Ahmadou Bamba

Reproduced by permission of Oxford University PressIn his lifetime Ahmadou Bamba acquired a following of disciples who would become known after his death as the Muridiyya, a Muslim Sufi way. Sufism is an esoteric dimension of Muslim practice and thought in which disciples seek the path to divine union in this life. The Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Babou suggests that at the time of Bamba’s death in 1927, estimates of Murid disciples totaled about 100,000

Area Studies and the Challenges of Creating a Space for Public Debate

Scholarship in the African humanities—art history, cultural anthropology, history, literature, religion, and so forth—has transcended disciplinary ways of knowing, transformed scholarly conversations from a focus on difference between Africa and the West to an emphasis on connections and convergence, and emphasized the universality of the particular. Today, the African humanities must confront another limitation in scholarly discourse about Africa: the presentist priorities of schools of global studies. If it appears that claims to particularistic knowledge of social and historical processes and linguistic competence are falling on deaf ears, it may be because the logic of securing “America’s Place in the World,” the topic of the spring 2016 symposium in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, no longer depends on knowledge of cultural processes produced by academics based in the university system. The United States moved on in the fall of 2014 from cultural tactics such as the Human Terrain Systems (HTS), developed by the US Army in 2006, to technical interventions like drones—interventions that do not rely on human sentiment or error, and big data like computational social sciences and predictive modeling (Gezari 2015). HTS embedded anthropologists (though the major scholarly association, the American Anthropological Association, rightly opposed HTS) and other social scientists with military units to provide regional expertise and cultural knowledge to aid military intelligence gathering and policymaking. In this new climate, dominated by technological solutions to social and political problems, largely managed by the Department of Defense, how can scholars of the African humanities based in the university system continue to make a case for the knowledge that we produce, which prioritizes humanistic understanding and humane values? It is these values, I argue, that foster public debate on the central issues of our time

Question and Answer Session One. Symposium: "A Contested Resource: Oil in Africa"

Moderated by Beth Buggenhagen, Indiana University Department of Anthropology

Review of Navigating the African Diaspora, by Donald Martin Carter

Reproduced with permission from the International Journal of African Historical StudiesIn this strikingly told tale, anthropologist Donald Martin Carter offers his readers a beautifully written story of exile, personal and collective. In it, Carter tells the story of diaspora, not one, but many throughout history and how they are linked through a pervasive experience of invisibility. Carter tells us, "This project is the result of an itinerant scholar traveling the byways of academic life" (p. xiii). His work, through narrative exposition and field based research, is to make the connections he sees visible to others. Throughout the book, Carter seeks to expose his personal experience of "navigating diaspora" and to think about how the collective experience of diaspora is represented. Navigating the African Diaspora goes beyond the analysis of the political economy of migration to look at the meanings these journeys create for those on them and those seeking to understand

Dak’Art 11th Biennale of Contemporary African Art

What does it mean to produce, circulate, and display art in a global context from the view-point of Africa’s westernmost city, Dakar? One of the ten major biennales in the world, the Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art, is an international exhibition featuring contemporary art produced by artists based on the continent and in the Diaspora. Cura-tors Elise Atangana, Abdelkader Damani, and Ugochukwu Smooth Nzewi organized the eleventh edition of Dak’Art under the theme of “Producing the Common.” This theme took the notion of “Tout monde” from Martini-can writer and poet Edouard Glissant, which promotes a vision of a world of flourishing cultural diversity in unanticipated directions underscoring perhaps the global relevance of the experience of precarity and improvisation

Review of Sufism and Jihad in Modern Senegal: the Murid Order by John Glover

Reproduced with permission from the International Journal of African Historical StudiesThe Senegalese Sufi way, Tariqa Murid, has been the subject of extensive scholarly research. Where historians of Islam in West Africa have conventionally used French conquest as their starting point, Glover focuses on continuity and transformation over a longer time period to understand the emergence of this Senegalese Sufi way as a reform and revival movement. Thus his study addresses the development of the Murid way in the context of the rise of reformist Islam, Wolof civil wars, and the impact of the transatlantic trade in slaves. Glover is interested in the multiple histories through which one can tell the story of Murid modernities. Neither an alternative to nor aligned with colonialism, in Glover's conception Murid modernities speak to the incorporation of the tariqa into local, regional, and global circulations through trade, labor, military service, cash crop production, and taxes

Transformed from the Inside Out: A Review of Joanna Grabski’s Art World City

Dak’Art, Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, is built from within, not without, argues Joanna Grabski in Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar. The Dak’Art Biennale reflects the artists, the urban context in which they create, and art-world globalization. From this artistic activity, the art world is structured, even if an infrastructure of museums, auction houses, and gallery spaces is not readily apparent to visitors to Dakar. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, supported the arts during his presidency, from 1960 to 1980, but state-supported institutions of arts and culture and their collections declined soon after, in the period of economic stagnation ushered in by economic liberalization. Institutions such as the library and museum of the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, the Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie, the Musée Dynamique, the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, and the École Normale Supérieure d’Éducation Artistique struggled without state support. And yet today, Dakar is a thriving center for the visual and performing arts, as well as for literature and fashion. How this has come to be is the story that Art World City tells

Question and Answer Session: Politics, Power and Poverty: Who Wins in Africa’s Resource Boom?

Moderated by Beth Buggenhagen, Indiana University Department of Anthropology

Review of African Textiles, by John Gillow. Thames and Hudson, 2009

John Gillow’s African Textiles: Color and Creativity Across a Continent surveys the production of cloth and clothing across the African Continent. Each of the five sections covers a region of the African continent (West Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa). Importantly, all of the examples covered are handcrafted. Gillow does an impressive job of including not only woven textiles, but tied and dyed and beaded textiles as well as leatherwork and other examples of clothing wrought from skins. African Textiles includes a glossary, resources for further reading, a guide to museum collections, and a map of the continent

Prophets and Profits: Gendered and Generational Visions of Wealth and Value in Senegalese Murid Households1

This paper analyzes the disjuncture between the projected prosperity of male migrant traders of the Murid Sufi order and the actual ability of these traders to maintain the social relations that engender wealth. I focus on an exchange of bridewealth that ultimately resulted in a collapsed marriage to show how households are made and unmade across time and space by diasporic practices. I aim to show how two decades of neoliberal reform in Senegal have had unintended consequences for the prospects of social production. The movement of male traders into transnational trade networks to shore up a stagnant local economy and to reproduce the social and moral order has unanticipated consequences for women's authority. Women claim male earnings not only to run the household, but also to finance the family ceremonies-baptisms, marriages and funerals-and the social payments that accompany these occasions. Women also seek commodities obtained through male trade to exchange in life-cycle rituals. For women, foreign commodities, rather than undermining the production of blood ties, are the very means of making those ties a social fact. In Murid families, the rejuvenation of domestic rituals through access to male earnings abroad sets in motion the production of women-headed households and ultimately of lineages