Translating African thought and literature : postcolonial glottopolitics

The articles of this special issue on “Translating African Thought and Literature” are exploring the long-term linguistic consequences of colonialism and appraising the sometime violent legacies thereof

Georges Balandier’s Africa : postcolonial translations and ambiguous reprises

This article focuses on Georges Balandier’s autobiographical essay Afrique ambiguë (1957). Its translation into English, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision (1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text, Ambiguous Africa does not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier’s book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor to Présence Africaine – he records the environmental, artistic, psychological, and linguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier’s assessment is pessimistic but he identifies, however, the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text

Statues Also Die

“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage.  The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).

Does international cereal trade save water?: the impact of virtual water trade on global water use

Cereals / Trade policy / Water use / Irrigation water / Productivity / Evapotranspiration / Water scarcity / Water conservation

An innovative integrated approach based on DNA walking to identify unauthorized GMOs

&lt;p&gt;In the next coming years, the frequency of unauthorized genetically modified organisms (GMOs) being present in the European food/feed chain will increase significantly. Rice already constitutes a challenge for laboratories developing methods to detect unauthorized GMOs. Indeed, in 2012, several genetic modified rices were detected in products imported from Asia, mainly from China. Therefore, we have developed a strategy to identify unauthorized GMOs containing a pCAMBIA family vector, frequently present in transgenic plants. The presented integrated approach is performed in two main successive steps on Bt rice grains. First, the potential presence of unauthorized GMOs is assessed by the qPCR SYBR&amp;reg;Green technology targeting the terminator 35S (t35S) pCAMBIA element, which allows discriminating pCAMBIA family vectors. Second, its presence is confirmed via the characterization of the junction between the transgenic cassette and the rice genome. To this end, a DNA walking strategy is applied using a first reverse primer followed by two semi-nested PCR rounds using primers that are each time nested to the previous reverse primer. The sensitivity of the method was assessed. This innovative approach allows to rapidly identifying the transgene flanking region and presents the advantage to be easily implementable in GMO routine analysis by the enforcement laboratories.&lt;/p&gt;</p

Integrated DNA walking system to characterize a broad spectrum of GMOs in food/feed matrices

Background: In order to provide a system fully integrated with qPCR screening, usually used in GMO routine analysis, as well as being able to detect, characterize and identify a broad spectrum of GMOs in food/feed matrices, two bidirectional DNA walking methods targeting p35S or tNOS, the most common transgenic elements found in GM crops, were developed. These newly developed DNA walking methods are completing the previously implemented DNA walking method targeting the t35S pCAMBIA element. Results: First, the newly developed DNA walking methods, anchored on the sequences used for the p35S or tNOS qPCR screening, were tested on Bt rice that contains these two transgenic elements. Second, the methods were assessed on a maize sample containing a low amount of the GM MON863 event, representing a more complex matrix in terms of genome size and sensitivity. Finally, to illustrate its applicability in GMO routine analysis by enforcement laboratories, the entire workflow of the integrated strategy, including qPCR screening to detect the potential presence of GMOs and the subsequent DNA walking methods to characterize and identify the detected GMOs, was applied on a GeMMA Scheme Proficiency Test matrix. Via the characterization of the transgene flanking region between the transgenic cassette and the plant genome as well as of a part of the transgenic cassette, the presence of GMOs was properly confirmed or infirmed in all tested samples. Conclusion: Due to their simple procedure and their short time-frame to get results, the developed DNA walking methods proposed here can be easily implemented in GMO routine analysis by the enforcement laboratories. In providing crucial information about the transgene flanking regions and/or the transgenic cassettes, this DNA walking strategy is a key molecular tool to prove the presence of GMOs in any given food/feed matrix

Indicators for comparing performance of irrigated agricultural systems

Irrigated farming / Irrigation systems / Indicators / Performance indexes / Financing / Crop production / Water demand / Water requirements / Prices