Crossing Places Graduate Conference - University of Nottingham, 26-27 Jan 2006

Delegate Biographies and Abstracts

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju: University College London, University of London, UK

Biography
Oluwatoyin is interested in developing dialogue between dominant and non-dominant epistemologies. He has a BA and an MA from the University of Benin, Nigeria, an MA in Comparative and European Literary Studies from the University of Kent and an MA in Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) from SOAS. He is currently a PhD candidate in the comparative literature program at University College, London.

Abstract
The Cave of Becoming: Feminine Biology and its Epistemic Possibilities in the Yoruba and Wiccan Correlations of Feminine and Spiritual Power (presented with Yvonne Owens)

Is it possible to develop epistemological possibilities from a consideration of feminine biology that goes beyond the focus on the ratiocinative or on the non-rational? This paper explores this question from a unique perspective that places in dialogue Western feminist constructions, dominant currents in Yoruba conceptions of the feminine and scholarship that draws upon this, with noncentrist currents in Western thought.
The conception of woman in relation to spiritual power in canonical Yoruba thought and popular consciousness is powerfully ambivalent. Women of power are witches who are A won Iya wa, our mothers, and yet, the creative power that enables their reproductive powers is also capable of manifesting itself in an untamed and at times malefic form.
Wicca, reacting against the misogynist construction of feminine power represented by traditional Western conceptions of witchcraft, could be seen as integrating and contesting perspectives similar to those developed in Yoruba conceptions of the feminine and spirit. Wicca does this by drawing from feminist, mythic and ecological thinking in correlating female biology with cosmic rhythms.
Yvonne Williams and Toyin Adepoju, male and female researchers, perform this paper as a twenty minute critical dialogue in which creative tensions and synergies between their perspectives are directed at actualising the emergence of epistemic possibilities from this dynamic ground.

Ayako Aihara: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Biography
Ayako Aihara is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, working on ‘War and Exile in African Women’s Fiction’ with reference to selected novels from both English and French speaking countries. Ayako holds an MA in African Literature from SOAS, for which she wrote a dissertation on Assia Djebar and Yvonne Vera. She has a particular interest in how contemporary African fiction explores the impact and legacy of liberation struggles and the forms of violence that the global economic system has unleashed.

Abstract
Colonial Encounters and Border-Crossings in Two Zimbabwean Novels: Nehanda and Jikinya

The paper will explore the issue of border-crossings in two Zimbabwean war novels: Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993) and Geoffrey Ndhlala’s Jikinya (1979). Apart from their obvious common concern in using oral traditions (legend/folktale), both novels share, though in differing ways, the themes of colonial encounter, people’s responses to colonial encroachment, the female protagonists’ liminal positions in the society and their ultimate martyrdom for the (re)nascence of the nation. Vera, on the one hand, re-narrates and re-mythologises the life/history of Nehanda, the female spiritual leader of the first Zimbabwean liberation struggle, through the exploration of her in-betweeness as a spirit medium who communicates with the ancestral world and as a woman who lives in nineteenth-century Shona society. On the other hand, Ndhalala’s protagonist Jikinya, the imaginary character borrowed from the Jikinya folktale, is an orphan of a white settler couple who becomes an adopted daughter of the black people and metamorphoses into the symbolic figure of national unity, thus crossing racial boundaries and bridging ethnic divisions. Such cross-border motifs operate on several layers in both novels and culminate in the manifestation of a new national consciousness and the premonition of the future liberation struggle. How does each writer situate his/her protagonist’s border-crossings in the destiny of the nation? How do the peculiar positions of the protagonists shape and interact with the community’s perceptions of the colonial invasion? How do the novels complicate the notion of resistance? By examining these questions, I hope to discuss the ways Vera and Ndhlala recreate the legends they draw upon and refashion foundational narratives of the colonial encounter.


Augustina Akoto: School of Oriental and African Studies, Univesity of London, UK

Biography
Augustina Akoto is currently completing a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies on the inheritance rights of widows under the Intestate Succession Law of Ghana. Her current research deals with the impact of law reform and gender equality in Ghana with special reference to the forthcoming domestic violence bill. She is also a Research Assistant at the School of Law, University of Reading, on a project concerning the possible reform of matrimonial property and finances in England and Wales. Her publications include, ‘The Commission on European Family Law?’ International Family Law, 2005, 23-27, and A. Akoto, E. Cooke, T. Callus and A. Barlow, ‘Community of Property: a regime for England and Wales: Interim Report’ International Family Law, 2005, 133-137.

Abstract
A failure to connect? Gender, Law and Custom: the case of the Intestate Succession Law of Ghana.

The debate concerning legal pluralism and gender equality, is one that has garnered a considerable amount of attention from both law and policy makers in Africa. This conflict is at its most acute in the arena of family law, where religious, customary and state laws co-exist side by side. Many African countries have attempted to deal with this conflict through legal reform. In Ghana an example of this can be found in the Intestate Succession Law, 1985 (P.N.D.C.L.111) which was an attempt to unify the previously plural system of inheritance laws, which in their various ways discriminated against women (and to a lesser extent children). In the two decades since its introduction research has indicated that the law has had a limited impact on the ability of widows to inherit from their husband’s estate and therefore benefit from its provisions. This is especially the case for rural widows.
The apparent failure of the Intestate Succession Law in this way, is in part attributable to the manner in which law, custom and gender intersect. This is often perceived to be to the detriment of women. However, this paper will attempt to show that contrary to the view that there is very limited intersection between the three, using Sally Faulk’s Moore theory of semi-autonomous social fields as a framework, and drawing on research conducted for my thesis, I will illustrate how the law can be utilised in a manner which will achieve its aims, although not precisely in the manner it proscribes.


Charlotte Baker: University of Nottingham, UK

Biography
Charlotte Baker is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Nottingham University. Charlotte holds an MA in French and Francophone Literatures from the University of Nottingham and her research interests centre broadly on twentieth century French and African francophone fictional writing. Charlotte’s thesis addresses the representation of the Black albino in the fictional work of Williams Sassine, Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville. Her other research interests include theories of the body and identity, marginalised and stigmatised groups in Africa, and the theory and representation of disability, madness and monstrosity. Charlotte’s most recent publication is, Charlotte Baker, ‘Writing over the Illness: The Symbolic Representation of Albinism’ in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Disease, Peter Twohig and Vera Kalitzkus (eds), (Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi, 2006).

Abstract
Enduring Negativity: Perspectives on the Black African Albino (presented with Médard Djatou)

In many African societies, the birth of a ‘white’ albino within a black population is regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon. However, the African albino often suffers overt discrimination throughout his or her life that results from a fundamental and recurrent misunderstanding of the condition. Apart from the real disability caused by albinism, the albino body is attributed other inadequacies that are imagined or assumed, such as deafness and muteness. The lack of pigmentation that marks the albino apart in Black Africa is considered to be symbolic of his or her links to the spirit world, or functions purely as a marker of difference and deviance. For this reason and others, albinos are marginalised, sacrificed and in some cases killed at birth.
The negativity that surrounds albinism is undeniable and despite a growing understanding of the genetic provenance of the condition, the myths and stereotypes that surround albinism endure. Médard Djatou is an anthropologist interested in the beliefs surrounding albinism among the Bamileke people in Cameroon. His work focuses on the marginalisation of the albino and the web of myths that surround this figure. By contrast, Charlotte Baker’s research explores the misrepresentation of the figure of the albino in contemporary French and African Francophone writing. Our paper will be a comparative study examining the reality of living with albinism and the tendency of literary representation to portray people with albinism in purely negative terms.


