Category Archives: Africa

Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’m preparing a year-long reading list of books about Africa for the Washington D.C. area Swarthmore alumni. I decided to constrain myself to memoirs or first-person perspective accounts. I decided to mostly concentrate on accounts from the last thirty years … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Swarthmore | 11 Comments

Why the Owl of Minerva Doesn’t Get Party Invitations After Dusk

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to get a bit aggressive about disciplinary expertise for a second. William Easterly has an interesting post about the “mystery of the benevolent autocrat”, observing that while the highest growth rates … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Production of History | 5 Comments

Toilers in the Trope Workshop

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One of my hopes for cultural history & media studies courses that I teach is that students will learn not just how to read, analyze and critique expressive culture but also get some sense of how to produce it, use … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Popular Culture, Production of History | 1 Comment

I’m Shocked, Shocked That There’s Hatred Going On Here

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Ta-Nehisi Coates picks up on an NPR piece about government hostility towards homosexuals in Uganda, and an interesting comments thread follows. This is an issue that I’ve thought about for a long while, partly due to the influence of my … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Politics | 3 Comments

Looking Backwards

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

In a few weeks, I’m going to be talking about how searching as an act changes when the digitized texts you’re searching through are either highly specialized in their content or are from a distinctly different era of rhetoric and … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | 1 Comment

Image of Africa courseblog

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve finally gotten my courseblog (and Twitter feed) for History 86, Image of Africa, fully set up. I’m really looking forward to this class: it’s become as much a class on the history of transmedia interactions as it is about … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Swarthmore | Comments Off

Huge Untapped Natural Resources

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Many moons ago, in my first teaching gig at a New England prep school’s summer session, I was responsible for a unit on Africa. I poked around in the school’s library and found an old educational film intended for American … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Politics | Comments Off

Double Consciousness of Double Standards

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Ah, the African Renaissance. Can you feel those winds of change? (photo by Chris Nevins) Feels more like a boat becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea with no breeze in sight. Statues that charmingly invoke North Korean aesthetics? … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa | 3 Comments

Looking Backward

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been fiddling with the syllabus for my Image of Africa class, which I am to teach this fall for the first time in a while. No course in my repertoire has changed as much in my underlying assumptions about … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Production of History | 22 Comments

Africans and the Slave Trade

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Timothy Burke

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks, as the last half of April so often is. Usually that leaves me with a mind like a blown-out tire for the week where everything calms down, and this year has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Production of History | 2 Comments