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This article adopts a longue durée approach to examining resistance around the Tunisian university, tracing current material and epistemological struggles back to the colonial era. To do so, it fuses theoretical insights from the growing bodies of literature concerned with how colonial-capitalist power is manifested and contested within and on the margins of institutions of higher education, including Marxist, social movement theory, and decolonial traditions. The article considers four important conjunctures in the development of the Tunisian academy as an institution where the connections between knowledge generation and (neo)colonial-capitalist power have been articulated and contested. The article will conclude by arguing that the sediments of resistance remaining from all four transformative moments have dialectically contributed to building alternative knowledge projects within and beyond the university. Whereas dominant modes of knowledge production enable and normalise the destructive and grossly unequal patterns of extraction and accumulation associated with (neo)colonial-capitalism, alternative knowledge projects instead seek to transform Tunisians' relations with one another, with the state and with the land in ways that promote the forging of the collective and meaningful liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the production of knowledge about sexual violence in the postcolonial warscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a particular eye on the politics of statistics. Over the last decade, 'hard numbers' have become central to 'knowing' sexual violence in conflict, including in DRC. Statistics depicting the exceptional scale of sexual violence in DRC were core to its making as the 'rape capital of the world'. Given the challenges of quantifying this sensitive issue, sexual violence statistics are nevertheless imbued with striking, if misleading, reliability. In this piece, I explore how sexual violence statistics in DRC are produced and consider what they can and cannot convey. Subsequently placing DRC in historical context, I highlight eerie resonances of this contemporary emphasis on sexual violence with the country's colonial past. Doing so, I join postcolonial scholars in calling attention to colonial durabilities that shape the knowledges that are not only accepted, but perhaps expected, in a region long cast under a deeply and intimately sexuo-racialised gaze. Notably, this gaze is one that depicts the 'Congolese woman' as always-already a victim, and the 'Congolese man' as always-already defined by presumed 'perpetratorhood'. Affirming the importance of such analytical vigilance vis-à-vis sexual violence statistics in particular, this article concludes by calling for concurrent authorial vigilance on the part of critical scholars. Indeed, we must ensure that efforts to complicate dominant narratives of sexual violence in DRC do not undermine, silence, or deny the experiential realities encoded in the knowledges we critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as a salve for the political problem of jobless growth and shrinking state coffers. But, its contemporary position at the frontiers of African capitalism is premised on nearly a century of attention on the African 'economic man', figured and reconfigured through efforts of governments and international development institutions. This paper traces a genealogy of this labouring subject in Kenya, describing the ideological, discursive and material practices undertaken to mould African workers into productive economic agents. Across colonial and post-colonial periods, and within different employment contexts, the purported African habitus has been construed as an obstacle to progress, one that can be surmounted through the acquisition of enterprising qualities and entrepreneurial dispositions. Steeped in an ideal of selfhood as individualistic, industrious and future-oriented, the productive economic man has come to represent a set of ideas about the future of the nation, and is deeply entwined with moral valuations of Kenya's citizenry and with idioms of development and economic growth. The paper details how the productive and enterprising subject is continually invoked as a response to shifting economic and political dynamics, and invested with a perennial capacity to reinvigorate the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on governmentality, recent studies of colonial power emphasize the role of sovereign power and discipline as the means of creating obedient subjects in the exercise and maintenance of colonial rule. Through examining educational materials of the Bakht er Ruda educational institute of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and its work in liberalizing education, this essay argues for the significance of liberal technologies of rule as modes of exercising power and securing colonial rule over the natives. Specifically, we will look at two aspects of Bakht er Ruda's programme. Through a close reading of colonial era documents, we will first examine the use of school societies as a means of training the Sudanese into a harmonious and orderly social whole through the interiorization of a set of norms, bringing together ideas and practices relating to freedom and responsibility. Secondly, we look at the introduction of psychology as a language and set of techniques utilized by the institute in the construction of political subjects skilled in the self-regulation of desires and actions necessary for the free and responsible subject, upon which liberalism as a strategy of power depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particularly in the nineteenth century, zoological gardens, trade fairs and circuses included humans for entertainment and curiosity value, but also used them as a means of illustrating then current ideas of evolution. These kinds of displays continued well into the twentieth century, and beyond, with mounting concerns voiced about representation, identity and appropriation. From the 1990s, there were a number of staged interventions in zoos and museums to draw attention to the denigration inherent in this form, so highlighting the objectification, racism and othering in such practices, although also in curatorial practices in ethnographic museums. The most vehement controversy occurred in Europe, with its peak in 2014, around Brett Bailey and the Third World Bunfight's production, Exhibit B, of colonial and contemporary structural violence. In considering the framing of an authoritative and critical voice in relation to humans on show, and in opening up questions of mimesis and subjectivity, I draw attention to the paradoxes of positioning in the interrogation of histories of race, and the difficulties of depicting racism without perpetuating its hostilities and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Witchcraft-related violence in Ghana has been the subject of international media attention for decades. In the past few years, increasing interest in the sensational stories of Ghana’s northern witch camps have enthralled readers and elicited furore. While much of this outcry is motivated by concern, it is also greatly misinformed regarding local realities, witchcraft phenomena, and the impact of international interventionism in general, and in Ghana specifically. This paper aims to stress the importance of informed and reflexive engagement with the subject of witchcraft in Ghana and elsewhere. Based in part on my own doctoral research on the subject of witchcraft and witchcraft-related violence in Ghana, this paper stresses the power of language of international actors, looking specifically at the discursive interventions of one non-governmental organization, ActionAid International, that have led the charge against the witch camps in Northern Ghana. This paper concludes that a critical discourse analysis of Action Aid International’s ‘anti-witch camp campaign’ reveals numerous layers of neo-colonial intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]