bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Putting aromatic compounds to work: Rational synthesis of organic 2D polymers
Authors: Schlüter A. Dieter , Sakamoto Junji
Published: March 2012

This contribution describes two different approaches aimed at the synthesis of monolayer molecular sheets with internal order, or, in other words, 2D polymers. First, an interfacial strategy is presented in which terpyridene-based hexafunctional monomers spread at the air/water interface are connected to one another with the help of metal salts. While this approach leads to micrometer-sized monolayer sheets that are mechanically stable enough to be spanned over several micrometer-sized holes, their internal structure could not yet be proven. The second approach rests upon solid-state photochemistry, and properly designed monomers are covalently connected with one another while being held in layered geometries owing to crystal packing. Exfoliation to single sheets can be achieved, and molecular structure is supported by a Raman spectroscopic analysis. We consider this the first case of a rational synthesis of 2D polymers and briefly touch on the impact this may have.
Assessing the Reality of a Palaeolithic “Dwelling Structure” in the Japanese Archipelago: The Structure of the Tana-Mukaihara Site
Authors: Sakashita Takanori
Published: March 2012

The Tana-Mukaihara site is located on the left bank of the Sagami River in the Sagamino Upland in southern Kanto Plain (Honshu, Japan). In addition to the two lithic scatters (mainly composed of obsidian debitage and tools) and two pebble clusters, the site has been recognized as a prominent Upper Palaeolithic site (c. 20,000 cal.y.b.p .) because of an exceptional pebble-surrounded habitation area identified as a dwelling structure, 12 postholes, and two hearths. The purpose of this article is to examine human activities in this Palaeolithic dwelling site through the analysis of thermally altered obsidian artifacts and their spatial distributions. The results show that thermally altered obsidian artifacts are not only concentrated around the hearths, but also in the postholes, suggesting that the so-called postholes indeed functioned as hearths with the other two hearths. This study provides new insight into the reality of Palaeolithic dwelling structures in the Japanese Islands.
Refitted Material and Consideration of Lithic Reduction Sequence among the Microblade Assemblages: A View from the Okushirataki-1 Site, Hokkaido, Northern Japan
Authors: Takakura Jun
Published: March 2012

In this article, I attempt to reconstruct the lithic reduction sequence of the microblade assemblage from the Okushirataki-1 site, Hokkaido, northern Japan, and to discuss the relationship between the technological variability of lithic reduction sequences and the morphological features of lithic raw materials, through with the assessment of numerous refitted materials. In terms of results, the refitted materials from this assemblage show that the detaching of microblades inevitably connects with the removal of blades in the course of the reduction sequence. Additionally, the presence and content of core preparations or rejuvenations on the flaked surfaces may have a significant role in the formation of variety among the blade and microblade reduction sequences. Therefore, it is not appropriate to compare the lithic assemblages and examine inter-site variability only through the analysis of morphological attributes reflected in the reduction sequence, which has been the focus of previous techno-typological approaches.
Introduction
Authors: Bleed Peter
Published: March 2012

This serves as an introduction to eight articles on Japanese Palaeolithic archaeology that illustrate the types of research issues recently addressed and the kinds of archaeological data currently available on Pleistocene deposits in Japan. The articles also show how Japanese researchers are setting out to explain Palaeolithic variability at various scales, including the regional level. Perhaps, most importantly, given the recriminations following the relatively recent exposure of faked “early and middle Palaeolithic” artifacts in Japan, these papers show how Palaeolithic archeologists working in Japan have recognized the importance of presenting reliable archaeological and paleoenvironmental data in the context of clear research methodology.
Experimental Study on Heat Alteration of Palaeolithic Material: Preliminary Results from Shale in the Northeastern Region of Japan
Authors: Yonekura Kaoru
Published: March 2012

In order to obtain a better understanding of the intentional thermal alteration of Palaeolithic materials in the northeastern region of Japan, heating experiments were carried out on two types of shale samples. Mechanical properties such as strength and hardness as well as surface morphology were analyzed before and after heating. As a result, a functional change was observed in mechanical factors after heating. A hard shale sample comprising small grains exhibited a significant decrease in strength and noticeable increase in hardness after heating. On the other hand, shale comprising larger crystal grains exhibited an increase in both strength and hardness values. Moreover, smoother surfaces were observed through SEM analysis in both samples after heating. These results lead us to the conclusion that the heating process, especially in the case of harder shale with higher strength values, might have modified material properties such as flaking characteristics as well as functional attributes that are relevant to hardness.
Dual Nature in the Creation of Disciplinary Identity: A Socio-historical Review of Palaeolithic Archaeology in Japan
Authors: Nakazawa Yuichi
Published: March 2012