Lizelle Bisschoff: University of Stirling, UK

Biography
Lizelle Bisschoff is researching the role of women in sub-Saharan African cinema for a PhD under the supervision of Dr David Murphy. She attended FESPACO, the biggest festival of African film in the world, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in February 2005, where she interviewed a number of female African directors. She visited numerous film institutions and television stations during a research trip to South Africa in July 2005. Her research so far has focused mainly on Southern and West African film. She is the founder and artistic director of Edinburgh’s first African film festival, Africa in Motion, due to take place in October 2006.

Abstract
New Filmmaking in the New South Africa: The Project 10 Documentary Series

Project 10: Real stories from a free South Africa is a series of 13 narrative documentary films made 10 years after the end of apartheid, charting the evolution of a post-apartheid society through the exploration of intimate and personal experiences of individual South Africans. The project was devised as a developmental initiative designed to nurture a new generation of dynamic South African filmmakers, giving them the opportunity to reflect on what a decade of democracy has meant for South Africans from a variety of backgrounds. The aim of the paper is to analyse how this type of narrative storytelling through documentary film gives rise to an “activist aesthetics” within contemporary South African filmmaking. Two films from the series will be examined – Belonging (by Kethiwe Ngcobo and Minky Schlesinger) and Umigidi/The Celebration (by Gillian Schutte & Sipho Singiswa). The ways in which “video diary” filmmaking leads to a certain type of aesthetic form – unscripted, immediate and fragmented – and its implications will be discussed through these two case studies.
The socio-cultural and historical themes highlighted through the films – such as racial integration; nationalism within post-apartheid South Africa; the role and relevance of the traditional rituals of indigenous cultures; and identity negotiation and formation in the present within the context of a past marked by exile or imprisonment – will be explored. Finally, I will investigate how the personal narratives of the films delineate the tradition-modernity tension within post-apartheid South Africa and further explore how the films offer representations of multiple hybrid modernities taking shape in contemporary South African culture.


Christina Clark: St Cross College, University of Oxford, UK

Biography
Christina is a DPhil candidate in the Department of International Development, Oxford University. Her doctoral research explores political roles and access to decision-making of Congolese young people in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement, Uganda. Christina is on leave from the Canadian International Development Agency and has worked in international organisations on child protection and human security issues. In her academic and professional capacities, she has published several articles in international journals.

Abstract
Marginalisation, Liminality and Political Space: Congolese Young People in Formal and Informal Refugee Contexts in Uganda

Refugee young people are often portrayed as double liminars because of their perceived state of being ‘betwixt and between’ both childhood and adulthood (Valentine 2003; Boyden 2001; van Gennep 1960; Wulff 1995; James 1986) and home and host communities (Camino 1994; Kaiser 1999). Liminality has traditionally been conceived as a stage in a linear progression from one fixed state to another (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1967; Gluckman 1962), but this does not necessarily reflect the much more ambiguous lived experiences of refugee young people in contexts characterised by change. Drawing on nine months’ research with Congolese young people in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement in western Uganda, this paper proposes an alternative conceptualisation of political marginalisation to analyse dynamic processes of creating, maintaining, questioning and resisting centres, margins and liminal spaces related to decision-making.
While liminality and marginality are often perceived to be inherently negative, my research findings suggest that they pose both opportunities and constraints to Congolese young people’s access to decision-making at household, community and policy levels. Many of my informants used their ‘unimportant’, ‘non-political’ status and spaces to undertake informal political activities that challenged the established order(s). Some also used the socio-political abnormality and ambiguity of their situation to question decision-making structures and/or negotiate greater participation within these. Highlighting both negative and positive aspects of liminality and marginality, this paper argues for the need to recognise the political agency of refugee young people even in extremely constrained and repressive political environments.

Girish Daswani: London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, UK

Biography
Girish’s doctoral thesis explores the relationship between Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana and the Ghanaian Pentecostal migrant community in London. It looks closely at how one international Ghanaian Pentecostal Church reproduces the promises of ‘modernity’ – freedom, progress, opportunity – while negotiating religious identity and a different set of moral relationships. It examines the contradictions and complexities that exist between divine promise and every day practice. Girish is currently writing up and hopes to finish in June 2006.

Abstract
Between Divine Promise and Practice: A Ghanaian Pentecostal Church in London

Pentecostal Christianity in Ghana presents itself as a religion of empowerment that crossed both geographical boundaries and physical limitations. It gave Ghanaian believers power and authority in the belief that they could transcend their economic and social problems and travel to the West. It also led to the creation of a cosmopolitan elite on an ideological and practical level. Ghanaian Pentecostals in London shared the conviction that God had brought them to London. They saw themselves as a chosen people with a divine purpose. When in London however they were caught up in a new political economy with busy work schedules and less time for prayer and evangelism. With the international growth of the church, the call for evangelism fell more heavily on these overseas Ghanaian Pentecostals. In this paper I look at the contradictions that became evident in their ideological beliefs and practical, lived mileus. This became a point of entry for a dialogue within the church on how to locate and speak about power and authority. If London was their destination point because of God’s favour, then why was it that many Ghanaian Pentecostals reflected on Ghana as more spiritually powerful? I will explore the changing nature of relationships experienced by Ghanaian Pentecostals in London and how these changes created opportunities for managing relationships differently. While Ghanaian Pentecostals in Ghana were busy making a break with their past in order to leave Africa for the Christian West, many of my informants in London were looking back at Ghana as a place of Christian values and moral upbringing.

Susan Dickinson: University of Nottingham, UK

Biography
Susan holds an MA in French Studies from Lancaster University and wrote her Masters dissertation on ‘Identity and Liberation in the works of Malika Mokkedem’. Susan is currently a third year part-time PhD student in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is writing her thesis on Stereotyping in sub-Saharan African Migrant Women’s writing in French, with a particular interest in the works of Bessora, Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome.

