the U.S. to represent my country by teaching Swahili at the university and spreading African culture,” he states.

28

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Having achieved a Bachelor’s degree in Education at the University of Dar es Salaam, he is especially motivated to share his knowledge and experiences with others at home and abroad to help them advance in their careers.

“I need to make young people with dreams know that their dreams can come true,” he said. “Looking at me, dreams can come true.”

RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY IN MUSLIM AFRICA: FRAGMENTATION & PLURALITY The African Studies Program co-organized a workshop on the topic, “Religious Authority in Muslim Africa: Fragmentation and Plurality,” at the Indiana University European Gateway in Berlin from October 10-12, 2019. The initiative was led by John Hanson (African Studies Program) and Ron Sela (Islamic Studies Program), joined by Rüdiger Seesemann (University of Bayreuth) and Terje Østebø and Ben Soares (University of Florida).

The workshop identified types of Muslim authorities in Africa, their sources of legitimation, their modes of transmission, their connections to external centers of authority and models of religiosity, as well as their relations with the state. The workshop papers analyze processes of the fragmentation and contestation of religious authority in Muslim Africa to historicize contemporary debates about authority in Islam and examine them from diverse disciplinary approaches. The hope is to revise the papers for an edited anthology published by Indiana University Press.

Presenters included Beth Buggenhagen (Indiana University), Britta Frede (University of Bayreuth), Sean Hanretta (Northwestern University), Joseph Hill (University of Alberta), Fulera Issaka (University of Ghana), Kai Kresse (ZMO), Wendell Hassan Marsh (Rutgers University), Hanna Nieber (University of Bayreuth), Benedikt Pontzen (University of Bayreuth), Kadera Swaleh (Pwani University, Kenya), Alexander Thurston (University of Cincinnati), Dorrit van Dalen (Leiden University), Halkan Abdi Wario (Edgerton University, Kenya), and Kimberly Wortmann (Wake Forest University). Commentators included Hanson, Østebø, Seesemann, Soares, and Marloes Janson (School of Oriental and African Studies).

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

29

PROGRAM NEWS ASP AT THE AFRICAN STUDIES MEETINGS (BOSTON 2019) ASA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS BY DR. MARIA GROSZ-NGATÉ On November 22, former associate director of the IU African Studies Program, Maria Grosz-Ngaté, delivered the 2019 ASA Presidential Lecture “Knowledge and Power: Perspectives on the Production and Decolonization of African/ist Knowledges” at the annual meeting in Boston. With this topic, Grosz-Ngaté builds upon issues brought to the fore by Pearl Robinson in her 2007 ASA Presidential Lecture, “Ralph Bunch and African Studies: Reflections on the Politics of Knowledge,” and most recently by Jean Allman’s 2018 address, “Herskovits Must Fall?: Meditations on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968 (Atlanta).”

In her lecture, Grosz-Ngaté focused on the perspectives of Maria Grosz-Ngaté, President of the African Studies Association, Research scholars of Francophone Africa. She drew upon decades of Scholar, and Associate Director Emeritus of the IU African Studies Program experience working in French-speaking countries of West Africa, delivers the 2018 ASA Presidential Lecture in Boston and almost a year of research in Senegal and Mali that was comprised of extensive conversations with nineteen colleagues* in Dakar, Saint-Louis, Ségou and Bamako. As the president of an organization based in the U.S., Grosz-Ngaté felt compelled to highlight the perspectives of Francophone scholars who are often overlooked in Anglophone African Studies, and who have dealt with an imbalance in research capacity, as well as a huge inequity in publishing. She urged for a sustained engagement with our Francophone colleagues in Africa. Grosz-Ngaté highlighted her Senegalese colleague Boubacar Barry’s words: …the decolonization of the minds is a long process that has to be taken up by those in the south who have decolonized and in the north…who colonized. It is a double adventure where people are never at the same level of decolonization. This creates distortions because as those in the south decolonized the theoretical apparatus put in place to justify or re-enforce colonization, as they effectively deconstructed the entire system, those in the north also had to undergo the decolonization process to enable them to deconstruct all that colonization had generated as knowledge and as justification for colonization.

Grosz-Ngaté has been passionate about this complex issue for years. In fact, in developing the required graduate seminar A650: Interdisciplinary Research Methods for African Studies, she included her own research, and required writings by other scholars -predominately African and African American- that could allow for graduate students to examine African Studies as an area of knowledge production. Since her retirement from IU ASP, the course continues to use this framework. Graduate students gain a foundation for understanding the historical, intellectual, and institutional contexts that have shaped the field over time, often through scholarly voices that have previously been marginalized within the field. *Contributors to Grosz-Ngaté’s research: Dakar, Senegal: Boubacar Barry, Yacine Diagne, Dady Dibanga, Babacar Fall, Rokhaya Fall-Sokhna, and Fatou Sow; Saint-Louis, Senegal: Louis Camera; Oumar Diop, Cheikh Tidiane Fall, and Alpha Amadou-Sy; Bamako, Mali: Daouda Keïta, Doulaye Konaté, Hamidou Magassa, Moussa Sow, Fousseyney Touré; Ségou, Mali: Boubacar Haidara; Soumaila Oulalé, Mamoutou Tounkara, and Amadou Traoré.

30

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

ASA SERVICE AWARD PRESENTED TO JOHN HANSON At the 62nd Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Boston, John Hanson, director of the IU African Studies Program and Professor of History, received the 2019 ASA Service Award. He accepted the award together with his colleagues Jan Jansen (Leiden University), Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Leipzig), and Michael Doortmont (Leiden University).

The ASA Service Award was established to recognize individuals or organizations that have distinguished themselves through their outstanding dedication to the ASA’s mission of encouraging the production and dissemination of knowledge about Africa, past and present.

John Hanson and fellow History in Africa editors receive the ASA Service Award

The ASA Board of Directors recognized Hanson’s service as an editor for the journal History in Africa. The ASA Board stated, “Serving in this role for nearly a decade, you transformed History in Africa into a peer-reviewed journal that not only engages a broad range of historical issues, but commands respect throughout the field.”

We congratulate Dr. Hanson on this well-deserved honor!

IU AFRICAN STUDIES ALUMNI AT ASA African Studies Program director John Hanson and associate director Tavy Aherne were delighted to visit with IU ASP alumni and faculty at the recent ASA meetings in Boston. IU’s presence was also quite evident in Boston by the numerous presentations by alumni, current graduate students, and faculty. We look forward to seeing you next year in Washington, D.C.

John Hanson with IU ASP Alumnus Jeremy Rich

IU Professor of History Michelle Moyd and IU Alumna Jennifer Hart Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

31

PROGRAM NEWS ASP & THE UNIVERSITY OF BAYREUTH’S “AFRICA MULTIPLE” CLUSTER OF EXCELLENCE GRANT Indiana University’s African Studies Program is a “preferred partner” in a network of universities in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, South America, and the United States associated with the University of Bayreuth’s seven-year Cluster of Excellence grant from the German Federal Government, awarded in 2019. This new partnership emerges from initiatives undertaken by John Hanson to include the African Studies Program in the long-standing relationship between Indiana University and the University of Bayreuth.

The University of Bayreuth held a conference in late October 2019 to start conversations between representatives of the various institutions that form part of the Cluster of Excellence network.

The conference, “Africa Multiple: Conversations and Building Networks,” occurred in Bayreuth on October 30-31, 2019.

Akin Adesokan was invited to speak on the history of the arts from a West African perspective for the panel focused on the knowledge production about Africa, one of the themes of the grant. Travel issues unfortunately prevented his participation.

John Hanson presented on another panel and theme of the grant, African Studies in the Digital Age, with examples from his experiences on several digital humanities projects as well as other digital projects involving the African Studies Program. Hanson also engaged in conversations to continue relations with the University of Bayreuth’s Cluster of Excellence.

32

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

IU CONGO WORKING GROUP This fall, a new working group formed at IU that is open to both graduate students and faculty. The IU Congo Working Group (CWG) is an interdisciplinary working group founded by graduate students in the School of Education and the Center for Constitutional Democracy. It serves to connect IU to colleagues and affiliates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The group tackles important issues from both local and international perspectives and offers events to the wider campus community.

Examples of timely issues that may be addressed include elections and electoral laws, political alliances, natural resources, education, environment, and responsible governance. If you are interested in joining, please contact the CWG leads through their Facebook page (search IU Congo Working Group) for more information.

STONE AGE INSTITUTE GIVES BACK TO TANZANIA AT OLDUVAI GORGE The Stone Age Institute (SAI) was founded as a non-profit archeological research center focused on human origins and their technological adaptations. African Studies faculty affiliates Nicholas Toth (Professor of Anthropology, Cognitive Science Program) and Kathy Schick (Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Cognitive Science Program) have worked diligently as founders and co-directors of SAI to expand the mission of the institute, including work at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (where SAI researchers have been excavating since 2012).

Working with Jackson Njau, (a research scientist with SAI, IU Assistant Professor in Geological Sciences, and ASP faculty affiliate), they recently partnered with the Tanzanian government to design, fund, and build a monument at Olduvai Gorge.

Olduvai Gorge, known as “The Cradle of Humankind,” became a household name through Louis and Mary Leaky’s excavations of early hominins beginning in the 1930s. It is one of the most significant paleoanthropological sites in the world and Nicholas Toth (blue), Kathy Schick (green) and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, yet few visitors to Tanzania know that one can visit Jackson Njau (yellow) worked with the Tanzanian the gorge through guided tours and the associated museum. It is hoped that this government to make this monument possible. monument will bring awareness to the accessibility of the site for tourists and assist Tanzanian economic development through tourism. The Stone Age Institute and the John Templeton Foundation funded the monument’s creation, which was designed by SAI scientists and fabricated by Tanzanian sculptor Festo Kijo. The monument is composed of representations of two of the earliest hominin skulls, both excavated at Olduvai Gorge: Parathropus robustus and Homo habilis (discovered by the Leakeys in 1959 and 1964, respectively). Each are six feet in height and are mounted on a stone platform, making for an impressive structure that can be seen from a great distance.

The Stone Age Institute, through funding from the Kaman Foundation, has also completed construction of a permanent, onsite geoarcheological research laboratory at Olduvai Gorge. The more than 2,000 square foot lab has solar panels and a water collection and storage system. Schick, Toth, Njau and Ian Stainstreet were involved in the initial design. Njau has been involved with IU’s Olduvai Field School in Tanzania, which provides IU students with field experience during the summer months [profiled in the ASP’s 2017-2018 Newsletter]. IU students and faculty involved in the field school will be among those who will make use of this new facility. “We are investing in the scientific infrastructure of Tanzania and the future of research at Olduvai Gorge,” states Toth. “This laboratory will be used by future generations of prehistorians who focus on human origins research.”

