Zed Books at ECAS 2013

Zed Books is proud to be a part of the 2013 ECAS conference 

27-29 June 2013 in Lisbon

We are launching three African titles during the conference:

Sexuality and Social Justice in Africa. Rethinking Homophobia and Forging Resistance by Marc Epprecht

Based on pioneering research on the history of homosexualities and engagement with current lgbti and HIV/AIDS activism, Marc Epprecht provides a sympathetic overview of the issues at play and a hopeful outlook on the potential of sexual rights for all.

27 June, Thursday,  16:30 - 17:00, 1st floor

ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Center of African Studies IUL

Speakers: Marc Epprecht and Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju

Youth and Revolution in Tunisia by Alcinda Honwana

A revealing account of the revolution that kick-started the Arab Spring, utilizing first-person testimony from those on the ground.
 

In this remarkable work, Alcinda Honwana goes beyond superficial accounts of the uprising in Tunisia to explore the defining role of the country's youth and the challenges they encountered after the fall of the regime and the dismantling of the ruling party. An essential account of an event that has inspired the world, and its potential repercussions for the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

28 June, Friday, 15:30 - 16:00, 1st floor
ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Center of African Studies IUL
Speakers:  Alex de Waal and Alcinda Honwana

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern

Based on original fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as research material from other conflict zones, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? challenges the recent prominence given to sexual violence, bravely highlighting various problems with isolating sexual violence from other violence in war.

29 June, Saturday, 16:30 - 17:00, 1st floor

ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Center of African Studies IUL

The Conference is organized by the Centro de Estudos Africanos - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Center of African Studies of the University Institute of Lisbon) on behalf of AEGIS, the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies. Its general theme will be ‘African Dynamics in a Multipolar World’. For more information about events and panels plese click here

Book Event: 'Just Sustainabilites' by Julian Agyeman's

We are launching Julian Agyeman's 'Just Sustainabilites' at the UCL Environment Institute 
Inaugural Annual Conference on June 18th.

Register here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/environment-institute/eiconf

Introducing Just Sustainabilities discusses key topics, such as food justice, sovereignty and urban agriculture; community, space, place(making) and spatial justice; the democratization of our streets and public spaces; how to create culturally inclusive spaces; intercultural cities and social inclusion; green-collar jobs and the just transition; and alternative economic models, such as co-production. With a specific focus on solutions-oriented policy and planning initiatives that specifically address issues of equity and justice within the context of developing sustainable communities, this is the essential introduction to just sustainabilities.

Julian Agyeman is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University. He is an environmental social scientist whose expertise and current research interests are in the complex and embedded relationships between humans and the environment, whether mediated by institutions or by social movement organizations, and the effects of this on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. He is co-founder and editor of the international journal Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability and his books include Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (with co-editors Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans, 2003), Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (2005) and Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability (with Alison Hope Alkon, 2011). He is series editor of Just Sustainabilities: Policy, Planning and Practice (Zed Books).

Visit his website and follow him on Twitter; @julianagyeman

Talking Stick TV interviews Steve Keen

Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? discusses his career, the Cambridge capital controversy, Hyman Minsky, and neoclassical economics - and how he became the world's most famous unemployed economist.

Steve's blog: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/

Available from Zed Books

Angry Nation 2.0: A photoblog by author Kerem Öktem

Turkey is in turmoil. In an unprecedented turn of events, protests against a shopping centre on Istanbul's Taksim Square spread to other neighbourhoods in the city, to all major cities in Turkey and beyond.

In my book 'Angry Nation. Turkey since 1989' I had charted the evolution of the country's recent history from a perspective of social struggles and the country's minorities. My particular interest was in the many episodes of state violence and how it has shaped the experience the country's citizens. I also charted the emergence of the current ruling party, the Justice and Development Party AKP, and its charismatic Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I argued that within a decade, the government has succeeded in taking Turkey into the globalized 21st century. I also identified authoritarian tendencies within the government, its conservative social policies and its emphasis on centralised leadership. I concluded Angry Nation with two scenarios: The first wondered whether the decade of economic growth would lead to a consolidated, pro-European democracy. The second drew attention to growing social conservatism and an Islamic form of Kemalist government, that is a top-down project to reshape society along the lines of a political identity project, in the case of the AKP, political Islam.