An expansion in archaeological excavations and site identifications over the last 30 years, particularly through an increase in salvage projects and the growth of government archaeology in Japan, has made the Japanese Islands one of the most dense regions of Palaeolithic archaeological sites in East Asia. The history of Pleistocene site discoveries and chronological frameworks for Palaeolithic lithic industries are summarized, followed by a critical review of research trajectories in the accumulation of a Palaeolithic record, specifically in terms of changes in relationships among academic archaeology, government archaeology, the public, and mass media. This article also attempts to clarify the peculiar structure of current Japanese archaeology that allowed the construction of a falsified Palaeolithic prehistory by some unscrupulous researchers for 20 years until its sensational exposure by a national daily in 2000.
Use Angle and Motional Direction of End Scrapers: A Case Study of the Palaeolithic in Hokkaido, Japan
Authors: Takase Katsunori
Published: March 2012

This article examines the direction of tool movement of end scrapers used by Palaeolithic peoples for hide-working in the Japanese Islands. Specimens are approximately 400 end scrapers from three sites dated to the first half of the late Palaeolithic in Hokkaido, northern Japan. As a result of examination using a method combining the high-power approach of lithic use-wear analysis with a replication technique for measuring the edge angle and the use angle, it was clarified that end scrapers were used only for hideworking. They were classified into four groups: (1) relatively short end scrapers used in a pulling motion (group A); (2) relatively short end scrapers used in a pushing motion (group B); (3) relatively long and large end scrapers used in a pulling motion (group C); and (4) relatively long and large end scrapers used in a pushing motion (group D). Groups B and D (i.e., for pushing motion) are dominant among whole specimens. This study will contribute significantly to the investigation of tool use strategies, curation systems, and the reduction sequences of end scrapers when compared with results of techno-morphological research. At the same time, the methodology performed for this article enabled to change of needs for hide products in prehistoric society.
Transitions in the Early Upper Palaeolithic: An Examination of Lithic Assemblages on the Musashino Upland, Tokyo, Japan
Authors: Yamaoka Takuya
Published: March 2012

This article explains lithic assemblage transitions during the Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) on the Musashino Upland by quantitative comparisons of lithic raw materials, core reduction (blade technology), and formal tool production. The results suggest that changes in aspects of lithic assemblage variability could be explained by changes in raw material utilization, not developments (sophistication of tool-making skills) in blade technology and methods of formal tool production. The results also indicate the possibility that the changes in lithic raw material would have been affected by changes in residential mobility and the foraging territorial scale of EUP hunter-gatherers, as well as the changes in organic raw material utilization in whole technological organization in various environmental settings during the EUP. Beside them, the characteristics of the lithic assemblages in Period I as the initial EUP assemblages in this region are different from general characteristics of Upper Palaeolithic assemblages (blade technology, standardized and formal flaked tools) in Eurasia. The nature of lithic raw material utilization, especially flaked tool use, in Period I assemblages looks extremely expedient. Therefore, the characteristics of initial EUP assemblages in this region represent that diversity in lithic raw material utilization and technological organization was present during the EUP.
Mobility and Lithic Economy in the Terminal Pleistocene of Central Honshu
Authors: Sano Katsuhiro
Published: March 2012

During the Terminal Pleistocene in central Honshu, which coincided temporally with the emergence of pottery, lithic raw material reduction sequences ceased to be rational and economical, instead becoming expedient and wasteful. Furthermore, hunter-gatherers had stopped importing lithic raw materials over long distances, and attempts made previously to attain a maximum number of usable edges on artifacts upon one nodule had ceased. Their reduction sequences might have no longer required a sparing strategy, since they now used abundant local raw materials, probably due to reduced mobility. It is suggested that the emergence of pottery allowed them to exploit more diverse plant sources and enabled them to survive within smaller territories, while the lithic reduction strategies changed as they adapted to use of available lithic raw materials.
The Palaeolithic Exploitation of the Lithic Raw Materials and the Organization of Foraging Territory in Northeastern Japan
Authors: Yoshikawa Kohtaro
Published: March 2012