For more information, visit stoneageinstitute.org and olduvai.earth.indiana.edu.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

33

IU students at the Olduvai Field School, Tanzania

34

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

35

PROGRAM NEWS MEET “BABA STAFFORD”

SPREADING UNDERSTANDING OF AFRICAN AESTHETIC SYSTEMS AT IU AND BEYOND THROUGH DANCE AND ACTIVISM Stafford C. Berry, known by students and friends as “Baba Stafford,” is Professor of Practice for the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS) and the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance. Berry previously spent eight years at Denison University in Granville, Ohio where he was assistant professor of Dance and Black Studies. Among his various experiences, he studied with Les Ballets Africaines, the national dance company of Guinea. At IU, he directs the African American Dance Company (AADC), founded by AAADS professor emeritus and African Studies faculty affiliate Iris Rosa in 1973.

The AADC is one of three ensembles that make up the African American Arts Institute, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. Along with the African American Choral Ensemble and IU Soul Review, it was born out of an initiative in 1974 from Herman Hudson who founded and chaired what was then the Afro-American Studies Department in 1970.

Going into his third year at IU teaching African and African Diaspora dance courses, one of Berry’s goals at the helm of the AADC is to provide more visibility for the organization on a national and international scale.

“One of the things that I knew I could contribute to was to increase visibility in the black dance field, in the African dance field,” said Berry. “One of the base ways is to get people to utter the words African American Dance Company and IU in the same breath.”

Berry explains that the uniqueness of the AADC is the fact that it is part performance group and part academic course. While not a professional dance company, there is still an audition. At the yearly conference of the National Dance Education Organization in 2019, he gave a workshop on his approach to choreography, which crosses cultural boundaries.

“It’s an interesting model to look at for other choreographers,” Berry said. “Particularly those interested in community work and underrepresented communities.”

Certified in a Pan-African dance technique called Umfundalai, Berry teaches from an Africanist perspective so that his students can “grapple with ways of being, doing dance, and thinking about dance that they may not have otherwise had to do.”

With his dance students in both departments at IU, Berry acknowledges that he is a very unconventional teacher.

“I don’t filter or adjust intentionally how I am teaching them. I am a loud, very colorful, language full, tall, energetic black man that is in front of them saying, ‘get yo leg up!’,” he laughs. “Like, you know, yelling is part of what I give. It’s not yelling for the sake of yelling, but yelling from passion.”

Sometimes he gets students who say they already have the basics of dance because they have done ballet, but, he admonishes, “this ain’t that.” African dance cultures have deep, rich histories, and the body, voice, and dress represent significant aspects of an entire aesthetic experience that also involves one’s audience, the music and musicians, belief systems, and more.

36

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

“We’re engaging in dialogue, but we’re also singing and we’re crawling on the floor,” Berry explains. “It becomes a dance history moment.”

And speaking of history, Berry is working to save a piece of it in Bloomington. He wants to revive the memory of Bloomington’s Black Market, firebombed by the Ku-Klux Klan in late 1968 just months after opening. The market, formerly located on the corner of Kirkwood and Dunn where People’s Park now stands, used to sell LPs, books, art, and African imports. Berry is advocating for some kind of physical marker to commemorate the market’s role as an important gathering space for the black community. In September 2019, he and some friends staged a spontaneous pop-up dance performance there that garnered attention.

He credits his approach to community activism as largely influenced by the fourteen years he spent working with his mentor Chuck Davis and the African American Dance Ensemble. They did residencies where they moved into a community and met with folk of all walks of life to find the resources and the common ground to “cobble together a performance that really was about taking what was in the community and integrating it with what we had.” Instead of outreach, Berry likes to see it as in-reach.

“I like to think of widening these walls so that we create this community where WE are the community and I’m reaching within our own community,” he said.

Berry, born and raised in Philadelphia and a big-city kid at heart, is hoping to branch beyond Bloomington and explore “in-reach” possibilities in the Indianapolis area, too.

“I can’t stay focused only on the academy. That would drive me bonkers,” Berry said. “We get so limited in our theoretical approach that we sometimes have to be reminded or remised to remember that more practical and embodied ways of knowing are just as valid.”

DID YOU KNOW? 2019 marks several converging commemorative moments 45th anniversary: African American Arts Institute 50th anniversary: Neal-Marshall Black Cultural Center 50th anniversary: Birth of Stafford C. Berry. Happy Birthday, Baba Stafford!

50th anniversary: Stonewall Riots (the catalyst in the fight for LGBTQ equality) 50th anniversary: Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies 400th anniversary: Beginning of American slavery Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

37

PROGRAM NEWS ASP’S BETTY DLAMINI COLLABORATES WITH THE INDIANA UNIVERSITY BOOKS & BEYOND PROJECT The Indiana University Books & Beyond Project is a literacy leadership project. It’s mission, and the extraordinary work of its IU student volunteers, was profiled in the ASP 2018 Newsletter. For more than a decade, this university student organization (USO) has collaborated with over ten IU teaching units on campus – including the African Studies Program. These collaborations are part of the “Beyond” in the organization’s name, helping to meet community needs in Rwanda and locally.

This summer, Dr. Betty Dlamini, African Studies Program senior lecturer, conducted two writing workshops in English for 55 teachers from Kabwende Primary School, Nyabitsindze Primary School and GS Kampanga Secondary School, in the Kinigi sector of the Musanze region, Rwanda.

Co-sponsored by the IU Books & Beyond Project, the ASP, and a research grant awarded to Dlamini, these workshops followed the exploratory workshop on teaching English as a second language that Dlamini conducted in summer 2018.

Kinyarwanda is the mother language used in much of daily life in Rwanda, and is taught in schools. As well, as a former Belgian colony, Rwandan school systems used French as the language of instruction. However, since 2008, English has replaced French in Rwanda as the main medium of instruction. For the majority of the country’s teachers, that means English is likely their third language, after French and Kinyarwanda. Therefore developing English skills among Rwandan’s teachers is critically important to students’ own learning outcomes.

The first of Dlamini’s recent teacher-trainings, was a one-day workshop on non-fiction writing, attended by fifteen teachers. Ten of these individuals had participated in the summer 2018 workshop, and had subsequently participated in a post-workshop writing competition offered by Dlamini and cosponsored by the ASP. The competition was meant to motivate the teachers to continue to write over the course of the year. Five new teachers from nearby GS Kampanga Secondary School also joined in the 2019 session.

“Although they had not participated in the 2018 workshop, I decided to accept them when they wrote me asking to be included in the 2019 workshops,” Dlamini stated.

Dlamini explained how the secondary school teachers had heard about the previous workshop

38

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

from their new colleague who was promoted from Nyabitsinde Primary school to teach in their secondary school. That teacher had participated in the writing contest and was the overall winner!

“I have conducted creative writing workshops before, but I wanted to equip the teachers with non-fiction writing skills first because its demands are less than those of creative writing,” Dlamini added.

The second session was a four-day workshop, focused on using the communicative approach to teach a second, third (or more) foreign language. The teachers from Kabwende, Nyabitsinde and GS Kampanga schools were all welcome to participate in the workshop.

“In the four-day workshop I modelled how the teachers could prompt their learners to use English by creating meaningful scenarios that compel them to use English instead of French and Kinyarwanda,” Dlamini explained.

She added that such scenarios include, for example, communicating with tourists and with friends from English-speaking countries who do not know Kinyarwanda and French.

The participants of the four-day workshop included the fifty teachers who had participated in the summer 2018 exploratory workshop on teaching English as a Second Language and the five from GS Kampanga Secondary school. With her background and experience in teaching English Language and Literature in high schools in Eswatini and the UK, Dlamini had gone to Rwanda in 2018 ready to provide the teachers with the skills they needed. In 2018, she had started off with a needs-assessment survey, which divulged that the teachers needed both pedagogy and content. After the 2018 workshop, it became apparent that for this new workshop, she needed to demonstrate how to use the communicative approach to teach a second or third language.

As in 2018, Dlamini finished her summer workshop by giving the teachers another writing challenge. The teachers chose their topics, which revolve around writing about aspects of their culture. The teachers’ writing project continues long distance, with the teachers submitting their monthly writing installments of English articles via email. Dlamini provides feedback and further support to the teachers. A future goal is to secure funding to publish the teachers’ written pieces and conduct more workshops to hone the teachers’ writing and language pedagogical skills.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

39

PROGRAM NEWS AFRICAN STUDIES PROGRAM PARTNERS WITH THE RWANDAN COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION OF INDIANAPOLIS In fall of 2019, IU undergraduate and graduate students acquired an exciting, new opportunity to learn Kinyarwanda, one of six language options offered by the African Studies Program (ASP) as well as Arabic taught through Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. As one of four national languages in Rwanda, Kinyarwanda is also spoken by some 30 million people in the Great Lakes region of Africa, including the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, southwest Uganda, northern Tanzania, and northern Burundi. In Indiana, it is the dominant language of some 5,000 Rwandan immigrants who reside predominantly in South Bend, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis.

Promoting Kinyarwanda at IU-Bloomington benefits not only IU students and faculty with a vested interest in the language, Rwandan culture, and/or immigration and refugee studies, but also heritage speakers/language learners born in the United States. Dr. John Musiine, chairperson of the Rwandan Community Association (RCA) of Indianapolis and faculty member at Martin University, explained that one motive behind an IU ASP-RCA collaboration is to assist these heritage learners to retain an important aspect of their Rwandan identity. The IU ASP will be using the successful model of the IU Bridges: Children, Language, World early language acquisition program to offer free Kinyarwanda instruction to children, especially focused on young heritage learners in the Indianapolis area.

“The Bridges-Indy program gives these kids an opportunity to study Kinyarwanda,” said Musiine.

“We don’t want to feel disconnected from the language. We don’t want to lose our own identity.”

Another benefit of an IU ASP-RCA collaboration is the chance to share Rwandan culture through music and dance events with both the IUPUI and IU-Bloomington campus communities. These Rwandan Culture Nights offer an avenue to teach about the role art and music has played as a pathway towards reconciliation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide of predominately Tutsis, Twa, and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Rwandan community members are collaborators in helping to plan and initiate these events with faculty and students of IUPUI’s Center for African Studies and the Olaniyan Scholars Program.

At IUPUI, the partnership will join forces with the Olaniyan Scholars Program to share the culture, values, and work ethics of homeland initiatives in Rwanda. Undergraduate students admitted to this highly selective program work with faculty members

40

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

who use African Studies as a lens to focus on research benefitting communities of color and people of African descent. For example, a case study may be developed on the Rwandan homeland initiative of Umuganda, held on the last Saturday of the month. It is an occasion where the country comes together to perform community service actions such as cleaning-up polluted streets, building a school, or supporting youth/gender empowerment events.

“This is a cultural tradition that has always existed (in Rwanda),” explained Musiine. “It is a citizens’ initiative that is not enforced by the government.”

Another collaborative effort between these student scholars and RCA community members is creating avenues for documenting the rich history of Rwandan immigrants in Indiana. Students would partner with community members to learn of these histories, of the neighborhoods, and possibly created an online site for documentation.