The current events suggest that particularly Prime Minister Erdogan's autocratic leadership has been veering towards the latter scenario. Overreach in the area of neoliberal economic restructuring and foreign political engagements in Syria, combined with zero tolerance towards critique and excessive policing strategies have triggered grassroots protests unheard  of in Turkey's long history of political contestations. From the day I arrived in Istanbul, Saturday 1st of June, I have been on the streets following the events and taking photographs, while I also tried to make sense of the deeper reasons and the larger implications in a number of papers, of which I would like to suggest a piece in Jadaliyya for further reading. What struck me most is the explosion of wit, humour and fun, which erupted on the squares of Istanbul, while police brutality but also angry protestors raged on elsewhere. In Istanbul at least, the anger has become transformed into celebration  Here is a collection of some of my photos and of Yusuf Sayman, a professional photo report for the New York Times.

Throughout Friday, when the police stormed the occupy camp in Gezi Park, and Saturday, the police attacked demonstrators with tear gas and water cannons. The more tear gas they fired, the more protesters joined in (Photo courtesy of Yusuf Sayman)

The protesters came from all walks of life and background, but there was a visible middle-class bias among the initial fighters (Photo courtesy of Yusuf Sayman)

As the street battles raged on, life continued as usual, but many who witnessed the initial police brutality felt a string sense of solidarity with kids on the barricades. They started to support the protesters and supplied them with lemons, water and with specially prepared solutions to fight the effects of tear gas (Photo courtesy of Yusuf Sayman)

By Saturday afternoon, the police began to withdraw from the hotspots of conflict on Taksim square and the barricades leading to the streets leading up to the square (Photo courtesy of Yusuf Sayman)

Once the police had retreated, Istiklal Avenue and Taksim turned into an open air graffiti museum. Garanti Bank became a target, because it belongs to the Dogus Group, which also runs NTV, a once respected news channel, which failed to report the events for several days. On Tuesday, the NTV CEO apologised to the people for its blatant censorship  (Photo courtesy of Yusuf Sayman)

A response to the government's vision for Istanbul as a neo-Ottoman consumer capital: "Istanbul - Byzantion - Konstantinopolis", "Recep Tayyip Erdogan, I kiss you, take case, good bye!"

The mainstream media was barred from broadcasting the events in the first few days, provoking this graffiti, which reads "The revolution will not be televized."

Even though started by environmentalists and event though the middle-class youth has often been likened to the least politicised generation in Turkey's recent history, political awareness seemed to have kicked in over night and thanks to the police brutality. This graffiti speaks of the "Murderous police" and "Fascists".

Saturday afternoon, spontaneous celebrations began on Istiklal Avenue, the main pedestrian street leading to Taksim Square.

The sense of celebration was tangible everywhere on Istiklal and Taksim, where protesters joined ad-hoc celebrations, folk dances and sit-ins. Street battles in other neighbourhoods raged on.

On Saturday night, the boats criss-crossing the Bosporus were packed with injured and tired protesters.

The police used water cannons and tear gas indiscriminately, but soon everybody had acquired gas masks.

When the police withdrew from Taksim Square it turned into a carnival, albeit with a strong political feel. Left-wing and Kurdish organisations joined in, and soon the entire political spectrum of the left, women's and LGBT organisations included, was represented.The main banner reads: "A political status for the Kurdish People and their Collective Identity. Education in the Mother Tongue. Freedom and Socialism". One of the smaller banners marks the "Taksim People's Square".

From day one, activists set up emergency facilities manned by doctors, and medical students and began to supply free food and water. It was this unprecedented feeling of solidarity that made people proud to be part of the protests.