Abstract
(De)Sexualising the Other: The European Homogenisation of the Sub-Saharan African Female Migrant in the Fiction of Bessora and Calixthe Beyala

Stereotypes of black Africans and their so-called ‘primitive’ cultures have long been embedded in the European conscience. Slavery, colonialism and pseudo-scientific ‘research’ have consistently advocated the ‘superiority’ of the Black over the White and have been the main driving-forces behind selective (mis)conceptions of the black African subject. Whilst these discourses have officially come to an end, an escalation in international migration throughout the post-colonial era means that the stereotyped construction of African identity is upheld and even propagated, as culturally diverse populations come into greater contact with each other. On paper, such increased interaction between populations from different ethnic groups creates multicultural societies, yet, in reality, it magnifies the potential for conflict, hostility and the marginalisation of the ethnic Other. Fears and anxieties are often displayed in the expression of ethnic stereotypes, as the host population endeavours to ward off any assumed threat to the identity of the homeland. Stereotyping as a form of ideological representation is of particular interest in terms of the female African migrant, for she is subject to both patriarchal and euro-centric, (neo-)colonial gazes that reduce her to a series of complex and contradictory caricatures of ‘race’ and gender. This paper examines the sexualised images that embody the figure of the sub-Saharan African female in the France-based fictional works of migrant writers Bessora and Calixthe Beyala. Defined from without in terms of their assumed sexuality, the migrant protagonists are depicted as either hypersexual (prostitutes, Hottentot Venuses) or as sexually ‘deficient’ (women unable to procreate). Positioned at either end of the scale of ‘normality’, the protagonists are classified as ‘extremes’, ‘deviants’ or ‘misfits’. The consequences of such homogenisation, classification and labelling through stereotyping upon both host-nation and female migrant identity are considered in the context of a post-colonial milieu still characterised by ‘racial’ thought. It is argued that these powerful (mis)representations of ‘race’ and gender distort the sexuality and femininity of the black African female, transforming her into a visual object and denying her any sense of autonomy.

Médard Djatou: University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon

Biography
Médard Djatou is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the University of Yaoundé 1, in Cameroon. He has a particular research interest in bio-cultural anthropology and his current research deals with the perception of the albino among the Bamiléké and Bakweri ethnic groups in Cameroon. Médard’s most recent study is, ‘L'Albinos dans les particularismes culturels au Cameroun: Expériences Bamiléké et Bakweri’. He also researched the Bamiléké perception of the albino for his Masters dissertation, which was entitled, ‘L’albinos dans les représentations et pratiques culturelles des Ngante et Lengou de l'Ouest Cameroun’, which was submitted in 2003.

Abstract
Enduring Negativity: Perspectives on the Black African Albino (presented with Charlotte Baker)

In many African societies, the birth of a ‘white’ albino within a black population is regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon. However, the African albino often suffers overt discrimination throughout his or her life that results from a fundamental and recurrent misunderstanding of the condition. Apart from the real disability caused by albinism, the albino body is attributed other inadequacies that are imagined or assumed, such as deafness and muteness. The lack of pigmentation that marks the albino apart in Black Africa is considered to be symbolic of his or her links to the spirit world, or functions purely as a marker of difference and deviance. For this reason and others, albinos are marginalised, sacrificed and in some cases killed at birth.
The negativity that surrounds albinism is undeniable and despite a growing understanding of the genetic provenance of the condition, the myths and stereotypes that surround albinism endure. Médard Djatou is an anthropologist interested in the beliefs surrounding albinism among the Bamiléké people in Cameroon. His work focuses on the marginalisation of the albino and the web of myths that surround this figure. By contrast, Charlotte Baker’s research explores the misrepresentation of the figure of the albino in contemporary French and African Francophone writing. Our paper will be a comparative study examining the reality of living with albinism and the tendency of literary representation to portray people with albinism in purely negative terms.

Abigail Dumes: Yale University, US

Biography
Abigail Dumes is a first year student in the doctoral programme in cultural anthropology at Yale University. She spent last year in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship, exploring the intersection of gender and economics within the Cameroonian immigrant community. Her current research interests are more generally concerned with the Cameroonian diaspora in France and the US.

Abstract
Your Money is Mine: Mutual Trust and Gift Exchange within Women's Rotating Savings and Credit Associations in Cameroon and France.

The rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) in Cameroon is an effective economic and social coping strategy that offers a collective pool of aggregated funds to each contributing member on a rotating basis. Against predictions made in the 1960s that more “rational” economic institutions would eventually replace the ROSCA, the ROSCA of contemporary Cameroon flourishes where formal finance flounders. Even in France, Cameroonian immigrant women prefer to use the ROSCA in addition to the normative savings strategy of the bank. Why, in 2005, is the ROSCA still so attractive; what is the key to its success? Drawing from ethnographic research that I conducted in Cameroon and France, and in keeping with the work of Maussian theorists on gift exchange, I suggest that the underlying principles of mutual trust and gift exchange create the social bonds which are the key to the ROSCA’s transnational success. In light of the French Republic’s model of cultural assimilation, the ROSCA also provides a window into the mutually constitutive relationship between economic life and cultural identity for Cameroonian immigrant women. Ultimately, I argue that the persistence of the ROSCA in both Cameroon and France highlights the continued importance of social relations in a putative age of utilitarian self-interest and complicates the distinction between (what is tragically still understood as) the “modern” and the “traditional.”


Ferdinand Duru: Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria

Biography
Ferdinand Duru is a part-time MA candidate at Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. Ferdinand holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Benin, Nigeria. His dissertation addresses the application of Hiss’s conceptual framework to the experience of dress, with a particular focus on the experiential nature of dress as both material and ideational. His study, in collaboration with Sweet Ivie Ubadigha, explores the way in which women interchange or combine African and Western attire, depending on the occasion.

Abstract
Nigerian Women’s Dress: Negotiating across Cultural Borders (with Sweet Ivie Ubadigha)

In this paper we apply Hiss's conceptual framework to the experience of dress. Consistent with prior work on the experience of place, we focus upon the experiential nature of dress as both material and ideational . More specifically, we explore how women's multisensory and symbolic experiences of dress change when they move across cultures and forms of dress. Our interpretive study draws from interviews with 15 Nigerian women who have resided in the United States for a minimum of three years. The women ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-60s. All but three were married. All held university degrees. Twelve are employed in positions ranging from research to information technology and social work. Data were analyzed using constant comparison processes. Emergent themes were integrated into a model of the sense of dress within cultural context. The women wore various forms of African and Western dress prior to leaving Nigeria. Since their arrival in the U.S., the women have interchanged and/or combined African and Western attire, depending on the occasion. Three emergent themes focused on aesthetic, symbolic, and functional components of the sense of dress. In our presentation we address the following questions. Firstly, how do women's aesthetic experiences of dress shift across cultural contexts? Secondly,. how does women's use of dress to make identifications of the self shift across cultural contexts? Thirdly, in both cases, what experiences and reflections contributed to change?

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere: University of South Africa

Biography
Natasha is an Instructor of English at Medgan Evers College, CUNY, NYC. She is completing her PhD in English at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. The title of her dissertation is, ‘From Silence to Speech: Memory and Female Circumcision in African Women’s Writing’. She has just received a three-year research grant from the South African National Resarch Fund to collaborate on a South African book project about identities in transition. She has worked with and advocated for circumcised women since 1991. Her most recent publications include: ‘Carving the Body: Female Circumcision in African Women’s Memoirs’ eSharp: Identity and Marginality, 6 www.sharp.arts.gla.ac.uk/ Forthcoming (Spring 2006) and ‘To Write What Cannot Be Written: Female Circumcision in African and Middle Eastern Literature’, Changing English, Vol 11, Number 1.