IU ASP’s commitment to Kinyarwanda extends to supporting school-age heritage speakers of Kinyarwanda in taking language examinations necessary for the awarding of the Indiana Department of Education’s Certificate of Multilingual Proficiency, by providing funds to cover the cost of such tests. This is part of a collaborative initiative among IU National Resource Centers, organized by the IU Center for the Study of Global Change in the Hamilton Lugar School, to support the learning of less commonly taught languages in Indiana.

Today, Rwanda has much to boast about. Rwanda is the world’s second fastest growing economy, with a GDP growth projection in 2019 of 7.6%. The nation is ranked second in the number of UN troops contributed to UN international peacekeeping missions (6,546 as compared to the US at 34). As the first country in Africa to ban plastic, Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali is on track to start the first ever “Green City” project on the continent. In a program called “He for She,” the country has also embraced gender empowerment and ranks first on the planet for having the most female representatives in parliament. Thus, one of the key takeaways of an IU ASP-RCA collaboration for students is the opportunity to learn from what is really a remarkable success story given the tragic circumstances from which it arose.

“Regardless of the pain, people have to take ownership by coming together,” said Musiine. “We have to move forward.”

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

41

PROGRAM EVENTS FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ANCIENT EGYPT AND NEW TECHNOLOGY HELD AT IU In the first conference of its kind held in North America, top scholars from twelve different countries convened in Bloomington on March 29-30, 2019, to offer thirty-four presentations on the present and future of computer visualization, virtual reality, and other digital humanities in Egyptology. Hosted by the Egyptology Program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC), the conference offered the opportunity to present current projects involving ancient Egypt and the digital humanities, but also an opportunity to workshop ideas to develop an International Virtual Museum of ancient Egypt.

Professor Stephen Vinson, Hamilton Lugar School Department of Near

Dr. Steve Vinson (professor of Egyptology in the Department Eastern Languages & Cultures (photo by James Brosher, IU Studios) of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and African Studies Program faculty affiliate) and several of his students had originally been working on learning how to make 3D models of Egyptian artifacts in the IU Eskanazi Museum of Art’s collections, but with the museum’s closure for renovation, the project was put on hold. Instead, Vinson and his students found funding to work with a curator of the Egyptian collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art to continue learning about how to digitize the Egyptian collection there.

That’s when Dr. Bernie Frischer, a digital archeologist and professor in the School of Informatics at Indiana University, came up with another idea.

“Bernie suggested creating a website with not just IU’s material, but anyone’s 3D collection,” recalled Vinson.

This virtual museum would provide open-access to the general public for discovering 3D models of ancient Egyptian objects and artifacts. The vision is to allow museum curators around the world to have the possibility of creating virtual access to their collections.

This is especially exciting to Erin Anderson, a graduate student in NELC’s Egyptology program, and a FLAS Fellow with the African Studies Program. Anderson worked on the Brooklyn project and participated actively as a volunteer at the recent international conference.

“I’m into the 3D modeling and using the technology not only for linguistic, but also material analysis,” said Anderson who has a background in archeology. “The increase in manageability makes it (the object/artifact) much easier to analyze.”

With the ability to better catalog objects, Anderson explained that this diversifies the teaching methods on hand to expose more people to ancient Egyptian culture. However, she admitted that there is still some hesitation in Egyptology circles to using “technology as a black box to spit out data.”

42

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Amanda Ladd, an MA student in Egyptology who assisted with the conference program, appreciated the stimulating debates that the conference generated, including how to market the new digital technology to the public.

“Integrating virtual reality, education, and ancient Egyptian resources…it’s a great way to combine what we know about Egypt into a virtual reality experience,” said Ladd, speaking specifically of the virtual reality game creators of “Life into Egypt.”

Ladd, who used to serve as a tour guide for an ancient Egypt collection at a museum in Texas, argued that the process of preserving Egyptian culture using digitization and virtual reality mediums is very important to cultivate linguistic and material knowledge of Egypt for future generations.

“We lost the Egyptian language for many years before it was rediscovered again,” she explained. “It’s the only way to ensure immortality for them (ancient Egyptians).”

For both Anderson and Ladd, the conference connected them to a variety of scholars working worldwide on Egyptology and new technology, including former IU Egyptology MA student Julia Puglisi who is now a PhD student at Harvard University. Puglisi presented on the ability of computer programs to find puns and other plays on Egyptian words.

“Her MA thesis won the prize in 2018 for best MA thesis at IU Bloomington, the second IU Egyptology student in a row to win that prize,” said Vinson.

Dr. Peter Der Manuelian from Harvard University gave the keynote speech (photo by James Brosher, IU Studios)

Dr. Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, gave the final keynote address at the closing banquet on the use of 3D technology in Egyptology.

There are also plans to create a Postdoctoral position shared jointly by NELC and the School of Informatics for an Egyptology scholar to teach courses and lead projects using 3D technology, virtual reality, digital reconstruction, and digital animation.

“The conference really raised our international profile,” said Vinson who said that talks are in the works to hold another one of this nature in the near future, possibly at another location overseas.

This year’s conference was supported by grants from the Office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, the IU African Studies Program, the IU Ancient Studies Program, and the IU Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

43

PROGRAM EVENTS P.S. VIEYRA: PIONEER OF AFRICAN CINEMAS, FILMMAKER, PRODUCER, AND HISTORIAN WORKSHOP This fall, a two-day workshop was held focused on the work and legacy of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. The workshop was organized

by Vincent Bouchard (Associate Professor, French and Italian; African Studies affiliate faculty) and Terri Frances (Director, Black Film Center/Archive) with support from numerous entities at IU. Speakers included Rachel Gabara, Mageye Kasse, Sada Niang, Amadou Ouédrago, Elena Razlogova, and Catherine Ruelle. Workshop participants were Stéphane Vierya, Akin Adesokan, Vincent Bouchard, Mieille Djenno, Erika Dowell, Claire Fouchereaux, Terri Francis, Samba Gadijigo, Michael T. Martin, Marissa Moorman, and Dana Vanderburgh.

Vierya was a pioneer of African film, credited with directing the first film by a francophone African, Afrique sur Seine (1955).

Vierya was a collaborator of Ousmane Sembène’s, a producer of Senegalese films, and a historian and advocate for African film.

Invited speakers and the public participated in discussions of Vierya’s career, the scope and condition of his papers and audiovisual media, as well as film screenings, and a pop-up exhibit of materials from the Ousmane Sembène archive at the IU Lilly Library. Film screenings included Afrique sur Seine, Une nation est nèe, Lamb, Môl, L’envers du Décor, and En residence surveille.

44

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

45

PROGRAM EVENTS

AFRICAN LANGUAGE FESTIVALS

46

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

47

PROGRAM EVENTS

ASP FRIDAY COLLOQUIUMS

48

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

49

PROGRAM EVENTS HLS WELCOME BACK PARTY

50

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

ASP OPEN HOUSE

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

51

PROGRAM EVENTS

MANDELA FELLOWS AT IU

52

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

OUSMANE SEMBENE ARCHIVES PREVIEW EXHIBIT AT THE LILLY LIBRARY

RUTH CARTER LECTURE & SCREENING OF BLACK PANTHER

WORKING WITH AN ACADEMIC JOURNAL

TASTE OF EAST AFRICA

ASP & NALRC CELEBRATE ALWIYA OMAR’S BIRTHDAY

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

53

PROGRAM EVENTS VISITING SCHOLARS

54

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

ASP TEA TIMES

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

55

PROGRAM EVENTS RECEPTIONS

56

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

FILM SCREENINGS

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

57

OUTREACH As a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC), outreach is a core mandate for the IU African Studies Program. Primary among NRC outreach initiatives must be teacher-trainings: one cannot be considered for NRC status unless the program has the capacity, expertise and willingness to train K-12 teachers. A “competitive priority” for the 2018-2022 Title VI grant cycle is assistance to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and Community Colleges (CCs) in internationalization and professional development of faculty in the specific world region. Another consistent “competitive priority” for the Title VI NRC grant is the teaching of less-commonly taught languages and outreach promotion of those languages (LCTLs). An NRC is also expected to reach out to community organizations, provide expert commentary to the media, and expertise to business and the government. By any measure, this past year was an exceptional year for outreach by the African Studies Program.

STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC SERVED THROUGH ASP OUTREACH & PROGRAMMING

MINORITY SERVING INSTITUTIONS & COMMUNITY COLLEGES

ASP is committed to assisting several Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and community colleges (CCs) in internationalizing.

For efficiency and greater impact, we often combine resources, collaborating with other HLS NRCs and the IU Wright School of Education (SOE). For example, ASP contributes expertise and resources to the Institute for Curriculum and Campus Internationalization (ICCI) organized by the Center for the Study of Global Change, and funding for faculty attendance from our MSI/CC partners. ICCI trains faculty from higher education institutions on how to incorporate global learning into courses; ASP provides materials and expertise to specifically aid the introduction of Africa-content. ASP has sent faculty from MSI/HBCU Huston-Tillotson and from MSI/CC St. Louis Community College system and CC Ivy Tech to ICCI; these faculty stated they were immediately able to incorporate information and techniques learned at ICCI into their curriculum.

ASP is assisting MSI/HBCU Huston-Tillotson (H-T) in internationalization of their curriculum, including the creation of a Global Studies interdisciplinary major. ASP is supporting an H-T faculty retreat this fall focused on internationalization of courses with Africa-content and the new Global Studies major. As there was only one trained Africanist at H-T, faculty are receiving professional development training through an intensive, international experience through the CAORC- Senegal program. As well, ASP is providing professional development support each year for H-T faculty to attend Africa-related conferences. By January, there will be three H-T faculty who have received such training and have regional experience in Senegal and/or other areas of West Africa. Additionally, H-T faculty who are wishing to incorporate Africa-content are receiving course releases for new course development.

ASP is assisting Ivy Tech CC faculty to internationalize courses and obtain professional development, as well as provide programming for their Diversity and International Days. ASP faculty also participated in a roundtable at Ivy Tech on internationalization of the math curriculum through incorporation of Africa-content. ASP has provided personal consultations to several faculty wishing to add content on Rwanda and Ghana to their courses. ASP partners with the Midwest Institute for International & Intercultural Education Conference (MIIE) on Higher-Ed teacher-training for Midwest CC faculty, supporting CC faculty attendance there and at curriculum development trainings (thus reaching CC faculty from across the U.S.). This year, ASP

58

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

also sponsored a faculty member from Ivy Tech to attend the MIIE curriculum development summer workshop. A result over the past year has been the internationalization of two math courses at Ivy Tech and the development of two math competitions for advanced Ivy Tech students – all with Africa-content. As well, we are collaborating on the Global Employability Initiative for Ivy Tech and other CC’s, to strengthen Indiana’s workforce by integrating global skills and competencies across technical education and the career pipeline of Indiana. This is working its way through the Indiana Department of Education.

ASP is expanding on IU’s Inner Asia & Uralic NRC’s partnership with MSI/CC St. Louis Community Colleges system to internationalize campus programming and curriculum with Africa content through multiple forms of support, including trainings, international experience (through the CAORC Curriculum Training & Development Workshop in Senegal), MIIE, and ASP faculty expertise. ASP is sponsoring a faculty member who directs the Community Nursing Program at St. Louis to the CAORC-Senegal training. We expect this will have a significant impact on the curriculum, but even more so on community health interactions. ASP expects to also send IU ASP faculty to St. Louis this spring to offer lectures.