The Taksim uprising is a globalised protest, and many international references can be found on the square and in the occupied park.  The main banner reads "Now Tahrir is Taksim, forward for the revolution".

In front of the Greek Consulate. Slogans for the Greek left-wing part Syriza.

Wednesday night was a religious holiday. Here is a banner wishing a peaceful Kandil (Lailat al Miraj), with the occupied Ataturk Cultural Centre in the background. 

Many conservative Muslims also joined the protests. One such group were the Anticapitalist Muslims, and their banner reads: The Kandil (religious holidays) are days of unity, equality and solidarity between the people.

The Taksim uprising has already become musealized. Many of the bulldozers which were used for the initial destruction of parts of the Gezi Park have been repainted and have been turned into tourist attractions. Will the future of Turkey be as colourful as the protesters and the views they stood for? Turkey's history is a series of missed opportunities, and worse may yet come. Yet, this week of protests has already politicised an entire generation and has shown the contours of how a more inclusive, less divisive and less neoliberal Turkey could look like. The nation is still angry, but it has found ways to express this anger in a playful and witty fashion that may be more corrosive to state power than the slogans of the old days.

The latest on the protests in Turkey:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/09/world/europe/opinion-oktem-akkoyunlu-turkey-erdogan/

http://www.opendemocracy.net/kalypso-nicolaïdis-kerem-oktem-karabekir-akkoyunlu/turkey’s-protests-limits-of-hubris

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12088/contours-of-a-new-republic-and-signals-from-the-pa

http://freespeechdebate.com/en/2013/06/why-turkeys-mainstream-media-preferred-penguins-to-protest/

http://www.opendemocracy.net/kerem-oktem/turkey-from-tahrir-to-taksim

Kerry Brown reviews 'The Morality of China in Africa: The Middle Kingdom and the Dark Continent' by Stephen Chan

© Asian Review of Books - Original article

Available from Zed Books

China in Africa has become one of those subjects about which everyone seems to have an opinion, and yet for which there is neither very little useful analysis nor hard facts. The usual tack taken in western media is to look upon what Chinese actors are doing there with deep skepticism. This reached its peak in the period before the 2008 Olympics when Beijing was accused of supporting the regime in Sudan that had massacred opponents in Darfur. Since then, China has improved its diplomacy and become more careful. It convenes large meetings sometimes in Africa, sometimes in China, where country leaders from both areas get together and talk up their common economic and political purpose. They produce nice sounding rhetoric, but this still leaves largely unaddressed the question of what is actually happening in the region.

Few are better placed than Stephen Chan of the School of Oriental and Africa Studies in London rectify this. Ethnically Chinese, but also British, he has been visiting Africa for many decades, and refers in The Morality of China in Africa—a collection of essays edited by him on relations between the two—to an encounter in 1980 with a Zimbabwe guerilla fighter who had been trained in China and referred to their experience of fraternity and support there with deep feeling. Chan writes eloquently in his introductory essay of this early period of relations between a China isolated and rebuilding itself after decades of internal and external war, and a continent where so many countries were shaking off the bitter yoke of colonialism, and how in the early days there was great idealism and romance in the ways in which these politics related to each other.

What lingers from this period is possibly, as Chan and some of the other contributors to this volume make clear, a shared anger at the historic injustices that were visited on them—despite their very different geographical, political and cultural situations—by colonialisms driven from Europe. We forget this history in the era of post-colonialization and late modernity, but it still weighs heavy in China, and it is clear from Chan’s words that this is also the case in Africa. One very real link between the two, therefore, is this shared anger, and a sense that at least they are speaking from common ground.

he new situation, however, is one where harder economic realities prevail. The simple fact is that many African countries have the sort of natural resources that China, with its energy- and resource-hungry manufacturing model, needs to maintain strong growth. Having a diverse network of relations, through which it can satisfy this supply need, is rational. China has therefore mobilized both diplomatic, aid and political channels to ensure that it can enjoy as wide a spectrum of benign support in Africa as possible. Aid projects, large loans, technical assistance, and bilateral agreements and meetings have all been used in this campaign, so far with great success.

