Postcolonial Negotiations of Neoliberalism & Revolution at the State University of Zanzibar

Since the entrance of Arab intellectual culture onto Zanzibar, the Indian Ocean archipelago has long been recognized as a generations-deep haven for intellectually revolutionary dialogue and collectivism. Today however, in postcolonial Zanzibar, where revolutionary legacies once ushered in the hope of an emancipatory sociopolitical order characterized by progressive African socialism and egalitarian home rule, the impingement of a neoliberal global regime—the political economic order that supposes that human wellbeing and freedom are best advanced by industrial liberalization, private-market freedoms, unobstructed property rights, and free trade—has thrown revolutionary dreams of governance, independent nationhood, and political identity into flux. While the neoliberal prioritization of “technological rationality” (“the quantification of life based predominantly on market productivity rather than social capability”) has promoted sociopolitical dislocation and alienation, Zanzibar’s genealogical revolutionary ideology has once again come under threat. Amidst these tensions, this thesis will examine the case of a prominent public institution of neoliberal birth, The State University of Zanzibar (SUZA), and ask whether it can meaningfully serve as a contemporary agent for Zanzibar’s legacy of intellectual revolutionary dialogue. We examine SUZA not because its situation is isolated to the institution itself or even Zanzibar, but because the capacity of Zanzibari educational spaces to mirror broader ideological negotiations fits into a larger, global pattern of university politics. By examining Zanzibar in focus, we can meaningfully address geographically-specific neoliberal developments while also better understanding Zanzibar’s place in this present global political shift. Therefore, this thesis is questioning the capacity of SUZA and the East African university to host revolutionary dialogues in the age of neoliberalism, which allows us to consider implications for the revolutionary futures of Zanzibar and postcolonial East Africa. If this work is to find that a leading, ideology-setting university can no longer serve as a conduit of revolutionary discourse, then one is forced to grapple with the deep permeability of the neoliberal order—which leads us to the question (which will not be answered in this work) of where revolutionary thought may be found and fostered in the crisis era of globalized neoliberalism

Tuskegee and the Health of Black Infants

For nearly half a century, the American government funded the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” As the name suggests, this experiment abused black men from Alabama and required medical professionals to withhold care from the test subjects. The “Tuskegee Study” is credited with increasing medical mistrust among members of the black community. Specifically, black men, particularly those similar to the original test subjects, experienced a decline in health following the 1972 “Tuskegee Study” disclosures. In this thesis, the health of black infants is viewed through the lens of the “Tuskegee Study” revelations. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a difference-in-differences methodology demonstrates that the disclosures did not negatively impact the health of black infants. Furthermore, data from the General Social Survey indicates that potential southern black mothers did not experience meaningfully high levels of medical mistrust following the revelations

Colonial Imaginaries: Reconstructing French Indochina through Cultural Artifacts

This senior project examines the colonial conquest of Indochina on the part of the French during the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century not purely as a geographical and historical phenomenon, but also a conceptual and imaginary one. By analyzing and juxtaposing two distinctive cultural artifacts – the reconstructed Angkor Wat in the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris and the Vietnamese bánh mì – this project contends that French Indochina constitutes an imaginary and performative construct on the part of both the French and the indigenous Indochinese populations, who approach and (re)imagine their colonial situation in disparate ways. As evidenced in the case of the Angkor Wat in the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris, which could be read as a work of propagandist fiction, the colonial imaginary of Indochina as constructed by French colonists is a phantasmatic and performative one that comes into considerable conflict with the violent realities of (de)colonization. On the other hand, in the case of the Vietnamese bánh mì – a sandwich which has its roots in the expensive wheat bread, which was regarded as the quintessential French staple – the Vietnamese population appear not as passive participants confined to the French colonial imaginary, but as active agents in (re)imagining their own colonial foodways