TEACHER TRAININGS & LANGUAGE PROMOTION AND TRAININGS

ASP works closely with School of Education (SOE) faculty and the Director of Global Education Initiatives Vesna Dimitrieska in SOE’s Center for P-16 Research in systematic efforts to internationalize P-16 education in Indiana, serving pre-/in-service teachers, administrators, and students. ASP has teacher-trainings in projects targeting all levels, collaborating as well with IUPUI, the Indiana State’s Department of Education (IDOE), other HLS NRCs, and other Africa NRCs. Through partnership with SOE, in the past year, there have been international experiences for pre-service teachers with Global Gateway teacher-training in Tanzania, on-going SOE course internationalization for pre-service teachers, and Global Literacy Invitations training (teaches how to introduce Africa-content literature into K-12 classes). We have partnered with the Global Center, the SOE and other HLS NRCs for Internationalizing the Academic Standards- Indiana which provides an online open-access Global Literacy Invitations Teacher Training resource to incorporate content in all subject areas, with specific examples and lesson plan recommendations to meet the Indiana State Standards.

ASP also supported two rounds of the Principals Academy for internationalizing K-12 schools across Indiana, and provided resources for the IN Foreign Language Teacher Association, and IN Council for Social Studies. In collaboration with HLS, SOE, and IDOE, we are beginning the process of internationalizing vocational training in Indiana through the Global Employability Initiative.

ASP is also in talks with the IU Center for Rural Engagement (CRE) to see how we can support CRE’s Quality of Place initiatives.

At IU, ASP assists SOE/GEI in expanding global competencies across IU (ex., creation of a Global Competence Certificate for IU students).

ASP organized a very successful summer institute for teachers on how to internationalize K-6 elementary education in Indiana, and has followed up with in-school Africa-content programming to meet school needs. Additionally, ASP has conducted trainings on Africa-content meeting state standards for in-service social studies teachers through the World History & Geography

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

59

OUTREACH trainings; this year, we have concentrated trainings in underserved rural areas across Indiana (six counties).

Further, IU’s engagement with teachers and students in underserved rural areas of Indiana has expanded through efforts with the Eskenazi Museum’s education department offering African arts and culture curriculum in rural schools. Additionally, ASP is seeking to sustainably increase IU’s rural outreach through the development this year of a prototype of the Globally Ready Digital Toolbox learning platform (meant to reach underserved rural K-12 and beyond with lesson plans based on objects in IU collections and informed by faculty research).

Participants at the Summer Institute for teachers on International-

In urban Indianapolis, ASP has begun to work with teachers with high izing the K-6 Curriculum numbers of students who are African LCTL heritage speakers, and with teachers/faculty serving students of color. ASP is assisting in the development of a semester-long course on African History for a high school in Indianapolis which serves a majority minority student population that also has a high number of students who are recent African immigrants. The course, the first of its kind, is to be launched in January. In addition, working with IUPUI’s Olaniyan Scholars Program, we are connecting the Scholars with our community partner members of Umubano, the Rwandan Community Network (note: Umubano is also a community network for other African immigrants in the Indianapolis metro area and beyond). The Scholars are conducting faculty-mentored research within the community, and also gaining cultural knowledge from Umubano members.

With regard to language training and promotion of African languages, ASP began offering Kinyarwanda at IU this fall. The introduction of Kinyarwanda also supports the IU Books & Beyond program which offers IU students (including pre-service teachers) an international teaching and service-learning experience in Rwanda, and internationalization of language arts/arts for local in-service teachers. As well, in partnership with the Umubano Rwandan Community Network, ASP has been developing an early language acquisition program for Indianapolis to reach children who are potential heritage language speakers/learners

MAKING AN IMPACT IN CLASSROOMS

5,625 K-12 STUDENTS SERVED

60

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2,472 K-16 TEACHERS SERVED

of Kinyarwanda. To encourage sustained language learning, the ASP is also supporting students with financial need who are Kinyarwanda heritage speakers to take the test to receive Indiana’s high school Certificate of Multilingual Proficiency. ASP, through the IU Bridges: Children, Language, World early language acquisition program, has been offering isiZulu, Kiswahili, and Arabic instruction in several schools. We will be expanding Kiswahili into the community next semester at the Crestmont Community Boys & Girls Club.

OUTREACH DEPENDS ON STUDENT & FACULTY VOLUNTEERS

With funding assistance through the ASP’s Title VI grant, and the efforts of our student, staff and faculty volunteers, the African Studies Program reached more individuals with quality Africa-content this past year than in the previous four years. This could not have been done without YOU – our volunteers. If you are interested in volunteering to assist with outreach initiatives, or wish to be added to our new listing of faculty experts/speakers, please contact associate director Tavy Aherne (taherne@indiana.edu).

Thank you!

HOW ELSE TO HELP? DONATE!

The African Studies Program is grateful to those of you who contributed to the ASP Enrichment Fund this past year, and especially to our monthly contributors. The ASP Enrichment Fund supports not only outreach and educational endeavors (provided at no cost to the public), but scholarships for African students pursuing degrees at IU, special Africa-focused programming, and more that Title VI funds do not cover. Visit africanstudies.indiana.edu/about/alumni-giving.

Beidy Sow at The Project School’s International Night

3,972 COLLEGE STUDENTS SERVED

Beth Buggenhagen works with students at Templeton Elementary

Baraka Mbise teaches about Tanzania and Swahili language

676

HIGHER-ED FACULTY SERVED Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

61

OUTREACH ASP STUDENTS & FACULTY SUPPORT THE AFRICAN STUDIES K-16 EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH COLLECTION African Studies Outreach programming is diverse and extensive, serving students from kindergarten through the college level, who are studying math, history, social studies, the environment, the arts, and everything in between. Teachers may ask for assistance generally in adding Africa content, or request very specific lesson plans and activities.

We also provide outreach into the community at large, such as recent performances and story times at the Monroe County Library, support for math internationalization at Ivy Tech, or the Great Decisions series to residents of the Meadowood Retirement Community.

One of the ways to meet such varied needs is through our ASP Outreach Lending Collection. The collection consists of objects, books, DVDs of African films, clothing and textiles, musical instruments, a growing collection of African comic books, and more. Items in the collection are lent free of charge to teachers, ASP students, IU faculty and our graduate AIs Resources for teachers in the ASP collections and TAs. In the past two years, the ASP has made a conscious effort to expand the materials we have on offer, particularly in support of the regions from which our African languages -Akan/Twi, Arabic (as spoken in Africa), Bamanakan, IsiZulu, Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, Wolof and Yoruba- are spoken. Other areas of growth are the purchasing of recent Children’s African Book Award (CABA) winners for K-12. The awards are sponsored and veted by the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association and online lesson plans are provided for teachers.

We are also currently building a collection of books and objects for teaching U.N. Sustainability Goals while meeting Indiana State curriculum standards. The ASP’s NRC Title VI grant has greatly assisted in making this possible. However, there are materials that we can’t obtain except through the assistance of our wonderful faculty and students.

DONATIONS • Jeanne Sept (recently retired Professor of Anthropology) donated numerous objects from her years of research on the African continent. Amongst them are textiles and clothing from West and East Africa; Kenyan objects of adornment, children’s toys. incense pots, hair combs, earth pigments, and even an ostrich egg and egg shell fragments that can be used in demonstrations.

• Jeffrey Holdeman (Senior Lecturer, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures; Director of the Global Living-Learning Center) donated six beautifully embroidered men’s hats of West African origin from his collection.

• Betty Dlamini (Senior Lecturer, African Studies) brought back story and school books, objects that a child would have in a school backpack, toys and clothing in support of outreach for Zulu language and culture.

• Tavy Aherne (Associate Director, African Studies Program) donated several books and textiles from West Africa.

62

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

• Macy Richardson (Undergraduate, Certificate in African Studies, Minor in African Languages, and Major in Biology) thought to bring back a gift of children’s literature from her study/work abroad in Botswana this past summer. [Yes, we do think we have the best students!]

ACQUISITIONS Special thanks to our ASP graduate students Matthew Ajibade, Samantha Hyde, and Dana Vanderburgh for acquiring a number of objects to add to our outreach collection during their summer research travels in 2019. From Ghana, Dana brought back Ghanaian school uniforms, school books, a wari game (widely known as mancala), and several children’s toys. From Nigeria, Matthew contributed boys’ and girls’ clothing he had tailored (including an agbada that will excite young Black Panther and T’Chala fans!), school uniforms, school books, and toys made by children from recycled and repurposed materials. From Kenya, Samantha brought back several items, including a wood horse on wheels that is a recent version of a wheeled wood rhino collected by Dr. Sept years ago.

We have already made use of many of these objects in Monroe County classrooms and in teacher-trainings around the state.

Thank you to our donors who provide either objects or funding toward enhancing our educational initiatives!

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

63

OUTREACH A BLOOMING RELATIONSHIP: LOTUS EDUCATION & ARTS FOUNDATION AND THE ASP A significant way for the African Studies Program to expand its outreach efforts is to collaborate with outstanding local and national organizations dedicated to global education and language acquisition. One such successful partnership is with Bloomington’s own Lotus Education & Arts Foundation. Familiar to most of us through the Lotus Festival of World Music held each fall, Lotus’s educational mission extends to creating unique opportunities for students and teachers to experience the diversity, richness, and creativity of cultures from around the world through handson experiences, in-school performances, and personal interactions with artists, musicians, and individuals from various countries.

This year for the Lotus Festival of World Music, African Studies co-sponsored performances by Kokoko! and Balla Kouyate. Kokoko! is a collective of musicians and dancers that originated in Kinshasa, DRC. The collective creates new instrumental pieces from rewiring and upscaling what many might consider junk – cans, engine parts, plastic containers and more into beautifully sculptural, resonant instruments. This was a lively, late night event that introduced Kinshasa music and creativity to a large audience! Balla Kouyate was born in Mali to a griot family. He has been a member of the Ensemble Nationale du Mali as a master balafon player. His Balan Fanga project showcases the West African balafon’s music, history and cultural value. Festival attendees also experienced Afrotronix, supported by IU’s Hamilton Lugar School. The artist, born in Chad, creates what he describes as “Electro Saharan Blues” – an eclectic, “futuristic package” that draws from West African, Saharan and other musical genres.

While the Lotus World Music Festival has gained national attention and has a diverse audience, Lotus Blossoms educational activities are focused on the young ones, close to home. One aspect of Lotus Blossoms is a commitment to having artists and musicians perform and engage with students at schools throughout Monroe County and beyond.

ASP co-sponsored in-school experiences by Balla Kouyate and others this fall.