Abstract
From Silence to Speech, from Object to Subject: The Body Politic Investigated in the Trajectory between Saartje Baartman and Contemporary Circumcised African Women’s Writings.

This paper investigates Saartje Baartman’s experiences in London and Paris (1810-1815) alongside three contemporary narratives of circumcised African women in New York.
Baartman, a San woman from South Africa, was paraded in a cage for audiences in London and Paris. Baartman’s tale is poignant as she is documented as the “missing link” in human evolution, namely joining the highest primate with the lowest human. These findings were based upon Baartman’s body; her generous buttocks, tiny waist, small stature and her “hottentot apron” (lengthened labia, common in areas of Southern Africa, including Malawi and Namibia). Baartman’s story was brought before the British judiciary system, as abolitionists were demanding her freedom because of her perceived enslavement by her European owners. Countless articles reported on this case. However, Baartman’s own voice remains mute throughout her experiences in Europe. People write and speak about her, not to her. Baartman’s narrative, I posit, begins a long and tenuous history of a European gaze onto the African women’s genitals.
In September – October, 2005, I conducted a series of writing workshops for circumcised women in Harlem. Three of these West African women share explicit details about their circumcisions; thereby adopting a language that reclaims the articulation and understanding of this tradition into their own hands. In the political act of speaking and writing their memories, they investigate their relationships with their mothers and other women who were involved in the cutting, as well as their collective decision not to circumcise their daughters. Lastly, they enunciate an African sensibility that does not focus sexuality, beauty or wholeness within the genitals, as perceived by many Western feminists, but within their minds. I posit in this act of speech, these women end a Western/European gaze upon their genitals.

Joan Haig: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK

Biography
Joan Haig is currently researching for her PhD in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh, supported by the ESRC. Her work concentrates on National Identity and sense of belonging among the Indians in Zambia. She taught at the Niger Delta University in Nigeria, where she developed her interest in Diaspora Studies. She has a forthcoming book review in Africa.

Abstract
Crossing Places: Indian Immigration to Northern Rhodesia

This paper will examine the character and development of the ‘Indian Question’ in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) from the early 1900s to 1964. Working against a dearth in local primary records and secondary literature on the history of Indians in Zambia, the paper will provide an account of the Indian Question through the ‘official mind’ (as per Robinson, et al) of the colonial administrations in Britain, Africa, and India, based on archival research carried out from May-September of this year. It also considers the changing voices at the official level when India became independent in 1947, and when Northern Rhodesia itself moved in the 1950s into the Central African Federation and in the 1960s towards independence: at these times the actual seats of political power crossed places, with strong repercussions for the Indian diaspora in Africa. The central argument of the paper is that the Indian Question in Northern Rhodesia was constructed as part of this changing colonial discourse, and continually reinforced by the underlying resistance from the white settlers to Indians crossing colonies to settle as economic migrants in central Africa. This meant that Indian immigrants arrived into a pre-formulated set of concerns about their place in the economic, social, political and moral orders of Northern Rhodesia. This set of concerns was underscored by racist and class-based attitudes, practices, and policies: this paper will explain how the Indian Question in Northern Rhodesia—largely external to the Indians themselves—emerged and persisted over sixty years of Indians crossing into central Africa.


Dan Hammett: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK

Biography
Daniel Hammett holds an ESRC scholarship at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, and has recently returned from a 12 month Research Associate position at the University of Cape Town. His PhD research focuses upon the social location of ‘coloured’ teachers in Cape Town framed within the changing socio-political context. Other research and publications include work on Cuban doctors in South Africa (Cuban Intervention in South African Health Care Service Provision, in review with Journal of Southern African Studies), research methodologies in Africa (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Researcher, with Ruth Wedgwood), and The Friendly Financier: Talking Money with the Silenced Assistant (with Thomas Molony, in review with Qualitative Inquiry) and a number of book reviews forthcoming in Africa. Dan also lectures ‘South Africa: a social and political salad bowl?’ in the Geography Faculty.

Abstract
Self, Knowledge and Respect: Challenges to Identity in ‘Coloured’ Schools in Cape Town.

Education is a major conduit through which knowledge, culture and social norms are channelled. Schools are microcosms of social issues and changes, especially in an environment such as South Africa where dramatic social change, and challenges to these changes, are everyday experiences. Within such conditions schools provide spaces in which nonsynchrony of structure and experience, of multidimensional and dynamic identities are articulated. They are sites within which social reconfiguration can be observed.
Most work on identity in South African schools has concentrated upon race, policies of non-racialism and the slow progress of desegregation. Drawing upon a transdisciplinary approach, using education as a lens through which to consider other issues, this paper will consider the role of ‘respect’ in identity. Working through two ‘coloured’ schools, changes in the construct of respect and respectability will be considered as a challenge between educators and learners.
Issues of race, identity, and politics intersect with local, national and global influences to shape changes in cultural identification and social norm formation. Working within ‘coloured’ schools adds dimensions of perceived marginalisation and social dislocation to discussions of globalisation, capitalism and the culture of consumption. Through these discussions, it will be posited that the notion of respect is evolving within the communities studied, that local and global influences and history shape the conception and expression of respect as a central element to individual identification.


Patrick Hayes: University of Oxford, UK

Biography
Currently lecturer in English at Worcester College, Oxford, Patrick is completing a doctorate on J.M. Coetzee’s engagement with the form of the novel in the postcolonial situation. His publications (all forthcoming) include a study of Coetzee’s Foe and the politics of literary form for the Review of English Studies; a comparative analysis of the Byronic figure in Disgrace for a collection of essays in French (J.M. Coetzee et les classiques); and an exploration of folly and the comic in Age of Iron, for a planned collection entitled Contemporary Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee.

Abstract
Political Conflict and Literary Crossing in Coetzee’s Disgrace.

Drawing upon Kwame Anthony Appiah’s recent work, The Ethics of Identity (2005), I will argue that the central conflict in Disgrace relates to two distinct, and broadly adversarial, intellectual and cultural legacies: one based in the classical Enlightenment conception of the abstract individual, and other rooted in a more frankly materialist identity-based politics. The tension between these two definitions of the individual is of defining importance for the African postcolonial state, which I will suggest, through a brief exploration of the complex Preamble to the new South African constitution, can be regarded as a liminal space in which the legacy political institutions of the colonial era, both formal and informal, have an uncertain and contested hold upon the nation at large. Coetzee’s novel is often assumed to be a pessimistic and self-lacerating work in which the claims of the European cultural and political legacies are found to have little or no future in the new South Africa. However, I will argue instead that his text explores the conflict it invokes with real literary and political nuance by finding ways of exploiting the borderlines between the serious and the non-serious. It is by cultivating an unstable literary identity that Disgrace is able to stage some of the most remarkable literary ‘crossings’ of its own: its protagonist, the novel’s chief defender of the various European legacies in South Africa, is subjected to a complex comic process in which his status undergoes continual renegotiation and reformulation.
At the broadest level, therefore, my paper will be a reflection upon how the form of the novel – another European legacy – might respond to the complexity of the postcolonial situation in Africa.


