Habshis—people of African descent in early modern India—are best known as military slaves in the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan region, a handful of whom rose to political prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars argue that, unlike the alienation that characterized Atlantic African slave diasporas, military slavery encouraged...
In his 1971 inaugural speech, the Asantehene (King of Asante), Opoku Ware II, proposed the reconstruction of the traditional Asante palace, which was demolished in 1874 when the British colonial forces attacked the “national” capital, Kumase. The aftermath of the attack witnessed the British attempt to alter and reinvent the...
In this current historical moment, with the increase in globalized inequity and with the intensification of decolonial efforts, I argue for “pluriversal” orientations towards development discourses wherein people are “de-linked” from inherently damaging comparisons (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011). To these ends, I interrogate the intersections of discourse, social structure, and...
This presentation is concerned with how return migrants articulate and experience belonging within faith communities in Accra. Focusing on Christian women, the paper investigates how interlocutors traverse ‘local’ and ‘global’ forms of Pentecostal/Charismatic practice in Accra. In it, I discuss their connection to Hope City Church, parsing out the relationships...
This paper will focus on fashion and body aesthetics in Vodu religious spaces. African fashion is often limited to the glitz of runways shows, urban dandies and flashy fashion weeks. This sums up the unresolved dialogue of decolonizing the aesthetics of African fashion. Colonialism and an interplay of post-colonial modernity...
This paper considers the planning of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, in the late 1970s as a site of global knowledge production about urbanism that cut across the Global North and South. The planning of Abuja presented an unprecedented opportunity to international teams of planners to experiment with environmental city planning and...
Since the official adoption of the Islamic legal system by the state governments in Northern Nigeria, Islamic figures in the religious public sphere have amplified their censure of homosexuality as a 'social illness' and 'depravity of depravities' incommensurable with the ethics that govern the discourse on gender and sexuality in...