The 24th annual Lotus Blossoms World Bazaar featured multicultural art, music, language crafts, and live performances. Created by area teachers in 1996, this year’s 2019 event took place on March 29 for all Bloomington-area fourth graders and March 30 for the general public at Fairview Elementary School. With the Bazaar featuring 30 activity stations with everything from Turkish Iznik tiles to Haiku poetry on typewriters, the African Studies Program offered a hands-on opportunity for children and adults to learn about the diversity of African languages and textiles. ASP students and faculty volunteer at this and other events, sharing their knowledge of African languages and cultures. This year, volunteers included undergraduate Kiswahili student Jessica Hynes; ASP graduate student instructors Margaret Mwingira and Baraka Mbise; alumnus Dr. Cheikh Lo; ASP Balla Kouyate faculty Dr. Alwiya Omar and affiliate faculty Dr. Nana Amoa-Ramey; and ASP Outreach graduate assistant Jennifer Lund. Lotus-goers were able to learn about the cultural significance of kanga cloths of Eastern Africa, and then draw their own original kanga designs. Kangas include a phrase, often in Kiswahili, and so participants could choose to have their phrase translated into Kiswahli. Attendees also learned the importance of greetings, and learned simple phrases in Akan, 64

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Bamanakan, IsiZulu, Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, Wolof, and Yoruba from regional language experts. ASP graduate student and former Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant, Baraka Mbise, also engaged attendees further with other languages activities, specifically in Kiswahili, at the World Languages table. Making a special appearance on the Bazaar’s elevated stage area were ASP undergraduate students studying isiZulu, who performed South African Gumboot Dancing. Guided and coached

by ASP faculty member Dr. Betty Dlamini, the students have honed their skills through a semester-long course Dlamini teaches on the history and practice of Gumboot Dancing. Offering a plethora of cross-cultural experiences, over 2000 people attended this much-loved two-day annual event, drawing community-members of all ages.

KOKOKO!

The African Studies Program is often asked to follow up the Lotus Blossoms events with specific in-class curricular support. Thus, our partnership with the Lotus Foundation enables us to reach a much broader constituency, and helps us connect with teachers in the region. For more on Lotus Blossoms: lotusfest.org/lotus-blossoms-main.

Photo credits: Lotus Education & Arts Foundation; Lotus Blossoms image, Dr. Alwiya Omar

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

65

OUTREACH STARTALK SWAHILI SUMMER PROGRAM Swahili (also known as Kiswahili) is the lingua franca of Eastern and Central Africa and is one of the working languages of the African Union. While Swahili has been taught at IU for over 25 years, it is not taught in Indiana high schools or lower grades. The main goal of the STARTALK Swahili program is to introduce Swahili to Bloomington Middle (rising 7th graders)- and High Schoolstudents in Bloomington, Bedford, and surrounding areas.

66

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

67

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES STUDENT NEWS • Issac Agbetuyi (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Biological and Life Sciences) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Yoruba at IU. This is his second FLAS award.

• Victor Alabi (PhD student in Linguistics and Associate Instructor for African Studies): In 2019, Alabi received the African Studies Program (ASP) Language Pedagogy Travel Award as well as the Department of Linguistics Travel Award to present his paper, Pragmatic Acts of Refusals/Rejections in Yorùbá Discourse in the KFLC: The Languages, Literatures and Cultures Conference at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, April 11-13. Alabi also co-published with Victoria A. Alabi, “Dream Symbols and Prevalent Personae in the Best and Worst Dreams of Christian University Students” in Ilorin Journal of Religious Studies, 9.2.

• Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim (PhD student in Anthropology and PhD minor in African Studies) conducted pre-dissertation research in Morocco this past summer, investigating the role that social media platforms play in shaping how young Moroccans perform their multiple religious, gendered, and national identities. He also presented at the ASP’s Friday Colloquium on his research.

• Erin Anderson (MA in International Studies with Africa regional focus) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Arabic at IU. • Tonya Dodez (PhD student in Political Science and PhD minor in African Studies) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Wolof at IU. • Samantha Hyde (Dual MA Library Sciences and African Studies): in the Summer 2019 semester, I was lucky enough to travel to Lusaka, Zambia to complete a brief internship with Lubuto Library Partners. This internship opportunity was funded by the OVPIA International Enhancement grant for graduates and the Larry Singell Internship scholarship from the Walter Center for Career Achievement. During my time in Zambia, I worked closely with Lubuto’s model library staff to research the needs of their early learners. I began creating a STE(A)M-based early literacy curriculum that I will complete over the 2019-2020 academic year as an independent research course through the ILS department. I currently serve as the Digital Outreach Assistant for the ASP. • Damilola Fasipe (Undergraduate minor in African Studies and major in English) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Yoruba at IU. • Maggie FitzGerald (PhD student in History and PhD minor in African Studies) received a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Zulu in Durban, South Africa, as well as a 2019-2020 FLAS to study Advanced Zulu at IU. • Jaclyn Flores (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Linguistics) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Yoruba at IU. • Meghan Halaburda (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Biological and Life Sciences) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Swahili at IU. • Cathryn Johnson (PhD candidate in Political Science and PhD Minor in African Studies) is currently completing her dissertation, Women’s Participation in Community Life and Politics in Mali and Burkina Faso: French Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Associational Life. Johnson received support for her dissertation fieldwork through a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Council (SSRC). In 2018, Johnson was awarded the Carlton T. Hodge prize from the IU African Studies Program for her commitment to African Studies.

• Natalie Lange (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Anthropology) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Swahili at IU. • Rene Lloyd (MA in Public Administration) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Bamana at IU.

68

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

• Sylvester Makobi (PhD student in Music in Literature and Performance, Jacobs School of Music, and PhD Minor in African Studies) interests are in performance and management of African Vocal Art Music. Makobi received the Carlton T. Hodge Prize for his commitment to African Studies in 2019. Sylvester is a member of Graduate Students in African Studies (GSAS), and was chosen by fellow graduate students as the 2019-2020 Graduate Student Representative on the ASP’s Executive Committee.

• Marina Meacham (PhD student in History and PhD minor in African Studies) received a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Zulu in Durban, South Africa, as well as a 2019-2020 FLAS to study Advanced Zulu at IU. Marina is also a volunteer for IU Bridges early language program in Zulu.

• Gaya Morris (PhD student in Anthropology and PhD minor in African Studies) received a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Wolof in Dakar, Senegal at the Baobab Center.

• Madison O’Day (Undergraduate in International Studies with an Africa regional focus) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study 5th year Advanced Arabic.

• Jenny Parker (PhD student in Anthropology and PhD minor in African Studies) is the Director of the West African Research Association (WARA), at the Boston offices. Parker is also writing her dissertation based on fieldwork in Senegal.

• Sydney Pleak (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Public Administration) received a FLAS to study Intermediate Zulu at IU. Sydney also serves as an African Studies program Outreach Ambassador and has volunteered with IU Bridges early language program in Zulu for two years.

• Simon Pierre Munyaneza (PhD student in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education and PhD minor in African Studies) is the ASP’s first instructor in Kinyarwanda. His areas of interest extend from literacy and culture, social linguistics, discourse analysis and language education, to instructional design and technology in the context of Africa. Being a native speaker of Kinyarwanda, he speaks five other languages: English, French, Kiswahili, Lingala and Orunyankole-Rukiga.

• Margaret Mwingera (PhD student in Education, PhD minor in African Studies) is active with the African Studies Program as a Swahili instructor and co-taught the Startalk Swahili language program last summer to 15 area high school students. She holds two different master’s degrees: one in African Studies from Indiana University Bloomington; one in Education from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Currently pursuing a PhD in IU’s School of Education, she also teaches courses on Special Education there. At Indiana University, she collaborated with Professor Robert Botne in the Linguistics Department to research and publish books on the Chimpoto language spoken in southwestern Tanzania. Her research interests focus on inclusion of exceptional learners of languages and social communication and her current research focuses on issues of special education and social communication in young children with exceptional needs in Tanzania. Outside academia, she spends her time cycling, reading books, gardening, and visiting the sick and elderly.

• Macy Richardson (Undergraduate Certificate in African Studies, minor in African Languages, and major in Biological and Life Sciences) was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Swahili at IU. She traveled to Botswana this summer for a service trip working in the health field. Richardson also volunteers with the African Studies program K-12 outreach, presenting at schools on Swahili language and culture. She is one of the ASP’s two undergraduate Outreach Ambassadors. After graduation in the spring, Richardson will be joining the Peace Corps, where she has been accepted to work in a public health project in Rwanda. Congratulations, Macy!

• Avenel Rolfsen (PhD candidate in History) received a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study fifth-year advanced Wolof in Dakar, Senegal at the Baobab Center. Rolfsen also recently passed her PhD qualifying exams.

Congratulations, Avenel!

• Andrew B. Stadeker II (PhD student in African and African American Diaspora Studies, and PhD minor in African Studies) is recipient of a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship in Akan-Twi, his second FLAS. He is in the process of writing his

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

69

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES dissertation on African American migration to Ghana.

• Ana Stahlman (Undergraduate minor in African Languages and major in Social Work) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Advanced Swahili at IU. • Dana Vanderburgh (PhD student in Social-Cultural Anthropology and PhD minor in African Studies) received a summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study 4th year Advanced Akan (Twi-Fante) in Ghana. She is currently researching how the arts can help youth respond to the environmental and social impacts of large-scale development projects in Ghana and Northern Canada.

• Caitlin Wischmeyer (Undergraduate in International Studies with African regional focus) received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Intermediate Swahili at IU.

ALUMNI NEWS • Taiwo Oluwaseun Ehineni (PhD Linguistics; PhD Minor African Studies) is a Preceptor of African Languages in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He earned a PhD in Linguistics with concentration in African Languages from Indiana University (Bloomington) and a MA in Linguistics from the same university. He also has an MA in English from the University of Ibadan (Nigeria). He was a J. William Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University, where he helped in establishing the Yoruba language program, which now has all levels (elementary to advanced) of language instruction. He taught Yoruba at the African Studies Program at Indiana University from 2013 – 2019. Dr Ehineni’s research focuses on various aspects of African linguistics and languages. He is the author of over 15 academic articles in books and reputable journals including Journal of African Languages and Cultures, Language Matters, A Journal of African Studies, International Journal of Linguistics among others. A recipient of several awards including Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies fellowship, Patrick O’Meara Award, Africa Today Research Award, New Directions in Humanities 2016 Emerging Scholar Award among others. He is also a Yoruba language consultant for ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) and has participated in series of ACTFL Yoruba Standards Setting Project. He is a Yoruba language specialist for ALTA Language Services where he assisted in developing the current comprehension (ILR 2 and 3+ levels) module being used to evaluate Yoruba proficiency. He is also interested in language technology and has been the Yoruba and Nigerian English Linguist for series of Lionbridge technology company language projects.

• Khaled Esseisah (PhD in History; PhD Minor in African Studies) successfully defended his dissertation, which explores the social transformations associated with the abolition of slavery in Mauritania, with a focus on the recent history of the Harāṭīn community and its diaspora. In this work, he investigates how Harāṭīn socio-political actions have changed their status in northwest African hierarchies, and how el-medh and mosque-building reflect their investment in religious practices that strengthen their sense of community and political identity. Dr. Esseisah now holds a position as Assistant Teaching Professor in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University.