This paper explores the organization of foraging territories of populations in early Upper Palaeolithic northeastern Japan. First, a chronology is established for the region, outlining three stages known as chronological stages 1 to 3. This is followed by a discussion of the role of trapezoids and knife-shaped blades, lithic raw materials (especially locally available siliceous shale), and their environments in understanding lithic technology, food procurement strategies, and lithic resource exploitation in each chronological stage. Various site types are categorized by examination of tool composition, procurement and consumption of foods, and lithic raw materials in each site. The results of this analysis indicate that foraging territories have been reorganized three times, corresponding with each chronological stage. Transformations in foraging territories are associated with changing tool types, lithic technology, exploitation of lithic raw materials, and food procurement strategies, representing the adaptation of human populations to environmental fluctuation in early Upper Palaeolithic.
“What Young Men and Women Do When Their Country is Attacked”: Interventionist Discourse and the Rewriting of Violence in Adolescent Literature of the Iraq War
Authors: Kieran David
Published: March 2012

This article examines recent adolescent literature of the Iraq War, arguing that these texts contribute to interventionist discourse in two key ways. First, they describe the Iraq War and the soldier’s experience in language that evokes tenets of interventionist discourse, casting it as an appropriate response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, as a humanitarian mission, and as an intervention in which it is appropriate for dutiful, patriotic young Americans to participate. Simultaneously, each text acknowledges but revises controversial moments of violence that have dominated media coverage of the Iraq war and have shaped the growing opposition to it.
Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking
Authors: Morey Anne
Published: March 2012

This essay explores the 1930s children’s prison film in the context of adjacent genres such as the adult prison film. While the children’s prison film engaged with contemporary social concerns by examining the origins of criminality, it nonetheless valorized the priest or judge in a revival of the mid-nineteenth century understanding of religious authority as inhering in the adult male rather than in the child. The children’s reformatory thus emerges as site of potential regeneration because in the hands of the proper reforming spirit it is a controlled experimental environment that is both scientific and sacred. When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher
When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher
Authors: Abate Michelle Ann
Published: March 2012

This essay examines Lothar Meggendorfer’s once well-known pull-the-tab book Scenes in the Life of a Masher as a revealing example of the tremendous social anxiety surrounding the interplay of conspicuous consumption, sartorial style, and the social construction of masculinity as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The 1894 text provides a rare glimpse in a book for young readers of the impact that consumer capitalism had not simply on the expected issues of social standing and class mobility but on the less expected one of male gender roles. In so doing, the moveable toy book records an important paradigm shift in the history of white Western masculinity, its relationship to retail commercialism, and its production of men’s sartorial style
Reminders of Rugby in the Halls of Hogwarts: The Insidious Influence of the School Story Genre on the Works of J. K. Rowling
Authors: Galway Elizabeth A.
Published: March 2012

The Harry Potter novels clearly contain elements from the school story tradition, yet there has been a tendency to view the fantasy series as a revision, rather than a continuation, of the genre. Considering the similarities between Tom Brown’s Schooldays and J.K. Rowling’s work reveals how the elitist traditions of the genre are perpetuated through a phenomenally popular series which, on the surface, appears to champion equality and diversity. Transcending both generational and geographical boundaries, Rowling’s books hold mass appeal, yet they simultaneously propagate elitist notions of class, gender, and masculine heroism that are integral to the school story tradition.
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events : Daniel Handler and Marketing the Author
Authors: Magnusson Kendra
Published: March 2012

By inventing the fictional author Lemony Snicket, writer Daniel Handler engages directly with issues of authorial presence in his books, A Series of Unfortunate Events . With Snicket’s in(ter)vention, Handler mocks the didactic conventions of children’s literature, as well as his own commodified presence as an author thereof. I argue that while the constructed fictional author is integral to mass-marketed literature, Handler’s negotiation of his role is tellingly reflexive. Although Handler appears both aware and critical of his works’ overtly commercial, materialistic nature, it is the integration of his own critical position that becomes the brand’s defining characteristic.
Radical Love and the Political Romance: Shelley After the Jacobin Novel
Authors: Nersessian Anahid
Published: March 2012

Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam engages the literary tradition of English Jacobinism. Read alongside Thomas Holcroft’s novel, Anna St. Ives (1792), it becomes available to a theory of Romantic liberalism that departs suggestively from classical liberal theory. Both texts claim that private intimacy generates public forms of impact, organizing politics around a fantasy of collective belonging. That fantasy is tested by a philosophical deployment of free love as a limit case for freedom. Where Holcroft cultivates a close relationship between sex and self-sovereignty, Shelley abandons the Jacobin commitment to formalism internal to the juridical imagination of political as well as erotic life.
Coming of Age on Stage: Jonson’s Epicoene and the Politics of Childhood in Early Stuart England
Authors: Greteman Blaine
Published: March 2012

By the time King James I took the throne, the actors in London’s children’s theatre companies were rapidly approaching adulthood. This essay uses Ben Jonson’s Epicoene to suggest that the liminal status of these young performers was key to the way the plays explored and represented the vexed status of the Jacobean political subject. At a time when James was countering parliamentary unrest by adopting and expanding the rhetoric of the firm but benevolent father-king, works like Jonson’s asked whether it was possible, or even desirable, to leave childish things behind.
The Practicalities of the Absolute: Justice and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Richard II
Authors: Philips James
Published: March 2012

Richard II is a king who falls because he failed to be just. His deposition is motivated not by protomodern desires for the reform of kingship, but by dissatisfaction with Richard as king. He is a parody of the just king, of the king who intervenes in the name of justice when a mechanical application of the law would be unjust. His tyranny exploits the freedom from the law that the medieval commonwealth acknowledges in order to make room for the unpredictability of justice. Shakespeare’s play can be read as a disquisition on the absoluteness, unpredictability and ambiguity of justice.
“Transported Touch”: The Sense of Feeling in Milton’s Eden
Authors: Moshenska Joe
Published: March 2012

The dialogue between Adam and Raphael that fills the middle books of Paradise Lost closes with a dispute surrounding the value of the sense of touch, which the angel dismisses as too bestial to be valuable. Touch had long been dismissed in similar terms by Aristotle, Marcilius Ficino, and others, but I argue that the angel’s view should not be accepted as John Milton’s own. He explores in Eden the manifold forms that touch can take, acknowledging the potential of the sense to damage and perturb but also suggesting that its intermittent and habitual exercise is foundational to unfallen human experience.
“Our Debt to Lamb”: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact
Authors: Russell David J.
Published: March 2012

I propose that “tact” emerged in Britain as an ethical and aesthetic response to social changes in population and urbanization in the early nineteenth century. I briefly contextualize this emergence, against older forms of social “manners,” before demonstrating how the sensibility of tact is best examined in the critically-neglected Essays of Elia, written by Charles Lamb in the 1820s. Close readings show how tact works to oppose and undermine systems of totalizing and imperializing epistemology (like that of Lamb’s work colleague James Mill) and do so in order to open up a “neutral,” uncolonized, middle space of relation, which I relate to the psychoanalyst D. W. W. Winnicott’s theory of “transitional space.” Finally, I compare Lamb’s discursively constructed neutral space with a similar construction in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, to show how they provide a shared sense of the social exigencies of their time (and another point of convergence between the Romantics and Utilitarians) before distinguishing Lamb from Bentham on their very different attitudes towards temporal “progress.”
Milton’s Strange God: Theology and Narrative Form in Paradise Lost
Authors: Fallon Samuel
Published: March 2012

John Milton sought in the narrative of Paradise Lost a solution to a theological problem that defied the normal modes of theological analysis: the difficulty of conceiving how an infinite, timeless God could interact with his finite and time-bound creation. In examining the poem’s attempt to bring God into narrative--a form that, because it simulates existence in time, offers itself as a particularly useful way to approach this problem--this essay proposes a new approach to the complaints readers since William Empson have lodged against the poem’s God and reconsiders the relationship between philosophical thought and poetic expression in Milton’s work.
Beckett and the Animal: Writing from “No-Man’s-Land”
Authors: Smith Carter
Published: March 2012

At a time when philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Alexandre Kojève relied on the animal in order to distinguish it from the higher functions of the human, Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel, Murphy, troubled that distinction with a vision of the human driven by its incommensurability with the world around it. This essay argues that Beckett’s novel develops a zone of proximity between humans and animals based on this incommensurability, one that prefigures the concerns of his later fiction and couples the act of writing to a desire and persistence that Murphy relates to animal life.
Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid and the Experience of the 1590 Faerie Queene
Authors: Junker William
Published: March 2012

