The Misiri Legend Explored

The Misiri Legend Explored
Author: araap Sambu, Kipkoeech
Publisher: University of Nairobi Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9966792147

How can a black people, who do not even profess to Islam, claim to have originated from Egypt, which is such an Arabic and Islamic geographical setting? But the Kalenjiin people of Kenya have held on fast to a tradition that their ancestors in antiquity were part of ancient Pharaonic Egypt, which they variously call Tto and Misiri. As unlikely as it may sound, the persistence in keeping this oral tradition alive does not seem to be dying with time and distance from the claimed place of origin. The Misiri Legend Explored: A Linguistic Inquiry into the Kalenjiin People's Oral Tradition of Ancient Egyptian Originestablishes the Kalenjin oral tradition of Misirian origin on the basis of linguistic evidence - a genuine tool which Egyptology scholars and researchers need to have relied on much more to bring greater and more final results to their investigations. Students of ancient Egypt willing to accept that there is an irrational prejudice against the concept of ancient black African ingenuity will upgrade their stock of knowledge regarding ancient Egypt with the numerous discoveries laid out here. They will discover a powerful new tool for their trade in the form of the African languages and cultures that now lie South of the Sahara.

Hollywood and Africa

Hollywood and Africa
Author: Opio Dokotum
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2020-02-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1920033688

Hollywood and Africa - recycling the Dark Continent myth from 19082020 is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the colonial mastertext of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the terms development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of HollywoodAfrica film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave HollywoodAfrica phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate and even critique these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywoods whitewashing of African history.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
Author: Hala Halim
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0823251764

Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers--C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell--whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers' representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his Camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers' and filmmakers' engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

The Nile Development Game

The Nile Development Game
Author: Mina Michel Samaan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2018-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030026655

This book introduces an analytic framework constructed upon the iterated Prisoners' Dilemma game to model and analyze transboundary water interactions along the Nile River. It presents a thorough and in-depth analysis of the historical path through which conflict and cooperation have been generated among the Nile riparians over large-scale developmental schemes. This is done through modeling water interactions in the basin as an iterated Prisoners' Dilemma game and employing process-tracing method to compare four distinguishable rounds of the game: the colonial round, the Cold War round, the post-Cold War round, and the post-2011 round. The book examines the influences of the changing political contexts at the domestic, regional, and global levels on the game outcomes. This framework is initially applied on several cases of international rivers worldwide, while the rest of the book is devoted to the Nile case. The book's central argument is that the riparians' interests, capabilities, and beliefs are heterogeneous in varying degrees and that the changing multilevel political contexts influence the level of such heterogeneities among the riparians, which ultimately drive the equilibrium dynamics in the Nile game to generate different conflictive and cooperative outcomes over time. Although the book's main conclusion indicates that the absence of economic interdependence and regional integration will transfer the game into tug-of-war, which will impose harsh punishment on the basin communities and ecosystems on the long term, the final chapter lists a group of recommendations addressed to the riparian states and international donors, exploring the way for boosting cooperation and preventing conflicts in the basin. Presenting clear theoretical, methodological, and policy implications, this book is appropriate for students and scholars of international relations, hydrology, and development studies.

Revolution Under Attack

Revolution Under Attack
Author: Ronen A. Cohen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2015-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137502509

During the revolution in Iran, a small, fanatical group called the Forqan used targeted assassinations of religious leaders to fight the Ayatollah Khomeini's plan to establish a theocratic Islamic state. Ronen A. Cohen examines what really happened behind the fog of revolution.