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In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of the social responsibility of Higher Education, encouraging knowledge exchange initiatives and impact. This often involves the collaboration with the industry, embracing a curatorial turn in the pedagogic approach. This self-reflexive case study shares the learning, challenges, and opportunities offered by the organisation of a networking event named 'Decolonising Film Festivals and Curating African Cinemas.' In so doing, it seeks to offer insights into one such forms of collaboration between Higher Education and the Industry. Through an analysis of the feedback by participants and the discussions at a round-table on decolonising, it highlights the horizontalism and distended environment of the experience, fostering a safe and fruitful discussion that engages in a call to action towards to sought change. In public facing events hosted at the university, the classroom becomes a brainstorming exercise in collaboration. The curatorial turn adopted through collaboration bridges theory and practice. Itlurifies voices in the learning and teaching experience, and collaboratively rehearses potential creative solutions to real life scenarios. It promotes social justice, engaging all participants in the process.

Taking a lead from recent articles in "The History Teacher," the author placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths, Monsters, and Markets." Drawing on folklore, literature, popular culture, and economics, the course explored the rise of capitalism and its relation to tales of monstrosity in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the globalization of capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its relation to tales of vampires and zombies from Sub-Saharan Africa, Britain, the U.S., and Japan. The course asked students to explore the relationship between capitalism and the rise of stories involving a new kind of monster-- one that is undead--and, in doing so, interrogate key symbolic registers in which capitalist commodification is experienced by people in established capitalist societies and in societies undergoing capitalist development at different times and in different places to see if there were important differences in the kinds of monsters each culture produced in folklore, literature, video, and film. This article describes historical contexts for the course, course goals and structure, teaching the course, and student engagement used to meet learning outcomes.

The article reflects upon the possibility of educating sensitivity to the pain of the different Other by using feature cinema. The authors rely on the methodology suggested by Stanley Louis Cavell and Andrew Klevan, and also on the suggestions and conclusions by William B. Russell, III and Stewart Waters. The authors of this article reflected upon the results of their own interview with gymnasium students and selected three feature films suggested by them as a case study for the possibility of developing not only critical thinking but also sensitivity to the pain of the unfamiliar Other. All three movies concern the humiliation and pain of the African people. The article raises questions for possible discussion in ethics class and suggests philosophical literature by E. Fromm, and K.R. Popper as a possible theoretical basis: moving from the concrete ethical problem discerned in the movie to the philosophical text and vice versa.

This article relates the authors' experience in a course that they have co-taught periodically called Honors Africans in Film. It is an upper-level, undergraduate course that engages honors students in watching and analyzing mainly Hollywood movies that are set in Africa. The challenge they present to their mostly U.S. American students is to examine both the representations depicted on film and to confront their own preconceptions of Africa and Africans. The feedback the authors have received over the years suggests that most students perceive the semester-long experience as eye-opening, promoting substantial self-reflection and the development of a critical perspective. In addition, the course makes it difficult for many to watch films about Africa in the same way ever again, such as the highly acclaimed and Academy Award winning "Out of Africa" (1985), or the comedy classic "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (1981). The course is centered on an interrogation of stereotypes and reflection on the tremendous difficulties encountered in uprooting and displacing them despite changing cultural, social, and political circumstances over time. Toward this end, perhaps the most challenging sections of the course are those in which the class views relatively recent films. These include, for example, "Blood Diamond" (2006) or "The Constant Gardener" (2005), which incorporate a 21st century Hollywood concern for social justice and appear to pay closer attention to race and gender portrayals.

Focusing on the paradox between innocence and responsibility generated by the term child-soldiers, which is treated differently in literary and cinematographic works from the North and the South, this article uses postcolonial theory in order to deconstruct "the single story" that may be erasing these children's many stories. Accordingly, the analysis brings to the fore both the supposed universality of a hegemonic notion of childhood, revealing it as a regulatory discourse which produces diverse subalternities, and the articulation of this notion within an Africanist discourse that legitimizes neocolonial practices in varied domains. (Contains 7 notes.)