This paper explores Edmund Spenser’s representations of the unarmed Cupid in his 1590 Faerie Queene in order to argue that the peculiar qualities and effects associated with this Cupid are intended to illuminate and model the reading experience of Spenser’s poem itself. Developing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phenomenological description of this experience, and engaging the recent work of Michael Schoenfeldt and Jonathan Goldberg, the paper argues that Spenser’s poem is intended to produce in us a fundamentally erotic experience--one that runs counter to Spenser’s purported goal of self-discipline and self-fashioning that informs many influential New Historical accounts of his romance.
Virginia Woolf, Hugh Walpole, the Hogarth Press, and the Book Society
Authors: Wilson Nicola
Published: March 2012

This article explores the unlikely relationship and alliance between the novelists Virginia Woolf and Hugh Walpole. It examines the ways in which these typically highbrow and middlebrow writers influenced each others’ lives and work, and focuses in particular on the interactions between the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press and Walpole’s Book Society, the first book club to operate in Great Britain. The article uses a number of case studies drawn from the Hogarth Press archives to demonstrate how by the 1930s, the Hogarth Press was much more commercial in its operations and pursuits of reading markets than is often recognized.
Judging Clarissa’s Heart
Authors: Nazar Hina
Published: March 2012

This essay considers literary sentimentalism’s contribution to the modern discourses of autonomy by bringing into focus its under-read motif of judgment. The idea that one should judge for oneself, especially in moral matters, stands at the center of Samuel Richardson’s paradigmatic sentimental novel, Clarissa; or The History of a Young Lady . But Clarissa upholds more than one understanding of judgment, with varying implications for sentimentalism’s place within the larger liberal Enlightenment. On the one hand, Richardson’s heroine represents her judgments as instinctive responses, the work of her judging heart, which mysteriously reveals God’s laws. On the other hand, she understands judgment to entail scrutinizing the heart from a standpoint of relative impartiality. This latter account is sentimentalist because it takes impartiality to be a contingency of Clarissa’s epistolary friendship with Anna Howe, who helps Clarissa gain distance from her heart’s promptings by becoming a co-spectator of them. I suggest that the first, broadly religious, paradigm of judgment identifies Clarissa only ambiguously as an independent moral agent: while she is justified by the highest principles to defy worldly authority, she nonetheless remains God’s obedient servant. By contrast, the second, broadly secular paradigm--one that resonates with a Kantian tradition of aesthetics extending from Kant to Hannah Arendt--mobilizes an at once less transcendental and more compelling understanding of autonomy as moral independence nurtured by friendship and debate.
Nana Asma'u's Instruction and Poetry for Present-day American Muslimahs
Authors: Mack Beverly
Published: March 2012

In 1995 I whined to Dave Henige about the difficulties involved in producing a 753-page volume of 383 pages of translated poetry (each including a work number, language of the original, source of the text, an historical introduction, and related text section) containing three orthographies, four languages, 947 footnotes, 241 pages of barely-arranged Arabic-script (but not all Arabic language) facsimiles, six maps, three glossaries, two works cited lists (published and unpublished), two appendices, and an index – all without a copy editor, and for a press demanding camera-ready copy from two novices an ocean apart who had access only to primitive email (remember CompuServe?) that would scramble poetic verse and jumble margins. When I finally took a breath, he smiled. Dave loves a challenge, and loves even more, passing one on. “Write about it,” he said. Suddenly I found myself signed up for the “Technical Problems in Preparing Text and Translations for Camera-Ready Copy” Historical Texts Panel at ASA's 1996 meetings. But that was not enough for Dave. He also expected an article, which I duly produced: “This Will (Not) Be Handled By the Press: Problems and Their Solution in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman Dan Fodiyo 1793-1864” for History in Africa 25 (1998). In fact, it was Dave who rained on our anticipated title, “The Complete Works…,” dryly inquiring, “How can you be sure?” So it was “Collected Works…” instead.
Making History in Africa: David Henige and the Quest for Method in African History
Authors: Doortmont Michel R.
Published: March 2012

My own history with David Henige goes back to 1985, when I had just finished a master's degree in African studies at the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham, England, and was looking for a place and a supervisor for a planned doctoral dissertation involving a historiographical study of Nigeria. One of my supervisors, Tom McCaskie, suggested getting in touch with Henige, to see if he could assist me. The reply was elaborate and positive, which I appreciated much. Circumstances for graduate students at the time being quite different from the present, and funding systems for study abroad still in their infancy, the plan came to nothing. The connection with Henige and his work was there to stay, however.