• Christopher Green (MA and PhD Linguistics) was awarded a Wenner-Gren Fellowship to support a residency at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) while on research sabbatical in Fall 2019. While there, Green will be working with members of the Somali diaspora towards the completion of a Somali reference grammar. Green, along with his graduate student Milkatu Garba, has also recently received an award from the Endangered Language Fund to begin a documentation project on Mbat, a Jarawan language of Nigeria.

• Carolyn Holmes (PhD in Political Science; PhD minor in African Studies) is a 4th year assistant professor at Mississippi State

70

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

•

•

• • • •

University. Holmes has a book forthcoming next fall from the University of Michigan Press in the African Perspectives Series, as well as a few articles. She maintains a position as a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria, Department of Sociology.

Cheikh Lo (PhD Folklore & Ethnomusicology) received his doctorate this spring (2019). Currently, he is a Visiting Lecturer with the Indiana University African Studies Program where he teaches a Contemporary Africa course and is developing an online course in Wolof. He has two book chapters in the recently published edited volumes of Africa Every Day: Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture (Ohio University Press, 2019), and Critical Folkloristics (Indiana University Press, forthcoming). This past November, he presented a paper titled “Religious Commemoration as Embodied Heritage: Two Prayers of Ahmadou Bamba in Saint-Louis, Senegal” at the Islam in Africa Series at Harvard University. Lo was a 2018 recipient of the Patrick O’Meara travel Award.

Rudo Mudiwa (PhD Anthropology) received her PhD in 2019. She is currently serving as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. During her time there, she will be working on turning her dissertation into a book manuscript, tentatively titled: A Nation of Prostitutes: Profiling, Sex Work, and the Making of Urban Space in Zimbabwe. Her dissertation, which was co-directed by African Studies faculty Jane Goodman, received the 2019 Dissertation Award from the American Society for the History of Rhetoric.

Samson Ndanyi (PhD History) received his Phd from IU in 2018. Ndanyi is now an Assistant Professor of History and African Studies at Rhodes College.

Beatrice Ng’uono Okelo (PhD in Linguistics; PhD minor in African Studies) successfully defended her dissertation “Aspects of Luo Anthroponymy: Morphophonological and Ethnopragmatic Perspectives.” Congratulations, Dr. Okelo!

Jeremy Rich (MA History; PhD History) is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Social Sciences Department at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

James Wunsch (PhD in Political Science) is completing a nearly 50-year career as an Africanist political scientist. He has taught at Creighton University in Omaha, NE, since 1973, but has been back to Africa for research many times over the years.

He spent two years on leave working at USAID full time in 1978-1980, published three books, and around 40 chapters, reviews and journal articles. Wunsch has focused on local government, decentralization, and service delivery. The bulk of his work has been conducted in Ghana. Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda and southern Africa. He expects to retire in May of 2020 and wanted to say, “Thanks to IU for a great start!”

FACULTY NEWS • Akinwumi Adesokan (Associate Professor, Comparative Literature) published three book chapters in 2019. These include “What is Yoruba Nollywood?” in Camera, Commerce & Conscience: Afrowood and the Crisis of Purpose, edited by Ayo Ojebode, et al; “The Invisible Government of the Powerful’: Joseph Gai Ramaka’s Cinema of Power,” in A Companion to African Cinema, co-edited by Ken Harrow and Carmela Garritano, and “Wole Soyinka: Ake, The Years of Childhood,” in the Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. He also participated in roundtable discussions about An Opera of the World, a film directed by Manthia Diawara, during the May 2019 African Literature Association conference in Columbus, Ohio. In August 2019, he participated in the Second D.O. Fagunwa International Conference held at the Royal Bird Hotel in Akure, Ondo, Nigeria.

• David Adu-Amankwah (Senior Lecturer, African Studies Program) was successfully re-appointed as Senior Lecturer with an extended service term. He also served as assistant African languages coordinator for the African Languages Program in African

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

71

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES

•

•

• •

•

• •

Studies. He was and still is on the Language Advisory Committee of the African Studies Program, Indiana University. He was patron of the African Languages and Cultures Club. Adu-Amankwah presented a paper titled “Everyone’s Nose Fits their Face: The Dynamics of Rural-Urban Life and Implications for American Workers in West Africa” to the Indiana National Guard (on official assignment to Niger, West Africa) in 2019. He also presented a paper titled “Beyond Face-saving: The Role of Indirection in Akan Royal Praise” for the Friday Colloquium series of the African Studies Program, Indiana University, in 2019. His book chapter titled, “Oratory and Rhetoric in Africa: The Case of Praise Poetry” in Handbook of African Oral Tradition and Folklore is being published by Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently revising his Siesie Wo Ho Sie: Elementary Akan (Asante-Twi) Vocabulary [2018] for publication by AuthorCentrix Press.

Tavy D. Aherne (Associate Director, African Studies Program; Affiliate Faculy, Art History) participated on two panels at the 2019 African Studies Association meetings in Boston. In her role developing educational outreach initiatives, she organized and presented at the IU Hamilton Lugar School’s Summer Institute “Internationalizing K-6 Curriculum,” as well as presented at numerous other trainings and events for teachers and their students across Indiana. Additionally, she was a guest lecturer for several courses at IU. Aherne serves as an editor for the journal Africa Today.

Heather Marie Akou (Associate Professor, Fashion Design; Eskenazi School of Art + Design; Director of the Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection) has recently published the article, “Tetela Amulets: Re-interpreting a Medical Anthropology Collection as a Fashion Benchmark,” in the International Journal of Fashion Studies (vol. 6, no. 2, 2019). She is also co-editing a forthcoming anthology titled Creating African Fashion Histories for publication by IU Press.

Robert Botne (Professor, Linguistics) published the book Aspects of Chimpoto Grammar in 2019. He also authored a book chapter titled, “Chimpoto N14” to appear in The Bantu Languages (2nd edition, Routledge) in 2019.

Vincent Bouchard (Associate Professor of French, Department of French and Italian) published an article titled, “Le silence des spectateurs lors des projections coloniales en Algérie : révolte ou décalage culturel ?,“ in 2019. He also has an article in press for the publication Mise au point titled, “European Design of Propaganda when Confronted with Colonial African Realities.” In July 2019, he was featured on WFHB’s “Bring It On!” in a discussion about a September 2019 IU workshop that he organized on Paulin S. Vieyra titled, “Vieyra: Pioneer of African Cinemas.”

Beth Buggenhagen (Associate Professor, Anthropology) contributed a review of IU ASP Alumna Joanna Grabski’s book Art World City titled, “Transformed from the Inside Out” in the journal Africa Today (vol. 65, issue 4). At the IU Europe Global Gateway (Berlin, Germany) and Bayreuth University’s international workshop on “Religious Authority in Muslim Africa: Fragmentation and Plurality” Buggenhagen was an invited speaker, presenting the paper, “From Photographic Portrait to Devotional Image: Photography and Muslim Authority in Bingo Magazine.” At the African Literature Association Conference, she participated in a roundtable titled, “Reflecting on the Digitization of AWA: la revue de la femme noire. Methods, Ethics and Pedagogy.” She also gave a talk titled, “From the Studio to Black Magazines: Portraiture in Bingo Magazine in 1950s Senegal” for the African Studies Program Colloquium Series. Buggenhagen serves as an editor for Africa Today.

Kimberly Carballo (Academic Specialist, Coordinating Opera Coach, Jacobs School of Music; Founder and Director of Reimagining Opera for Kids (ROK)) is part of the inaugural and ongoing team for Tunaweza Kimuziki (Through Music All is Possible), a project promoting exchange among music educators, scholars, and performers in Kenya and the United States.

Stuart Davis (Professor, Linguistics) published three articles in Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: “Are There Transfer Effects in the Arabic Comparative?”; “Diminutive Formation in a Libyan Dialect with some Phonological Implications” with Abdulhamid Gadoua; and “Diminutive and Augmentative Formation in Northern Najdi/Ha’ili Arabic” with Wafi Alshammari. With Abdullah Alfaifi, he also published a paper in Historical Phonology titled, “A Different Path to [f]: Labiodentalization in Faifi Arabic”. For the 50th Anniversary of the IU Linguistics Club (LCIU), he co-wrote an article with Abbie Hantzen and Serge Sagna for the Journal of

72

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

• •

• •

•

•

African Languages and Linguistics titled, “Moraic Preservation and Equivalence in Gújjolaay Eegimaa Perfective Reduplication.”

He also wrote a book chapter titled, “The Volunteer State: An Etiology” for the LCIU Commemorative Collection. In March 2019, he gave a workshop on construction morphology at Indiana University. At the University of Toronto in April 2019, he gave a talk with Abdullah Alfaif at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics titled, “Some Preliminary Observations on a Variety of Faifi Arabic with a Focus on Emphatic Fricatives.” At Leeds University in May 2019, he co-presented with Abdullah Alfaif on “Labiodentalization in Faifi Arabic.”

Mireille Djenno (African Studies Collection Librarian, IU Libraries) traveled to Nairobi, Kenya in October 2019 to visit the Library of Congress Regional Office. One outcome of this meeting will be an increase of the Kirundi and Kinyarwanda language materials being acquired through the Nairobi office’s Cooperative Acquisitions Program (AfriCAP).

Betty Dlamini (Senior Lecturer, African Studies Program) received the Indiana University’s Statewide Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, Class of 2018. She was later appointed to the FACET Statewide Steering Committee for a three-year period, ending in 2021 (facet.iu.edu/contact/committee-members). She has been an appointed At-Large member of the African Studies Executive Committee since fall 2008. She continues to serve as both a student (graduate and undergraduate) and faculty mentor as part of the initiatives of the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs.

After receiving the New Frontiers Exploratory Research Grant, she concurrently ran two English Teachers’ Workshops in the Kinigi sector of the Musanze region of Rwanda, one on 1) Non-fiction writing and 2) Employing the Communicative Approach of Language Teaching and Learning (July 2019). She was invited to speak to teachers and students at Encabaneni High School, Manzini region of the Kingdom of Eswatini in March 2019. She published two Zulu Pressbooks, Imbiza Yolwazi: Sifunda IsiZulu eMerika and Woza uzozwa ngathi: An anthology of IsiZulu students’ stories 2017-2019. She is a peer reviewer of articles for journals including: Journal of Asian and African Studies; Common Ground Research Networks’ The Arts in Society Journal Collection; and, The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. She has served internationally as the external examiner for a University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s PhD, “Lecturers’ Experiences on the Implementation of English Medium of Instruction in a Teachers’ College in Zimbabwe,’ and, a University of South Africa’s English MA dissertation, “Art Designs in Life: Explorations of Leaders’ Impact on Society using Macbeth and Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Grand Tragic Fall.”

Sergio Fernandez (Associate Professor, School of Public and Environmental Affairs) published an article with Shinwoo Lee, Gyeo Reh Lee, and Deanna Malatesta in 2019 titled, “Outsourcing and Organizational Performance: The Employee Perspective” in the American Review of Public Administration. Fernandez serves as an editor for Africa Today.

