This book explores the relations between literacy and "people's power" in the context of Mozambique's project of socialist construction. It probes the tensions between literacy as a tool for grassroots democracy versus literacy as a tool for mobilizing at the base for top-down initiatives.

Africa and particularly South Africa is in a stage of creating an inclusive education system. It is a necessary starting point to first recognize the voices of those who are excluded and marginalized, and then to develop strategies which will ensure their inclusion.

Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecommunication would enhance everything from entrepreneurialism to democratization to service delivery, ushering in socio-economic development. With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance by revealing how better access to information may in fact be anything but desirable. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb, Archambault shows how, in their efforts to create fulfilling lives, young men and women rely on mobile communication not only to mitigate everyday uncertainty but also to juggle the demands of intimacy by courting, producing, and sustaining uncertainty. In their hands, the phone has become a necessary tool in a wider arsenal of pretense—a means of creating the open-endedness on which harmonious social relations depend in postwar postsocialist Mozambique. As Mobile Secrets shows, Mozambicans have harnessed the technology not only to acquire information but also to subvert regimes of truth and preserve public secrets, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.

Education as Politics argues that colonial schooling remade Senegalese politics during the transition to French rule, creating political spaces that were at once African and colonial, and ultimately leading to the historic 1914 election of a black African representative from Senegal to the French National Assembly.

»Transatlantic Caribbean« widens the scope of research on the Caribbean by focusing on its transatlantic interrelations with North America, Latin America, Europe and Africa and by investigating long-term exchanges of people, practices and ideas. Based on innovative approaches and rich empirical research from anthropology, history and literary studies the contributions discuss border crossings, south-south relations and diasporas in the areas of popular culture, religion, historical memory as well as national and transnational social and political movements. These perspectives enrich the theoretical debates on transatlantic dialogues and the Black Atlantic and emphasize the Caribbean's central place in the world.

Current debates on the transnational impact of world views (interpretive frameworks) often refer to the concepts of 'globalization' or 'travelling models, ' with an emphasis on domination or on a process of translation. This volume highlights situations where different world views are confronted with each other within Africa, and the question of how the actors mediate between the two. The conceptual chapters foster a critical view on the normative implications of agency itself, as well as how they reflect on the claim of interpretive hegemonony of human rights, concepts of law, democracy, or neoliberalism. In addition, the book examines the confrontation of world views in particular cases. Essays examine distinct empirical grounds, such as law (e.g. Islamic law, children's rights, law and development, political ideology), and analyze the role of transcendental powers. (Series: Contributions to Research on Africa / Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung - Vol. 40) [Subject: African Studies, Politics, Human Rights, Law

In an age of global anxiety and suspicion, South Asian immigrants juggle multiple cultural and literate traditions in Mid-South America. In this study Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into this community to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding at sites as varied as a Hindu school, a Hindu women's reading group, Muslim men's and women's discussion groups formed soon after 9/11, and cross-cultural presentations by these immigrants to the host communities and law enforcement agencies. Through more than seventy interviews, he reveals the migratory nature of literacies and the community work required to make these practices meaningful. Pandey addresses critical questions about language and cultural identity at a time of profound change. He examines how symbolic resources are invented and reinvented and circulated and recirculated within and across communities; the impact of English and new technologies on teaching, learning, and practicing ancestral languages; and how gender and religious identifications shape these practices. Overall, the book offers a thorough examination of the ways individuals use interpretive powers for agency within their own communities and for cross-cultural understanding in a globalizing world and what these practices mean for our understanding of that world.