This article is an effort to give a reflection on David Henige's career and his impact on the discipline of history in Africa, through his work as editor of History in Africa. The scope of the reflection is limited, as we concentrate on David's own contributions, rather than setting him and his work in a comparative framework. When David Henige started History in Africa in 1974, it was yet another scholarly journal on Africa, in an ever-growing series, counting already more than two hundred titles, as Henige pointed out himself. And indeed, in such circumstances, a new journal needs ‘to justify itself to the audience it addresses.’
From the Madrasah to the Museum: The Social Life of the “Kietaabs” of Cape Town
Authors: Jappie Saarah
Published: March 2012

Ebrahiem Manuel sits opposite me, about to embark upon his story. His living room is filled with material manifestations of his research: boxes overflowing with books and papers cover his entire sofa, newspapers and articles line the floor, and collages of images and texts hang on the walls and sit in the cabinets. It is clear that he is consumed by his passion for heritage, and his personal journey of discovery. He speaks in an animated, almost theatrical tone, raising and lowering his voice, stressing certain syllables, alive as he tells his story of “the ancient kietaabs.”

The journey began in 1997, when Ebrahiem returned to South Africa after years at sea, working as a cook on shipping vessels. Upon his return, he began a quest to learn about his personal heritage, inspired by a dream he had had about his grandfather. This search led him to an oldkietaab, given to him by an elderly aunt. This was not the first time he had come across the old book; he remembered seeing it as a child, amongst other kietaabs, stored out of reach of the children, on top of his grandfather's wardrobe. It was inside this book that a possible key to his ancestors was to be found.

This significant find was a range of hand-written inscriptions inside the book, in Arabic, English, and an unknown script. The Arabic script and its corresponding English transliteration read “Imaam Abdul Karriem, son of Imaam Abdul Jaliel, son of Imaam Ismail of Sumbawa.” Here was his family tree, starting from his great-grandfather and leading to two generations before him and, it seemed, their place of origin, the island of Sumbawa in eastern Indonesia. Ebrahiem then decided to go to Indonesia to solve what had become the mystery of “the ancient kietaab.”
Local Knowledge: An Akuapem Twi History of Asante
Authors: McCaskie Tom C.
Published: March 2012

In 2003 Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh I's eighty-nine page manuscript ‘The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself’ of 1907 was published in an annotated scholarly edition alongside a selection of allied texts. The same publisher is to produce a related volume containing the four hundred and fifty pages of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II's ‘History of Ashanti’ written in the 1940s (and edited by myself). Both of these texts are written in English. However, the huge range of sources on the Asante past recorded in Akan Twi have yet to receive equal attention and treatment. This short paper introduces and contextualises one source of this kind that was researched in Asante between 1902-1910 and finished in written form in Akan Twi in 1915.

The Akuapem (Akwapim) kingdom is located less than thirty miles northeast of Ghana's capital at Accra. It has always been and remains a small polity. It comprises only seventeen historic towns scattered among hills on two parallel ridges about fifteen hundred feet above sea level. There are more towns today, many created by the cocoa economy of the early twentieth century, but Akuapem remains a compact entity. It is a Twi-speaking Akan kingdom, but an unusual one in that it is ethnically diverse.

Patrilineal Guan-speaking farmers settled on the Akuapem ridges in the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were oppressed by the matrilineal Twi-speaking Akan of the nearby Akwamu kingdom. To end this situation the Guan recruited other Akan Twi speakers as allies. These were military adventurers from the Akyem Abuakwa polity to the west. The Akyem incomers succeeded against the Akwamu but stayed on to establish their own conquest dynasty in 1733.
Colonialism from the Middle: African Clerks as Historical Actors and Discursive Subjects
Authors: Austen Ralph A.
Published: March 2012

In a review of my first published book one of the founding figures of african historical studies suggested that instead of giving so much attention to European colonial administrators and African traditional chiefs I should have focused upon “the clerks, the schoolmasters and the evangelists, who were to take the lead when indirect rule had failed.” The terms in which this admonition was expressed implies a confidence in the nationalist project of “educated elites” that is less tenable today than it was during the 1960s. Nonetheless, in the late stages of my own career I have come to the conclusion that of the various occupational categories cited by Roland Oliver, African clerks do deserve greater examination than they have received so far in the historiography of colonial Africa. However, if they do prefigure the political leadership of postcolonial Africa, it is less in the heroic and innovative mode of “nation-building” than in the more problematic and continuous role as “gate-keepers,” or “brokers” (honest or not) between subject populations and external sources of power/patronage.