Adèle Langlois: The Open University, UK

Biography
Adèle is a second year PhD student at the Open University. She is studying the impact of genomics technology and regulation on developing countries from an international relations perspective. Her project examines international regulatory instruments on human genetics and bioethics, focusing on UNESCO’s 1997, 2003 and 2005 declarations, all three of which contain articles on cooperation between North and South in knowledge-sharing and capacity-building. Adèle is interested in how these declarations are affecting development, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where her fieldwork is based. She is also looking at the relationship between these instruments and other models for promoting genomics technology in the South.

Abstract
Crossing Boundaries in Bioethics Regulation: Kenya and Beyond

The completion of the Human Genome Project has opened up unprecedented possibilities in healthcare, but also ethical and social dilemmas. Some fear that the health concerns of developed countries will take precedence over those of developing countries, thereby creating a “genomics divide”. This has led to calls for more effective governance of genomics science and technology. On a broader scale, international relations theorists have been arguing for reform of global governance frameworks in general. Some have suggested an international information sharing and capacity building network, a Global Genomics Initiative (GGI), as a means to harness the potential of genomics technology to reduce inequalities in health between North and South. Three UNESCO declarations also call for cooperation between developed and developing countries in the field of human genetic research.
Based on interviews conducted during a fieldwork trip to Kenya in Autumn 2005, with government policy-makers, members of intergovernmental organisations, ethicists, scientists and civil society representatives, this paper will compare these international mechanisms with what is happening at the national level. It will examine how well the global translates to the national and the extent to which key people in Kenya are engaged in international processes. It will also look at how attitudes towards regulation – its purpose, how it should be implemented, who should decide on its content and the place of subnational, national and supernational actors – differ across the public, expert groups and the State in Kenya.

Tendai Marima: Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Biography
Tendai is a second year PhD student at Goldsmiths College, researching Zimbabwean Women’s Writing and African Feminist Theory. Tendai has a background in American Studies and Southern African Literature and is keen to further develop African feminist literary theory. Tendai is also a reviewer for the weekly online newspaper The Zimbabwean and upcoming journal, Southern Africa in the Diaspora.

Abstract
Crossing the Floor: The Male Imaginary and African Feminism(s) in Bones by Chenjerai Hove

African feminist discourse locates and re-visions the creative agency of women's fiction, theorizing women's fictive experiences a critical conceptual lens through which to (re)construct history. In this paper, the shared historical and cultural experiences of men and women are used to critically explore the possibility of male feminism(s), reading Chenjerai Hove's Bones (1988) as a male feminist novel. Flora Veit-Wild (1991) has criticized Hove's portrayal of female characters as monolithic and romanticized, I argue on the contrary the representation of the maternal body recognizes the subaltern conscience in a non-phallocentric way, actively writing against patri-national marginalization of women as voices of war. Without essentializing the position of women, this paper examines the place of men within African feminist study, examining what it offers to men as a way of re-articulating relations between men and women. Engaging with the possibilities of male feminist discourse in African literature, this paper will draw on the various theories of African feminism(s) as conceptual tools to interrogate the position of male feminist writing. While Susan Arndt (2004) argues there is no African male feminist novel, I contend that Bones, as the first Zimbabwean novel to portray women's subjugated positions in the war is such a novel. Citing parallels between Bones and Yvonne Vera's Nehanda, I will suggest that Hove and Vera can in fact be considered literary siblings.

John Masterson: University of Essex, UK

Biography
John is currently a PhD student in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His primary research interest concerns ‘body politics’ in the novels of Nurrudin Farah. Other areas include the intersections of postcolonial and postmodern theory, representations of dictatorship and dystopia, and the applications of the work of Michel Foucault in postcolonial studies. John’s publications include a review of ‘Cultural Encounters – European Travel Writing in the 1930s’ Charles Burdett and Derek Duncan (eds) in Journeys – The International Journal of Travel Writing and a review of ‘Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah’ Derek Wright (ed.) in Wasafiri 46, 2006.

Abstract
Contested Borders: The Recent Work of Nurridin Farah

This paper focuses on recent developments in the work of Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, whose most celebrated novel Maps (1986) is set against the backdrop of the Ogaden war over the disputed territory between Somalia and Ethiopia. It will discuss how such concerns with contested borders characterise Farah’s discourse, and especially how this impulse has been reconfigured in his journalistic study of the Somali Diaspora, Yesterday, Tomorrow (2001). This text showcases a preoccupation with the border-transgressing role of the exilic writer/intellectual in relation to a wider marginalised group. The diasporic community he draws attention to represents the very human fallout from inter-border and civil conflicts as explored in his novels. Supplementing Said, I suggest that Farah’s rigorous differentiation between writer and refugee is indicative of the materialist imperative that defines his work, both fictional and non-fictional. In both, attention is paid to embodied notions of interstitial movement and identity. Farah is a multilingual writer who has been heralded and/or hampered with the ‘postmodern’ tag. Whilst his work draws attention to intersections between postcoloniality and postmodernity, I maintain it does so in order to problematise both categories. Yesterday, Tomorrow serves as a riposte to the dubious tendency in postcolonial discourse to conflate the identities of intellectual and immigrant. Farah alerts his reader to these tensions and emphasises the provisional nature of both border crossings and crossers. As such, this documentary excursion is a fitting supplement to the work of a distinguished writer with a peculiar investment in interrogating borders liminal and lived.

Gita Mohan: University of Salford, UK

Biography
Gita Mohan holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Madras, India, and an MA in Translating (French / English) from the University of Salford, Manchester. She is currently nearing the end of her second year of a PhD in Postcolonial and Translation Studies, working under the guidance of Professor Myriam Salama-Carr. Gita has undergone Teacher Training at the Alliance Française network in India and has also worked as a freelance translator. Her research interests include Postcolonial and Commonwealth literature, Francophone and Maghrebian literature and Literary Translation.

Abstract
Postcolonial Maghrebian Literature – Crossing Places: Literally (Sherazade) and Figuratively (Ahmed/Zahra)

In my paper, I would like to look at two radically diverse literary characters who have undergone two entirely different types of ‘displacement’. I shall discuss the cases of Sherazade, a young Algerian girl in Paris, from the book of the same name Sherazade (1982) by Algerian author Leïla Sebbar and that of Ahmed/Zahra, the main character in Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels L’Enfant de Sable (1985) and its sequel La Nuit Sacrée (1987). The authors Leïla Sebbar and Tahar Ben Jelloun are themselves diasporic writers living in Paris, which brings up the issue of ‘Crossing Places’ again!
What is interesting is that Sherazade, a runaway, supposedly unrestrained by any conventions, is still unable to carve her own identity. As an unwanted immigrant in Paris, she has crossed places literally, yet longs to return to her homeland Algeria. The hero(ine) of Ben Jelloun’s novels, on the other hand, is a young woman, Zahra, who was forced (by her father) to live life as a man since the parent had suffered enough humiliation for having fathered 7 daughters and not produced even one son. The eighth female child is named Ahmed and the two novels make up Ahmed /Zahra’s story. The narratives are, thus, of one who has crossed places figuratively – caught between two genders, two identities.
The three novels will be analyzed in the light of Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity or the in-between Space – “It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994, p 37).