Chan is right that African voices are seldom heard in this new dynamic, and he supplies in the collection a long essay by Patrick Mazimhaka, formerly of the African Union, who praises China’s more long-term and less prescriptive vision for how it runs its relations with its African partners, but also points to the failure to find a stronger unified voice within Africa itself. [Click here to read the full article]

REVIEW – Congo Masquerade: The Political Culture Of Aid Inefficiency And Reform Failure

A new review of Theodore Trefon’s African Arguments book ‘Congo Masquerade'.

In Congo Masquerade, Congo expert Theodore Trefon seeks to explain why a decade of internationally supported state-building efforts has brought very little progress in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As the title indicates, Trefon’s narrative centres on the hypocrisy of the interactions between Congolese authorities and international partners, during which both sides ‘make a show of being what they are not’ and ‘pretend not to recognize who is behind the masks surrounding them’ (p. x). Congo Masquerade is compact and accessible, and therefore an ideal introduction for those less familiar with the DRC’s predicament. Yet it will certainly also interest Congo experts and activists, because of its razor-sharp and provocative analysis of who is responsible for the country’s lack of progress and why.

The analysis, based on a political-anthropological approach, is presented in five concise and accessible chapters. The book starts relatively slowly, with the first two chapters respectively discussing more … [Click here to read the full article]

Available from Zed Books

The Spectre of "Multiculturalism" - 'The Crisis of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age' reviewed

by Molly Klein

© Monthly Review - Original article

"Multiculturalism" has inspired reams of anguished writing across Europe over the past decade and a half.  Politicians, pundits and academics have competed to produce the most lurid tales of a "failed experiment" conducted by misguided elites, a botched socio-cultural surgery causing grievous harm to the social body requiring an urgent therapeutic process of "integration".  Without being described with any specificity, both the implementation and the malfunction of multiculturalism are widely indicted for having inflicted injury on things of presumed incontestable value, among them value itself, "our" values, Western Civilization, liberalism, democracy, individualism, secularism, national pride, community cohesion, feminism, masculinity, working class struggle, and more.  As is traditional, the castigation of this mysterious enemy offers an occasion for the ritual assertion of "European" claims to everything worthwhile and admirable humanity has ever produced, with the possible exceptions of ideographs, woks and Jazz.

[...]

But as Lentin and Titley show in their book The Crisis of Multiculturalism -- a staggeringly detailed and thorough dissection of the current stream of supremacist, imperial-apologist, racist discourses -- it is precisely a legendary and not a concrete menace that is required and fashioned by the denouncers.  The real target of the attacks on "multiculturalism" is, as they put it, "lived multiculture", and the real content of the condemnations is the production of race and racism, an overt engagement with which is taboo and for which the discourse of "failed multiculturalism" provides a euphemistic lexicon.  An actually existing multiculturalism (as perhaps might encompass a range of policy in education, media development, arts funding, urban planning, or perhaps designate an attitude or tendency in various grassroots social, aesthetic, hermeneutic, or organizational practises) could never live up to the monstrous figment's evil reputation or justify the level of terror required to solidify a portion of the public's allegiance to the status quo.  The irreversible illegitimacy of racialist ideas or biologistic racism and the dogma of the contemporary era as "post-race" seal the difficulty and awkwardness of advancing Euro-supremacist interpretations of reality and ideological elements of white supremacist praxis in any way other than in disguised and yet codified and legible form such as the "multiculturalism debate" offers.  This explains why the wreckage of this misbegotten multicultural Thing's rampage is visible all across new and old media, but the beast itself is glimpsed only obliquely, as in the most effective horror entertainments.  Addressees of these warnings about the ubiquitous and protean enemy are intended to infer the contours and features of multiculturalism from the shapes of the wounds it has dealt to a parade of evocative abstractions. [Click here to read the full article]

Available from Zed Books