Greg Fisher (Associate Professor, Kelley School of Business) in 2019 published “Online Communities and Firm Advantages” in the journal Academy of Management Review. In 2018 received an Emerging Scholars Award from Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division; an MBA Teaching Excellence Award at Kelley School of Business, Indiana University; and an Eyster Teaching Award at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.

Laura Foster (Associate Professor, Gender Studies) published two book chapters in 2019. These include “Fieldnotes on Tensions Related to Openness in Researching Indigenous Peoples Knowledge Systems and Intellectual Property Rights” and “Reinventing Hoodia.” In May 2019, she gave an invited talk at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa titled, “Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa.”

Maria Elizabeth (Betsi) Grabe (Professor and Associate Dean, The Media School) has been named editor of Communication Theory, the peer-reviewed journal of the International Communication Association. She was selected as an International Communication Association Fellow, a status that recognizes distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication. Grabe is also a co-leader of the Observatory of Social Media at IU, a new $6 million dollar research center that will investigate the role of media and technology in society.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

73

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES • John H. Hanson (African Studies Program Director; Professor, History; Executive Associate Dean, Hamilton Lugar School) was invited to present papers on the Ahmadiyya in Ghana at two scholarly conferences in 2019: in January at the University of Florida’s symposium on “Religious Minorities in Muslim Africa,” and in October at the Faculty of Comparative Study of Religion and Humanism’s conference on “The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Scholarly Perspective” in Antwerpen, Belgium. Hanson co-organized and was a panel discussant at a workshop, “Religious Authority in Muslim Africa: Fragmentation and Plurality,” at the IU Europe Gateway in Berlin from October, 2019. Hanson also presented a paper on his involvement in digital humanities at the University of Bayreuth’s conference, “Africa Multiple: Conversations and Building Networks,” in October, 2019. Hanson also was on three panels at the 2019 African Studies Association meetings in Boston: a presentation on the “Author Meets Critic: Paul E. Lovejoy’s Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions” panel, a discussant on the “Muslim Minorities in Africa” panel, and a presenter at the “Working Effectively with Journals” panel. Hanson taught a course at the University of Bayreuth’s International Summer School in July 2019. He published two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition (Leiden: Brill, 2019): “Fulbe, Fulfulde,” 30-33, and “Karta,” 62-63. He also co-authored the editor’s introduction to History in Africa, Volume 46 (2019). He also published a review of Paul E. Lovejoy’s Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 48, number 4 (2018). Hanson received the Service Award at the 2019 African Studies Association meetings for his ten years of service as one of four editors of History in Africa. Hanson serves as an editor of Africa Today.

• Eileen Julien (Professor, Comparative Literature) published “On Duality” in the Journal of the African Literature Association in March 2018. She received the 2019 Distinguished Member Award from the African Literature Association for outstanding record of service and commitment to teaching and scholarship in, and promotion of, African literature. Julien serves as an editor of Africa Today and is on the advisory editorial board for Black Camera.

• James Kelly (Associate Professor and Director of Journalism, the Media School) completed his Fulbright Scholar award in June and is writing up the results of his research there. From January to June, Kelly was a Visiting Lecturer at Moi University’s department of Communication Studies in Eldoret, Kenya. While there with his wife Carol, he taught a photojournalism course to 45 Moi undergraduate students and conducted a series of interviews and documentary photographic projects for a book he is writing about the 30-year-old collaboration between the medical schools at IU and Moi University, and the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. The partnership is now known as AMPATH, but began as the IU-Kenya Partnership in 1990 when IU medical faculty helped Moi faculty establish Kenya’s second medical school. Since then, the collaboration has responded to the HIV/ AIDS epidemic by developing a great many innovative treatment and patient support programs. Currently, it is working with the Ministry of Health toward a universal health care system predicated on preventative care and a national insurance fund. The book will include four in-depth photo stories about Kenyans who work in the more than 50 patient-support projects and interview/ portraits of the Kenyan and American leadership. Publication through the IU Press is planned for 2020.

• Patricia Kubow (Professor in International Comparative Education, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Curriculum and Instruction) had two publications on South Africa published in 2018. These include “Exploring Western and non-Western epistemological influences in South Africa: Theorizing a critical democratic citizenship education” in Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education; and a book chapter on “Schooling inequality in South Africa: Productive capacities and the epistemological divide” in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2017, International Perspectives on Education and Society.

• Alex Lichtenstein (Professor, History): With sponsorship from the College, the Global Living Learning Community, and from CSGC, Lichtenstein took 8 IU students and 4 students from South Africa on a “civil rights tour” of the US South, Oct. 4-8. Highlights included museums and historical sites in Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, Jackson, Selma, Montgomery, and

74

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

•

•

•

•

•

Birmingham. With support from the ASP and Title VI, he plans to follow with taking IU students to South Africa, and develop a curriculum-linked study abroad. In 2019, he published an article in Labor History titled, “`We feel that our strength is on the factory floor’”: Dualism, Shop-Floor Power, and Labor Law reform in late apartheid South Africa.” In February 2019, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Sao Paulo, School of Philosophy, Letters & Human Sciences where he taught a course on US/ South African race relations. He presented a paper titled, “Twenty-Five Years Later: The State of Labor in Post-Apartheid South Africa” at the 2019 Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa in Burlington, Vermont. In April 2019, he also gave a talk on the end of apartheid at the “Thirty Years after Global 1989” for the Human Rights Program at Purdue University.

Pedro Machado (Associate Professor, History) presented the paper, “A Trove of Ocean Riches: Marine Products and the Political Economy of Empire,” at the Global History Seminar affiliated with the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University on October 28, 2019. He also gave a public talk on April 20, 2019 at the Seattle Art Museum on how the 20-century Portuguese state embraced the establishment of forests – especially eucalyptus – at home and abroad in its African colonies. Thousands of eucalyptus trees were planted across great swathes of Angola and Mozambique, reshaping their African landscapes.

Lauren M. MacLean (Professor, Department of Political Science) was a featured guest in December 2018 on an Ufahamu Africa Podcast regarding student protests in Ghana. In 2019, with Jennifer Brass and Kirk Harris, she contributed, “Is there an AntiPolitics of Electricity?: Access to the Grid and Reduced Political Participation in Africa” to Afrobarometer Working Paper. In 2019, she also gave talks at the Southwest Workshop on Mixed Methods Research (ITAM/Mexico City), CDD-Ghana, Indiana University Ostrom Workshop WOW, and the American Political Science Association (APSA). MacLean serves as an editor of Africa Today.

Michael Martin (Professor of Media and Cinema Studies, The Media School) was the editor for The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present (Indiana University Press, 2019). Martin is co-editor with David C. Wall, of the forthcoming, From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (Indiana University Press, in-press, May 2020). He also had the following articles published in 2019: Michael T. Martin, “The Practice of Curating the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive: A Conversation with the Founding Director,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal, vol. 11. no. 1 (Fall 2019): 40-61; and, Martin with Noel Griffis, “Black Women Becoming Whole: Bridget M. Davis on Naked Acts,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal, vol. 11, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 13-39.

Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz (Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art, Associate Professor, Art History): Martínez-Ruiz’s ideas and perceptions on African art and the African diaspora will be the subject of an upcoming book of critical essays to be published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. In Summer of 2019, he carried out field research in Padua Village in Angola on rock painting and tree engravings in the Kongo Kingdom. He plans to return in December 2019 and will publish an essay about the Padua findings in ARTAFRICA (artafricamagazine.org) later in 2019.

Marissa Moorman (Associate Professor, History) presented on a panel at the book launch of “Atlantica: Art from Angola and the Diaspora” on March 9 in Lisbon. She co-authored, with Delinda Collier of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an article entitled “Medium and Media in Angola: Expressive Practices in Context” that appears in the book. On March 12, she co-taught a class called “Luanda Humms and Buzzes: Urban Soundscapes, Club Music, and Dance” with André Soares, a PhD student at Universidade Nova in Lisbon. The class was held at ISCTE at the University of Lisbon. She also signed a contract with Mercado de Letras for the Portuguese translation of her book Intonations, which will be published in June in Lisbon. She gave an invited talk “O papel da música na construção da nação,” (The Role of Music in the Construction of the Nation) at the Homenagem aos 100 anos de Carlos Aniceto ‘Liceu’ Vieira Dias (Dedication on the 100th Anniversary of the birth of Carlos Aniceto ‘Liceu’ Vieira Dias) at the Universidade Católica de Angola, in Luanda, Angola, 1-7 May 2019. Earlier this spring, she received an Individual Research Award from IU’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

75

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES •

• • •

•

Cold War, 1931-2002 has been published by Ohio University Press in the New African Histories Series: ohioswallow.com/ book/Powerful+Frequencies. On May 20 she gave a talk on the high verses popular art (arte erudita vs. arte popular) at the conference to celebrate the first graduate class of ISART, the Instituto Superior das Artes in Luanda, in Angola. June 4, Moorman presented “A música popular angolana e a rádio durante o século XX,” at the Curso Livre de História de Angola, UCCLA, Lisbon, Portugal. And June 14th, she gave a talk on the history of Angolan music at the October Gallery in London. Her article “Radio as a form of struggle: scenes from late colonial Angola” was published in The Conversation on December 2.

Michelle Moyd (Associate Professor, History) co-authored with Joël Glasman a book chapter titled, “Military and Police” in General Labour History of Africa, edited by Stefano Bellucci and Andreas Eckert (James Currey Press, 2019). In the Winter 2019 edition of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs she published an article titled, “Ordeal and Opportunity: Ending the First World War in Africa.” Her work titled, “Radical Potentials, Conservative Realities: African Veterans’ Politics after World War I” was shared at the International Society for First World War Studies Annual Conference at the University of Leeds in September 2019, and as the topic of two keynote lectures at the University of Chicago and SUNY-Fredonia in the Spring of 2019. Last June, she also presented her work titled, “Making Armies: Colonial Military Recruitment as Labor Migration in East Africa, 1870-1900” at the Global Labor Migration Network conference at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. As part of Indiana University’s Great Decisions series, she gave a public talk in February 2019 on refugees and migration.

Luciana Namorato (Associate Professor of Portuguese, Spanish and Portuguese) gave two invited lectures and a workshop in February 2019 on Brazilian novelist and short story writer Clarice Lispector at the Autonomous National University of Mexico, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the Brazil Embassy in Mexico City. Namorato serves as an editor of Africa Today.

Jackson Njau (Associate Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) published “From the Oldowan to the Acheulean at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania” (with I. Torre, L.J. McHenry) in a 2018 special issue of the Journal of Human Evolution 120: 1-421.