I am not alone in this concern and an entire recent volume of essays has been dedicated to the study of such colonial “African intermediaries.” I contributed a chapter to this book and have continued to pursue a study of colonialism from “the middle” (as opposed to the “above” of my previous work as well as the social history “from below” that emerged in more recent decades). The focus of my research on this topic is upon two figures who are of both historical and literary significance: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991), the very renowned Malian writer and scholar who produced a memoir about his early career as a colonial clerk; and “Wangrin,” a clerk and interpreter of an earlier generation, who is the subject of Hampâté Bâ's most widely read book.
History for Timbuktu: Aḥmad Bul‘arāf, Archives, and the Place of the Past
Authors: Jeppie Shamil
Published: March 2012

Aḥmad Bul‘arāf died in September 1955 and was buried in his adopted Timbuktu. He was laid to rest in the town's Sīdi al-Wāfi al-Amīr al-Arawāni cemetery but it would be hard to identify his grave. Gravestones soon disappear into their natural sandy settings. At the time he was widely eulogized for his life's work as a man of religion, culture, and knowledge. Well-known scholars and copyists of his era composed panegyric verses in his honour. One wrote:

What a pity on the sciences and their books/On their owners when this calamity occurred/Their schools and places have become deserted/There's no one in them except crows and vultures/Suddenly today there is a caller and no one to respond/Except the echoes and the tunes of the winds/By Ahmad Bui ‘arāf they were granted a gift/How many lessons were conducted and/You have upheld their loftiness, established their origin/You maintained their essence with your honorable books.

Decades later he still lives on in the memories of scholars as a “great hero and famous scholar, reviver of Islamic culture,” as a young writer described him in 1986, in a carefully handwritten essay in a local calligraphic style devoted to his achievement. Composed in “Sudani” script in blue ink with headings in red, when the typewriter, if not the PC, had long ago arrived in the region, this encomium to Bui‘arāf was a fitting tribute to a man who loved the written word. He cared for ideas expressed on paper, for their circulation, and how books could be stored for use in the present and in the future. He was devoted to conserving the manuscript heritage of Timbuktu. His own calligraphy in various regional variants was widely recognized and he practiced it without hesitation in the print age.
Remembering Korle Bu Hospital: Biomedical Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in theGolden Jubilee Souvenir
Authors: Roberts Jonathan
Published: March 2012

On the evening of 8 October 1973, a group of physicians led a watchnight ceremony on the campus of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana. At midnight, Dr. Portuphy-Lamptey, the Chief Medical Administrator, pulled a lanyard to raise an official flag inaugurating the Hospital's Golden Jubilee Anniversary. The next day, the Ghanaian Commissioner for Health, Lieutenant Colonel A.H. Selormey, unveiled an anniversary plaque that thanked and praised the hospital staff who had worked at Korle Bu over the past fifty years. In a speech to assembled dignitaries, Selormey appealed to Ghanaians to use the Golden Jubilee Celebration as a means of arousing a “full consciousness” of Ghana's “great heritage.” In the months that followed, the 50th Anniversary Celebration Committee organized a series of events to commemorate the role of the institution in the history of the Gold Coast and Ghana, including a formal dinner during which the assembled guests joined together to singKorle Bu Oyiwala doŋŋ, a popular tribute to the hospital sung in the local language of Ga (see Figure 1). Several months later, at the closing ceremony, the Committee unveiled a statue of Gordon Guggisberg, the British governor credited with building the hospital, an iconic image that is still standing in front of the hospital today.
Literacy and the Decolonization of Africa's Intellectual History
Authors: Brizuela-Garcia Esperanza
Published: March 2012

In his book In My Father's House Anthony Appiah made a powerful argument for historians and intellectuals at large to recognize the diverse and complex nature of Africa's cultural and historical experiences. He stated, for instance, that: “ideological decolonization is bound to fail if it neglects either endogenous ‘tradition’ or exogenous ‘Western’ ideas, and that many African (and African American) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way.”