Zoë Norridge: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Biography
Zoë Norridge is a PhD candidate researching pain narratives in contemporary African novels at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. After undergraduate and postgraduate study at Cambridge University she spent several years working in health promotion before returning to academia. Her work explores the literary construction of physical and emotional pain narratives using interdisciplinary approaches to enrich existing theoretical frameworks. Recent projects include editing an e-book on health and disease perceptions, publication of an essay on Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera and presentation of comparative perspectives on J.M. Coetzee and Bessie Head at an international pain conference in Athens.

Abstract
The Need to Go Further? Crossing in the Work of Alexandra Fuller and Alexander Kanengoni

Two years ago Alexandra Fuller and Alexander Kanengoni contributed short stories to a collection of new work from Zimbabwe entitled Writing Still. Both stories address some form of cross-racial identification. Fuller, who grew up in the then Rhodesia and later moved to the US, describes herself as a white child finding refuge with a black maid at a party. Kanengoni, a black Zimbabwean former freedom fighter, recalls the moment when he noticed his white farming neighbour’s resemblance to his late father.
As these stories show, both Kanengoni and Fuller are fascinated by crossing places. Identification across the borders of time, space, gender and race is also a theme in their extended writing. Kanengoni is best known for his novel Echoing Silences, an account of a traumatised guerrilla soldier who feels the need to travel to Mozambique to come to terms with his past. With a few striking similarities, Fuller’s second novel, Scribbling the Cat, describes her recent journey from the US to Mozambique in the company of a former white Rhodesian soldier in search of some truths about Zimbabwe’s liberation war. In addition, Fuller dedicates her novel to Kanengoni and quotes extensively from Echoing Silences throughout.
This paper will ask why Fuller is so fascinated by Kanengoni’s narrative. Both writers define themselves as African yet despite Fuller’s identification with Kanengoni, their present situations and past histories seem ostensibly very different. How and why does the white female novelist identify with her black male colleague? Where do their accounts of crossing geographical spaces, gendered places and remembered times come together or diverge? How does the identity of the writer cross into the substance of their text? And finally, in the current literary economic climate of such unequal power do these crossings remain necessarily partial?

Okwudili Daniel Okoye: Delta State University, Nigeria

Biography
Okwudili holds a BA in Philosophy from Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Benin. His MA dissertation was entitled ‘Glimpses of Gender Bias in Islam discussed in the light of the Nigerian situation’ and he is currently in the second year of a PhD in Philosophy at Delta State University, Nigeria.

Abstract
African Identity And African Immigration To The West: Questions For Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum And Mbiti’s I Am Because We Are (presented with Emeka Ujagba)

John Mbiti’s “I am because we are” is parallel to the Cartesian Cogito in defining the identity of an African. While Descartes’ Cogito bases identity and personhood on the “thinking being”, for Mbiti, the community creates and gives identity and personhood to the African. Both Cartesian and Mbitian philosophical principles acknowledge the unique identity of the thinking being who is thirsty for self knowledge and raison d’etre.
This paper will focus on the role of immigration in an African’s search for identity and personhood. We will examine how the reality of African immigration to the West and the African’s search for identity and personhood challenge Cartesian and Mbitian concepts of African identity and personhood. Can we really say that African identity and personhood are products of Descartes’ ‘pure thought’? What does Mbiti’s idea of community offer the individual African in search of identity? Or, philosophy aside, is African identity based on a social response to survival instincts in a third world malady?
In our thesis, we will take two positions and critically analyse their roles in the definition of identity and personhood in Africa. Firstly we will compare African immigration to the West with Descartes’ philosophical inquiry, seeing it as a search for authentic identity. Secondly, we will argue that in fact African immigration to the West is not an effective panacea to the problem of identity and personhood since identity and personhood ought to be nurtured by African governments, African communities, and African families.
Finally, we will argue for a necessary convergence of the Cartesian Cogito and the Mbitian “I am because we are” as a more holistic philosophical definition of identity and personhood, especially for the African.

Bev Orton: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Biography
Bev Orton is currently researching the politicization of gender in Southern Africa. The focus of the research is theatre and film. Bev has written and directed television shows in South Africa and has worked extensively in the both the theatre and the film industry. She is very interested in the representation on women in plays and on screen. As part of her work she develops ideas for funding purposes that explore how communication and literacy skills are improved through writing and filmmaking. To date Bev has worked on numerous projects with various groups from diverse communities. The work from these projects has been screened at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge and at Ewha University in Seoul.

Abstract
Experiences of Motherhood in Sub Saharan Africa

Using the play texts of Gcina Mhlophe and Fatima Dike as reference points I will explore the experiences of Motherhood in Sub-Saharan Africa. The apartheid policy had an enormous impact on the family lives of many people of different cultures. The paper will focus on how the women managed to cope without their menfolk and how they maintained their homes and provided a living for their children. Has anyone seen Zandile? explores how Zandile moves between the different cultures and languages- Zulu, Xhosa and English. Her grandmother, Gogo, takes on the role of her mother and this close bond is broken when she is kidnapped by her maternal mother, Lulama. Zandile had to adapt to the different values of her grandmother and mother. In So What's New? by Fatima Dike the focus is on how a single mother, Dee, a shebeen queen, provides for her daughter and tries to instil in her daughter, Thandi, the importance of education and high moral values. Thandi has to reconcile how disparate Dee's way of life and expectations of her are.
Both plays reflect on the role of the male and the female, political experiences, the importance of education, the crossing of languages and the importance of identity. Motherhood is explored through the lives of Gogo, Lulama and Dee. Their lives and movements are directly affected by apartheid. Their decisions and aspirations sometimes confront the restrictions dictated to by apartheid. This paper will highlight the experiences of Motherhood and how Mothers strive to achieve the highest aspirations for their daughters whilst being subjected to political, racial, cultural and gender restrictions.

Michelle Osborn: University of Oxford, UK

Biography
As an MSc student in African Studies at Oxford University Michelle is currently pursuing research regarding youth mobilization in Nairobi’s slums following Kenya’s Independence. This research stems from her doctoral studies in Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, where she is exploring the intersections between resilience, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS among youth in Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera. The topic Michelle has chosen to present on for the Crossing Places Conference, blogging and Kenya’s diaspora, is the result of protracted interest in the blog phenomenon and Kenyan participation.

Abstract
Connecting the Dots: Blogging and the Kenyan Diaspora

Today literally thousands of individuals within the African Diaspora frequently contribute to weblogs. Blogging has become an increasingly popular phenomenon through which much of the African Diaspora community are connected, both to one another and to their communities back home. Beyond being a communal space for connectivity, blogs represent an expressive space for thought and creativity, as well as a discursive space in which identities are shaped and negotiated. Thus, blogs are a distinct site from which we can examine not only the Diaspora but the way in which individuals articulate their place within this dispersion. This paper aims to explore specifically Kenyan participation within the blogging discourse and examine the ways in which those within the Diaspora forge a international cyber community while also (re)connecting themselves to life and persons in Kenya.


