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Ecomaternalism remains the dominant narrative concerning the role of families in climate politics. The centrality of ecomaternalist narratives to intersectional constructions of race, gender, heteronormativity, and nature means that interrogating and disrupting these dominant representations of families is a crucial task of ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer political theory. This article explores other ways to narrate familial politics that might challenge rather than reproduce dominant power relations. Examining three Africanfuturist short stories by Nnedi Okorafor (“Spider the Artist”), Tlotlo Tsamaase (“Virtual Snapshots”), and Terh Agbedeh (“Mango Republic”), set in Nigeria and Botswana, I argue that they draw our attention to transformations within cyborg, digitized, and utopian families and social structures, as well as the potential for violence within the heteronormative patriarchal family. They narrate alternative discourses about families in crisis, families as threat, and families as ruination that are rarely articulated in climate politics. In these stories, the family is not the solution to climate politics, but a social relation that will (and should) change as the climatic and social context changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how to understand stand-up comedy as a form of resistance in global politics, combining discussion of Homi Bhabha's concepts of ambivalence and mimicry with an examination of Trevor Noah's stand-up performances, in particular his material on race, disease and poverty. The article builds upon approaches which have interpreted comedy in terms of hidden transcripts, counter-discourses, and counter-conducts to argue that stand-up is serious politics. Notwithstanding his prominence and success, Noah's performances are an alternative to dominant, white, western and Eurocentric discourses of global politics, and can be understood as a form of 'ambivalent mockery' which both inhabit and subvert dominant power relations and discourses from within. In his routines race is reified and deconstructed; disease is tragic and laughable; poverty is lamentable, valorized, and misunderstood. Noah invokes, inhabits and challenges racist and racialized assumptions, performing a racial 'in-between-ness' ranging across black, mixed, coloured and white identities which subverts assumptions about stable categories of race and identity. Taking this comedy seriously enables important contradictions in assumptions about race, disease and poverty to be seen more vividly, and demonstrates how global politics is performed and resisted in diverse ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited by the resources available to them and the fact that many are establishing new courses from scratch. This article contributes to the literature by identifying key debates around teaching Africa and IS, setting the scene for the articles that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst the ‘green state debate’ has primarily focused on a narrow range of usual suspects in the developed world, the debate can be enriched and challenged by considering more diverse cases. Viewing African states from a green state perspective invites empirical reassessment of the geographical scope of the concept, and introduces a new set of conceptual questions about the political significance of transitions in environmental governance. Ecological modernisation theory has largely neglected African states because it is assumed that African states are weak, failing, or failed, and that environmentalism is a post-materialist phenomenon. Whilst both assumptions can be challenged empirically, a biopolitical perspective on the African environmental state, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can both position African state development within a longer-term context and challenge some assumptions of ecological modernisation. Examples from Egypt, South Africa, and the Kavango-Zambezi Trans-frontier Conservation Area highlight underestimated continuities in environmental state practices. The international and transnational drivers of the green state in Africa are emphasised, as well as the political dangers of a green ‘state building’ project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]