As Professor Michael Bamidele Adeyemi of the University of Botswana suggests, "Americans believe that Africa is a country, that Africa is "still uncivilized," that the average African is polygamous, and that Africa is not urbanized." In fact, the African continent encompasses a diverse set of more than 50 nations, each made up of a variety of urban and rural cultures, lifestyles and socioeconomic realities. Rates of urbanization in Africa are the highest in the world. By 2025, more than half of the African population will be urban. However, images in the news, popular media and school textbooks often highlight African people living in abject poverty; rarely do they show the realities of wealth, power and good health that also exist throughout the continent. Inaccurate impressions of Africa start early, as children are exposed to stereotypical information in books, the news media, advertisements, and film and TV programs such as "The Lion King," "Madagascar" and "George of the Jungle," to name just a few. Because teachers, parents, and other adults are influenced by ongoing exposure to these stereotypes, they must carefully examine and challenge their own knowledge and assumptions about African environments, customs, traditions and cultural realities. This article presents some recommendations for using an anti-bias curricular approach when creating learning experiences about the African continent for children in the United States.

The concept of bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world draws symbolically on nineteenth century diffusion theories of linear progress and twentieth-century theories of modernization and development. This paper examines information and communication technology (ICT) policies and public-access postings on http://www.bongoland.net. Bongoland evokes a quality of life that is hectic, frustrating, and slightly crazy. Where the language of policies envisions that technology will improve life in Bongoland, users' postings suggest that technology reinforces regional hierarchies. This essay argues that, despite the disarticulation of past and present at narrative levels in policy, the past and the present emerge as related in Bongonians' online postings. (Contains 1 figure and 21 notes.)

"Amistad," the story of a group of Mende people illegally brought to the United States from West Africa in 1839, was taught to a group of 90 eighth grade students. To learn about the "Amistad," these eighth graders visited a replica of the ship, read a nonfiction account of the Amistad story, and viewed the Steven Spielberg film "Amistad." Two aspects of this project were found to be of special interest: (1) the teachers wondered whom the eighth grade students would choose as the heroes of the "Amistad;" and (2) how the multimodal approach to this unit -- discussion, hands-on experience, reading, and film viewing --would influence students' learning and perceptions, particularly with respect to the heroes of the incident. Three teacher education faculty members, the authors of this article, helped to plan these various learning activities and involved several of their teacher education students in discussing the Amistad story with the eighth graders immediately before and after viewing the film. Visualization of the story and the characters was the overriding theme in student reports of what influenced their learning and their insights. However, each medium provided students with a vehicle with which to confront or conjure images of the Africans' experiences, and these visualizations engaged them in learning. The multiple learning experiences appealed to varied learning styles and helped students to go beyond the facts of the Amistad story to develop a much more immediate and intense appreciation of the evils of slavery and the kinds of heroism needed to confront and defeat such evil. The teachers got a clear sense of the students' development of ethical standards, their moral offense in the face of injustice, their interests, and their learning preferences. The teacher education students came to appreciate the abilities and engaging qualities of middle school students and learned several useful lessons about teaching and learning in the middle school. Critics argue that school curricula often do too little with too much; however the students in this project acquired a greater understanding of many important themes in American history and enabled them to make crucial intertextual links. The project demonstrated the many possibilities for making learning and teaching engaging, exciting, and powerful.

Colleges and universities across the country are seeing an overwhelming interest among students in learning about the Middle East and Arabic languages. The most popular courses, professors say, are Arabic language, Middle Eastern politics and the dynamics of the Israeli and Arab relationship. Also in demand are courses on comparative religions and gender issues. Courses in Arab film have also enjoyed renewed popularity, reflecting an ongoing renaissance in cinematography in Iran, North Africa and Israel. The surging interest in the Middle East is at least partially tied to post-Sept. 11 national security concerns, so while Middle Eastern studies programs have exploded in popularity in the past six years, whether they will remain in the national spotlight remains to be seen. Interest in the programs appeared to begin to flatten in 2005, but it is still too early to draw any conclusions. The continued fighting in Iraq, the escalating conflict with Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggest that affairs in the Arab world will continue to make national headlines. As a result, many professors have reason to believe that interest in Middle Eastern studies will also continue to grow.

The first part of the Overseas Liaison committee's bulletin on women in rural development was published in July 1976. Part 2 features brief summaries of action programs and current research, research projects and proposals, conferences and workshops, publications, and films, all focusing on rural women in the developing countries of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. The action programs and current research generally include studies undertaken by governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The index to the Rural Development Network Bulletin for numbers 1-6, for the years 1974-1977, is included in this publication. (Author/MSE)

Reviews events of 1978 in Francophone African journalism, literature, and film. (AM)

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Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)