Yvonne Owens: University College London, University of London, UK

Biography
Yvonne Owens is the author of three books of folklore, mythology, and creative process. She has taught art history at the undergraduate level, and has published articles on gender, cultural theory and art criticism in medical journals, academic journals and arts publications. Her undergraduate degree was an Honours B.A. in Art History from the University of Victoria. She received an M.A. With Distinction in Medieval Studies from the University of York (UK) and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at University College, London, registered in both Art History and European Studies.

Abstract
The Cave of Becoming: Feminine Biology and its Epistemic Possibilities in the Yoruba and Wiccan Correlations of Feminine and Spiritual Power (presented with Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju)

Is it possible to develop epistemological possibilities from a consideration of feminine biology that goes beyond the focus on the ratiocinative or on the non-rational? This paper explores this question from a unique perspective that places in dialogue Western feminist constructions, dominant currents in Yoruba conceptions of the feminine and scholarship that draws upon this, with noncentrist currents in Western thought.
The conception of woman in relation to spiritual power in canonical Yoruba thought and popular consciousness is powerfully ambivalent. Women of power are witches who are A won Iya wa, our mothers, and yet, the creative power that enables their reproductive powers is also capable of manifesting itself in an untamed and at times malefic form.
Wicca, reacting against the misogynist construction of feminine power represented by traditional Western conceptions of witchcraft, could be seen as integrating and contesting perspectives similar to those developed in Yoruba conceptions of the feminine and spirit. Wicca does this by drawing from feminist, mythic and ecological thinking in correlating female biology with cosmic rhythms.
Yvonne Williams and Toyin Adepoju, male and female researchers, perform this paper as a twenty minute critical dialogue in which creative tensions and synergies between their perspectives are directed at actualising the emergence of epistemic possibilities from this dynamic ground.

Marie Rodet: University of Vienna, Austria

Biography
Marie Rodet is a PhD candidate in African Studies at the University of Vienna. Her thesis is entitled ‘Female Migration in French Sudan 1900-1945’. In 2004 she published a paper in Austrian Stichprobe concerned with Colonial Law, Gender, Power and Social Change in French Sudan. She will publish a second paper in January 2006 in the French social sciences journal Terrains et Travaux, about the way in which colonial archives can be used to write African women’s history. Another article is planned for 2006 in the Journal of the French Colonial Archives which will deal with female forced labour in French Sudan. Marie is also part of a research project on African Women’s History at the Institute of African Studies.

Abstract
Migrants in French Sudan – Gender Biases in the Historiography

In this paper, I will examine the invisibility of Female Migrations in the historiography of French Sudan (1900-1945). I will try to deconstruct general concepts such as ‘labour migration’ as built on the binary opposition ‘wage-paying jobs’ vs. ‘domestic work’ in order to show how this concept contributed to a gender-blind analysis of African migrations during the colonial time. The colonial analysis of migration tended to take the maleness of the labour force for granted and to place women’s work into family and domestic labour. Women were mainly described as those left behind in the rural areas, reproducing the labour force, whilst males were absent migrants with wage-paying jobs in urban centres. The focalisation of the androcentric colonial administration on male labour led the colonizers and later most scholars to regard male labour migration as the only noteworthy form of migration. Some scholars still only refer to ‘labour migration’ and concentrate on the economic motivations for migration. However, by focusing only on economic factors, the complexity and multiplicity of the migration experiences risk being overlooked. The study of African female migration during the colonial time can help us to question the centrality of ‘labour migration’ in the historiography of migration. ‘Labour migration’ appears to be ultimately a masculinist concept since ‘labour migration’ is considered as the central/neutral/universal reference where the referent is actually a male one.

Jennie Sutton: Washington University, USA

Biography
Jennie Sutton is pursuing a PhD in History and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Her research focuses on connections among southern African and Americans around 1900, in particular how racial and national identities were created and expressed through popular culture.

Abstract
“Transvaal Spectacles”: Creating Black Identity at the 1904 World’s Fair

In March 1904 more than 60 black South Africans and over 600 white veterans of the Anglo-Boer war traveled from Cape Town to perform in the “South African Boer War Exhibition” at the St. Louis World’s Fair. As white South African veterans reenacted key battles from the 1899-1902 war, black South Africans, attired in ‘native’ costumes, represented ‘African life’ in a reconstructed kraal. Although show organizers wished to portray them as subservient and uncivilized, black South Africans manipulated such images for their own ends. In exchange for wages and passage to the US, they performed American understandings of African ‘tribal’ identities. They also took advantage of the fair’s liminal space to compete with whites and challenge racial myths. Two performers participated in the 1904 Olympics on equal ground with whites, an opportunity not accorded black Americans. Ultimately, one-fifth of the black cast left the show in protest over unpaid wages, and, aided by black Americans, 'passed' as African Americans into the black St. Louis community. These events show how some African Americans and South Africans used the instability of blackness to contest the international solidarity of white supremacy. Transnational studies of U.S.-South African diaspora have focused on exchanges among educated elite; in contrast, this paper demonstrates how South Africans and African Americans used work and popular culture to develop a distinctive and subversive sense of international black identity.


Isabel Trevor: Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Biography
Isabel Trevor is a final year PhD student in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. Isabel is researching Franco-Algerian authors, notably Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Her research focuses on questions of marginality, especially Jewishness, but Isabel also has research interests in crime, confession and abjection.

Abstract
‘My Compatriot’: Derrida’s Algerian Augustine

Jacques Derrida, in his texts, Circonfession, Voiles and Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre, sets out to provide the ‘testimony’ of a North-African Jew under French colonial rule. He explores this experience by calling upon his ‘compatriot’, St. Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions are extensively quoted in his text in order to describe Derrida’s own Algerian experience. Key episodes in Derrida’s life are found to be repetitions of Augustine’s life sixteen centuries earlier, indicating a cycle of North-African experience, spanning the rise and fall of successive empires and cultures.
In this paper, I shall consider the manner in which Derrida attempts to culturally resituate Algeria by calling upon Augustine, a canonic figure in Western Romance culture, rather than upon, for example, an ethnically Arab antecedent. In order to describe his own identity as a Jewish North-African, Derrida returns to Augustine, and presents the history of Algeria as one that is Catholic and Latin-speaking. At the same time, he suggests the possibility of a backward appropriation, as a Christian text is once again assumed into the writings of a Jewish author.
Derrida’s text is composed in French, Augustine’s in Latin; in both cases this is the language of a hegemonic imperial authority. I shall also consider the implications of viewing Augustine, the representative of the Church of Rome, as the voice of imperial authority, especially in the light of Derrida’s questioning of what the proper language of the colonial confession might be, and the manner in which language is a carrier of hegemonic values.


Sweet Ivie Ubadigha: Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria

Bibliography
Sweet Ivie Ubadigha is a full-Time MA candidate at Ambrose Alli University in Ekpoma, Nigeria. Sweet holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. Sweet’s research interests include cross-cultural experiences and crossing between African languages. Her study addresses the application of Hiss’s conceptual framework to the experience of dress and focuses upon the experiential nature of dress as both material and ideational.