During the past fifty years, Africanist historians have focused much of their efforts on the goals of decolonizing or Africanizing the study of the African past. These have been guided by the need to produce a more authentic and relevant history of the continent. The search for such authenticity has shown that African cultures and societies are often the result of a broad range of influences and that the notions of what is indigenous or authentically African needs to take into account this historical complexity. Intellectual historians, in particular, have faced this question with regards to written sources. The question of literacy and its impact on the intellectual development of Africa is an interesting example of how historians have made some strides towards redefining the notion of a decolonized African history.
Some Implications of Literacy in Uganda
Authors: Twaddle Michael
Published: March 2012

During the last fifty years, several debates have waxed and waned regarding the implications of literacy for African history. Among social scientists in general and social anthropologists in particular, Jack Goody and Ian Watt's survey of “The Consequences of Literacy” (1963) for hitherto preliterate or partially literate and now modernizing societies, drew attention to one suggested transformation: “The importance of writing lies in its creating a new medium of communication. (…) Its essential service is to objectify speech, to provide language with a material correlative, a set of visible signs. In this material form speech can be transmitted over space and preserved over time; what people say and think can be rescued from the transitoriness of oral communication.” The consequences, in Goody and Watt's view, were immensely important: “In oral societies the cultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely by face-to-face communication; and changes in its content are accompanied by the homeostatic process of forgetting or transforming those parts of the tradition that cease to be either necessary or relevant. Literate societies, on the other hand, cannot discard, absorb or transmute the past in the same way. Instead, their members are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present, historical enquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages scepticism; and scepticism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the universe as a whole.”
Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon
Authors: Cinnamon John M.
Published: March 2012

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.

Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.
The Intimacy of Belonging: Literacy and the Experience of Sunjata in Mali
Authors: Jansen Jan
Published: March 2012

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.

Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”
“Doorway to Success?”: Reconstructing African Careers in European Business from Company House Magazines and Oral History Interviews
Authors: van den Bersselaar Dmitri
Published: March 2012

The largely literate African employees of European businesses during the colonial and postcolonial period have not been studied as a group, unlike miners, railway workers and colonial intermediaries. This group has nevertheless been of great importance. Many of its members became part of the core of the management of African-owned enterprises and organizations, others started their own businesses or became successful politicians. African employees of European business, alongside government employees, formed the basis of the rapidly growing middle classes during the period after the Second World War. They gave their children a Western-style education, often at well-respected schools. In many local communities the “manager” became a figure of respect. Many employees were elected to traditional office as chiefs. Such successes were not limited to those employees who made it into management. For example, a carpenter with a steady career with a European company could build and own several houses. These African employees domesticated capitalism in West Africa, mediated changes in consumption and the rise of a consumer society, and adopted European expectations of career progression and life cycle. Working for a European business, they also found themselves at important sites of contestation during colonial and postcolonial political struggles.
“Watch the Waves of the Sea”: Literacy, Feedback, and the European Encounter in Elmina
Authors: Holsey Bayo
Published: March 2012

On 19 January 1482, a Portuguese fleet of ships under the command of Captain Don Diego d'Azambuja landed at Elmina (a small town on the Gold Coast, what is now Ghana). D'Azambuja immediately set up a meeting with the king of Elmina. King Kwamena Ansa, dressed in all of his finery, met with the Portuguese captain, and during this meeting d'Azambuja asked for permission to build a permanent settlement. At first, Ansa denied his request, stating that he should watch the waves of the sea. Just as they come to the shore, reach the shore, and go back, so too should he continue to come to Elmina, trade, and go back to Portugal. After persistent requests however, Ansa finally agreed and allowed the Portuguese to build a fort known today as Elmina Castle.

I first heard this story from men and women in Elmina during field research there in 2001. When I asked people to tell me about the history of the town and gave them free rein to discuss any topic of their choosing, this was often the story that they chose to tell. Kwamena Ansa, it seems, is a local legend. His fame has extended beyond Elmina however, and into Western scholarship. In particular, David Henige has tracked the emergence of Ansa within Elmina's oral tradition. Henige argues that, while this historical figure can be traced through written sources reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century, his recognition as a past king by local residents in Elmina has a much shorter history. Indeed, Ansa first emerged in kinglists dating back only to the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, Henige argues, local residents began reading European texts about Elmina's history in order to negotiate colonial courts. The inclusion of Ansa on kinglists represents, therefore, an example of feedback, which is the process of the integration of information from the written record into the oral tradition.
The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade
Authors: Wright Donald R.
Published: March 2012

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.