Martha Nyikos (Associate Professor, Literacy, Culture, and Language Education) was one of three recipients in November 2019 of Purdue University’s biannual Distinguished Alumni Award. She also received Indiana Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (INTESOL’s) 2019 Best of the Best Higher Education Award. With Vesna Dimitrieska (Research Scholar and Director of Global Education Initiatives for the Center for P-16 Research and Collaboration) she presented “The State Landscape of Pilot Dual Language Programs: Lessons from Indiana” at the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Annual Convention and World Languages Expo in November 2019 in Washington D.C. Nyikos is the pedagogical coordinator of IU’s Bridges: Children, Language, World early language acquisition program, which offers free language instruction of less commonly taught languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Persian, Russian, Swahili, Zulu, and more) to young learners in the greater Bloomington area and beyond.

Alwiya Omar (Clinical Professor and African Languages Coordinator, African Studies Program) received a grant in Summer 2019 to direct a STARTALK Kiswahili language program for middle and high school students in Bloomington and surrounding areas. The grant was administered by University of Maryland’s National Foreign Language Center. Students who successfully completed the program received IU Foreign Language credit. She collaborates with the State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) by teaching and mentoring MA and PhD students in SUZA’s Kiswahili Linguistics graduate program where she focuses on Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, and Discourse Analysis courses. She is a board member of the Association for Globalization of Kiswahili (CHAUKIDU) and one of the organizers of the CHAUKIDU conference with Swahili as the medium language. The conference took place in Zanzibar in December 2018 where she conducted a language pedagogy workshop on teaching Swahili as a Foreign Language and learner assessment. She also presented in Swahili at a conference in Kampala, Uganda December 13-16, 2019 with a talk titled, “Motivation for American High School Students to Learn Kiswahili: Examples from a Summer

76

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

•

•

• •

•

• •

STARTALK Program.” Omar is actively engaged with other language organizations such as African Language Teachers Association (ALTA), National Council on the Teaching of Less Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL), and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). She attended the 2019 ACTFL Convention in Washington DC and participated in the ACTFL Assembly of Advocates meeting on Capitol Hill on November 21 for language advocacy. Locally, she conducts language pedagogy workshops for IU’s Center for Language Excellence.

Sarah Osterhoudt (Assistant Professor, Anthropology) was a guest speaker at the American University on February 7 to give a guest talk titled, “Naturally Artificial: Value and Labor in Biosynthetic Vanilla.” As a guest workshop participant, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, she gave a talk at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland titled, “‘Transparency: Qualities and Technologies of the Global Gemstone Industry.” She is one of the anthropologists co-leading a cultural restoration program in Northern Iraq. The project, based at Purdue University and funded by USAID in partnership with the Long-Term Assistance and Services for Research (LASER) program, seeks to identify and restore key agricultural resources for minority communities in Iraq and to assist communities to reestablish themselves on ancestral homelands. She is also a team co-leader for a multi-million-dollar Indiana University Emerging Areas of Research 2018-2022 project on sustainable food system science for the 21st century.

Solimar Otero (Professor, Folklore and Ethnomusicology) is a new affiliate faculty member of the African Studies Program.

Otero has two forthcoming books in press: Archives of Conjure: Afro-Latinx Residual Transcriptions of the Dead, Columbia University Press, and Critical Folkloristics: Critical and Ethical Approaches for the 21st Century, co-edited with Mintzi-Martinez Rivera, Indiana University Press.

Beth Lewis Samuelson (Associate Professor, Literacy, Culture, and Language Education) is serving as the faculty director of the IU Books & Beyond Project, a literacy leadership project benefiting Rwandan students and teachers, as well as offering literacy and global education elements to elementary students in Monroe County, Indiana.

Antonia Schleicher (Director, National African Language Resource Center; Professor, Linguistics; Executive Director, IU Language Resource Centers; Executive Director, Center for Language Excellence; Adjunct Faculty, Global Center) was a guest of the African Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh in September 2019 where she gave a lecture presentation on “Less Commonly Taught Languages in the United States: African Languages in Colleges and Universities,” describing the current state of Less Commonly Taught Languages education in the United States including their emerging importance in the global context.

In 2019, she received a National Security Agency (NSA) and National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) Grant of $89,956 to organize a Summer Startalk Professional Development Workshop for instructors of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs).

Amadou Beidy Sow (Senior Lecturer, African Studies Program) participated in African Studies outreach in both spring and fall of 2019 at The Project School in Bloomington for its bi-annual International Night. He shared West African culture – primarily Malian culture -- with students and their parents through discussion, images and artifacts. In mid-2019, he presented at the African Language Teachers Association (ALTA) plenary session about recruitment for courses focused on less commonly taught languages. He also published a textbook about African women and political leadership in Africa. In summer 2019, he gave a talk at the American Embassy in Bamako, Mali about political leadership organized for Malian students by the American Embassy. In fall 2019, he shared his knowledge about West Africa in a presentation at Camp Atterbury in Indiana, a U.S. military and civilian training facility.

Laura Stachowski (Director of Global Gateway for Teachers, School of Education) traveled to Ghana in October 2019 to establish it as a new host country for the Global Gateway for Teachers program. In Africa, the program currently offers an overseas student teaching experience in Tanzania.

Jessica Steinberg (Assistant Professor, International Studies) published her book Mines, Communities, and States: The Local

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

77

FACULTY & STUDENT UPDATES Politics of Natural Resource Extraction in Africa with Cambridge University Press in 2019.

• Esi E. Thompson (Assistant Professor, The Media School) in November 2018 published, “Public Relations Education in an Emerging Democracy: The Case of Ghana,” in the Journal of Communication Management. She presented “Knowledge and Risk Perceptions Following an Infectious Disease Outbreak,” in the Communicating Science, Health, Environment, and Risk and Public Relations Divisions scholar-to-scholar refereed paper (poster) session at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s 102nd annual conference Aug. 7-10, 2019. At The Media School in March 2019, she participated in a “Diversity is Our Future” panel on how best to serve underrepresented minorities in public relations and communications.

• Michael Wasserman (Assistant Professor, Anthropology) presented a poster in Kruger National Park, South Africa at the 7th Conference of the International Society of Wildlife Endocrinology on the effects of dietary phytoestrogens on red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) fecal hormone levels in Kibale National Park, Uganda. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at the 2019 International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB), he presented on the influence of conservation incentives on tropical forests, bats, and primates in Costa Rica. He also presented a poster in Cleveland, Ohio on the presence of Xenoestrogens in the hunter-gatherer diet of Mbendjele BaYaka from Republic of Congo. In 2019 he gave three invited talks at the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers University, the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at Australia National University, and at the Robert Koch Institute for the Project Group Epidemiology of Highly Pathogenic Microorganisms. Grants and fellowships in 2019 include the International Research Experience for Students (IRES) Program, National Science Foundation: “Comparing the influence of economic incentives and land use patterns on the conservation of tropical forests and primates in Panama, Costa Rica, and Uganda”, collaboration with co-PI Dr. Peter Beck - $299,877; BRIDGE Grant, Indiana University - $68,568 (co-awarded with Dr. Marta Venier); Morris Animal Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, “Anthropogenic related stress on reproduction in African forest elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis),” awarded to postdoc Dr. Daniella Chusyd - $100,000; and the Hutton Honors College HIEP Course Development Grant, Indiana University - $6,000 (co-awarded with Dr. Andrew Libby).

ASP EMERITI FACULTY NEWS • Maria Grosz-Ngaté (President, African Studies Association; Research Scholar and Associate Director Emeritus, African Studies Program) gave a guest lecture titled “La tarikha Qadiriyya de Ndiassane: L’institutionnalisation d’un réseau islamique transregional” in the German Historical Institute-CREPOS lecture series in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2019. In May, she presented “The Tarikha Qadiriyya of Ndiassane: Institutionalization, the State, and Religious Practice in a Transregional Islamic Network” at Rutgers University. On November 22, she offered the 2019 ASA Presidential Lecture “Knowledge and Power: Perspectives on the Production and Decolonization of African/ist Knowledges” at the annual meeting in Boston. Grosz-Ngaté also participated in a methods workshop at the University of Segou, Mali, in March 2019. Together with Malian colleagues, she planned and co-organized the conference “Armed Conflict and Insecurity in the West African Sahel: Challenges and Implications for Research and Education” held at the Institut des Sciences Humaines in Bamako, October 1-3, followed by a workshop for emerging scholars on October 4. Grosz-Ngaté serves as an editor for Africa Today.

• Patrick R. McNaughton (Professor Emeritus, Art History) has two essays appearing in the exhibition catalog, Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths, published by the Fowler Museum of UCLA as a compliment to the traveling exhibition of the same name.

• Patrick O’Meara (Special Advisor to the Indiana University President, Vice President Emeritus, and Professor Emeritus of Public and Environmental Affairs and Political Science; Former Director, African Studies Program) with Leah K. Peck has published in

78

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2019 the book Indiana University and the World: A Celebration of Collaboration, 1890-2018 on the university’s commitment to international engagement.

• Claire Robertson (Retired Lecturer, and Adjunct Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington; Professor Emeritus, Women’s Studies and History at Ohio State University;) with Nwando Achebe, has just co-edited a new text on African women, Holding the World Together: Changing Perspectives on African Women, through the University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.

• Ruth Stone (Laura Boulton Professor Emeritus, Folklore and Ethnomusicology; former Associate Vice-Provost for Research; Co-Project Director, Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive) published two books in 2019. These include a Chinese edition of Music in West Africa: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, originally published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. She has also co-edited with Harris Berger the second edition of Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights.

• Verlon Stone (Special Advisor to the IU Libraries’ Liberian and African Studies Collections) is a consultant with Tetra Tech ARD in Burlington, Vermont for a USAID-funded project to continue digitizing and preserving Liberian land records in a digital library repository for the Liberia Land Authority.

ASP STAFF NEWS Wayne Parkinson (Student Services Specialist) received a Distinguished Service Award from the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies (HLS). Parkinson was previously awarded the inaugural HLS Staff Award for his dedication to the African Studies Program. We will miss him and wish him well in his future endeavors.

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

79

READING LIST ASP READING LIST A selection of recent publications from African Studies faculty members

80

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

81

POSTCARDS PHOTOS FROM STUDENTS & FACULTY

Vincent Bouchard with Jean-Pierre and Charles Ouedraogo (Film Director)

Photo/ Beth Samuelson, Rwanda

Baraka Mbise in Tanzania 2019

Photo/ David Adu-Amankwah, Ghana

Books & Beyond volunteers in Rwanda

82

2018–19 Newsletter

Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

Danielle Osbourne in Tanzania

Photo/ Emily Stratton, Osu Street Art, Ghana Newsletter editors: Tavy Aherne & Jennifer Lund Newsletter layout and design: IU Hamilton Lugar School Office of Communications & Marketing Photos: Courtesy of the African Studies Program and the IU Hamilton Lugar School unless otherwise noted Hamilton Lugar School African Studies Program

2018–19 Newsletter

83

Promoting greater understanding and appreciation of the African continent and its people through diverse research, teaching, and outreach activities

African Studies Program Hamilton Lugar School of Global & International Studies 355 North Jordan Avenue, Room 3072 Bloomington, IN 47405 africanstudies.indiana.edu •Hamilton afrist@iu.edu • (812) • @iuasp Lugar School African Studies 855-8284 Program 2018–19 Newsletter

84