Abstract
Nigerian Women’s Dress: Negotiating Across Cultural Borders (presented with Ferdinand Duru)

In this paper we apply Hiss's conceptual framework to the experience of dress. Consistent with prior work on the experience of place, we focus upon the experiential nature of dress as both material and ideational . More specifically, we explore how women's multisensory and symbolic experiences of dress change when they move across cultures and forms of dress. Our interpretive study draws from interviews with 15 Nigerian women who have resided in the United States for a minimum of three years. The women ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-60s. All but three were married. All held university degrees. Twelve are employed in positions ranging from research to information technology and social work. Data were analyzed using constant comparison processes. Emergent themes were integrated into a model of the sense of dress within cultural context. The women wore various forms of African and Western dress prior to leaving Nigeria. Since their arrival in the U.S., the women have interchanged and/or combined African and Western attire, depending on the occasion. Three emergent themes focused on aesthetic, symbolic, and functional components of the sense of dress. In our presentation we address the following questions. Firstly, how do women's aesthetic experiences of dress shift across cultural contexts? Secondly,. how does women's use of dress to make identifications of the self shift across cultural contexts? Thirdly, in both cases, what experiences and reflections contributed to change?

Emeka Ujagba: Ambrose Alli University, Nigeria

Biography
Emeka holds an BA and MA in Philosophy from Ambrose Alli University in Nigeria and wrote a dissertation on ‘Democracy in the Political Philosophy of Benedict Baruch Spinoza’ for his BA degree, and a dissertation entitled ‘Philosophy and the search for an African Identity: The Contributions of Paulin J. Hountondji’ as a requirement of his Masters degree. He is currently a PhD candidate at the same university. His most recent paper to be published is a critique of the search for an African Identity Debate.

Abstract
African Identity And African Immigration To The West: Questions For Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum And Mbiti’s I Am Because We Are (presented with Okwudili Daniel Okoye)

John Mbiti’s “I am because we are” is parallel to the Cartesian Cogito in defining the identity of an African. While Descartes’ Cogito bases identity and personhood on the “thinking being”, for Mbiti, the community creates and gives identity and personhood to the African. Both Cartesian and Mbitian philosophical principles acknowledge the unique identity of the thinking being who is thirsty for self knowledge and raison d’etre.
This paper will focus on the role of immigration in an African’s search for identity and personhood. We will examine how the reality of African immigration to the West and the African’s search for identity and personhood challenge Cartesian and Mbitian concepts of African identity and personhood. Can we really say that African identity and personhood are products of Descartes’ ‘pure thought’? What does Mbiti’s idea of community offer the individual African in search of identity? Or philosophy aside, is African identity based on a social response to survival instincts in a third world malady?
In our thesis, we will take two positions and critically analyse their roles in the definition of identity and personhood in Africa. Firstly we will compare African immigration to the West with Descartes’ philosophical inquiry, seeing it as a search for authentic identity. Secondly, we will argue that in fact African immigration to the West is not an effective panacea to the problem of identity and personhood since identity and personhood ought to be nurtured by African governments, African communities, and African families.
Finally, we will argue for a necessary convergence of the Cartesian Cogito and the Mbitian “I am because we are” as a more holistic philosophical definition of identity and personhood, especially for the African.

Emilie Venables: University of Edinburgh, UK

Biography
Emilie Venables holds an ERSC scholarship at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. She has carried out ethnographic research on commercial sex-workers in both the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Her PhD research focuses on the relationship between space, identity and gender. Her previous work, entitled, ‘I may work as a prostitute, but that doesn’t make me one: the creation and maintenance of boundaries amongst sex-workers in Ziguinchor, Senegal’ has been published as a CAS Occasional Paper at the University of Edinburgh.

Abstract
Sex Workers in Ziguinchor: Working as or Being a Prostitute

In order to separate their domestic life from their work, female sex-workers in Ziguinchor, Senegal place a great deal of emphasis on the difference between working as a prostitute and being a prostitute. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Ziguinchor, discusses the way in which sex-workers create spatial and corporeal boundaries between themselves and their work in order to cope with and manage the stigma surrounding what they do. In relation to the idea of ‘crossing places’, this paper addresses how women in Ziguinchor ‘cross’ between identities and negotiate the boundaries in their daily lives to separate themselves from the perceived stigma of their work. The creation and maintenance of such boundaries is an important survival strategy for the women involved. In keeping their domestic space separate from the bars, clubs and hotels which make up the workplace, women live their lives in a blurred yet carefully staged reality. However, the Sexually Transmitted Infection clinic, which registered sex-workers were required to attend on a fortnightly basis, is a space in which they are unsure of whether to exaggerate or deny their sexuality. The clinic is a liminal place in which night-time sex-work and day-time domesticity collide, making women uncertain of how to dress and how to act. Sex-workers in Ziguinchor see their work as a temporary stage on their life trajectory, allowing them to maintain the façade and switch between their different identities in the hope it will not be permanent.

Chamaminda Weerawardhana: Université François Rabelais, France

Biography
Chaminda is currently reading for an interdisciplinary Masters degree at the University of Tours. Her primary research work revolves around comparative peace and conflict studies, focusing on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka. Chaminda’s research work crosses through disciplines that range from political history to literature and she is particularly interested in issues related to identity, self-determination and discrimination of minority communities. One of her major recent research projects was on the role of literature as a tool for constructive conflict transformation, and a paper on the subject was presented at the University of Salford in September 2005. An extensive version of this project is to be published in book form in future.

Abstract
Images of Africanness : Border-crossing, Identity Crisis and Politics of Race in Travelling with Djinns by Jamal Mahjoub

In my paper, I wish to work on the issues related to ‘Africanness’ and the ensuing (conflicting) discourse of racial politics and African identity in the apparently globalized society of our times. I shall use as my point of departure the novel Travelling with Djinns by Jamal Mahjoub. The Anglo-Sudanese writer attempts to create a parallel universe of his own life sojourn in the novel, and for Yasin, the narrator, crossing places, i.e. national and territorial boundaries, is the only means of coming to terms with his own dual/hybrid identity. He embarks on a tour of Europe with his seven-year-old son, crossing borders, moving from one place to another in search of realization and reconciliation. Born to an African (i.e., Sudanese) father and a British mother, he is a result of human movements and immigration. Legally, he belongs to two worlds, one White and the other Black. But in both worlds, he cannot help feeling ill-at-ease with his identity. Issues of race, culture and ethnicity and stereotypical images of Africa, Africans and ‘Africanness’ lie at the core of the racial/ ethnic politics of the story. It is his own identity (or the absence of one) that prevents him from leading a balanced family life. The ‘European-African’ thus becomes an impossible image to accommodate, and he is reduced to a kind of secondary being. Contrary to the richness resulting in cultural mixing, is it a handicap to those who undergo it? Yasin notes at one point that Europe is his ‘dark continent’. Is this the same for all Africans? In such a case, do words such as immigration, Diaspora, cross-cultural, inter-linguistic exchanges represent a perpetual sentiment of unpleasantness and subtle trauma to the African psyche? This paper will deal with these crucial interrogations, amongst many others.