Nomadic expansion, cosmopolitan sensibilities, and new imperial frontiers -- Nomadic and diasporic life under empire -- Development, nationalism, and new topographies of power -- The creation of homeland and the domestication of the nation-state -- The criminalization of Somali networks and the silencing of alternative nationalisms -- The globalization of diaspora, the ambivalence of statelessness, and the quest for minority rights -- From a greater Somalia to a global Somalia
In the late 1930s, members of the Kenyan branch of the Isaaq Somali diaspora began a campaign for Asiatic status in an effort to gain greater privileges within the colonial racial order. After national independence, this aspect of their history became politically problematic. To situate themselves within the Kenyan nationalist narrative and combat forms of xenophobia that broadly paint Somalis as foreign and alien, members of the Isaaq community have recently suppressed public memories of the Asiatic campaign. This article examines this elision within public testimony and considers the differences between silences in the oral and archival records.
One of the paradoxes of history is that it took Africa's contact with the Arab world to make the Black people of Africa realize that they were black in description, but not necessarily in status … On the other hand, it took European conceptualization and cartography to turn Africa into a continent.Ali A. Mazrui, "The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,"Research in African Literatures36/3 (2005), 68–82, at 70Historians of Africa can no longer overlook race. To scholars of African-diaspora studies (who often work under the rubric of Africana studies, black studies, and African American studies), the recognition of this fact is long overdue. With the rise of the area-studies paradigm in the 1950s, North American scholars of Africa became preoccupied with the rise of nationalism and the writing or critique of national histories. The future was defined by national development, while the study of the past was centered on the search for a pristine precolonial identity. Consequently, a world of nations took precedence in scholarly writing over concerns about the management of empires, colonies and, strikingly, races. Even as Africanist scholars came to reevaluate the successes and failures of the postcolonial experience across Africa in the 1970s, they frequently lamented the persistence of ethnic conflict, but not of ongoing forms of racial hierarchy. Race, insofar as it was treated at all, tended to be confined to the "colonial episode" and to settler states, like South Africa.
Identification technologies like biometrics have long been associated with securitisation, coercion and surveillance but have also, in recent years, become constitutive of a politics of empowerment, particularly in contexts of international aid. Aid organisations tend to see digital identification technologies as tools of recognition and inclusion rather than oppressive forms of monitoring, tracking and top-down control. In addition, practices that many critical scholars describe as aiding surveillance are often experienced differently by humanitarian subjects. This commentary examines the fraught questions this raises for scholars of international aid, surveillance studies and critical data studies. We put forward a research agenda that tackles head-on how critical theories of data and society can better account for the ambivalent dynamics of 'power over' and 'power to' that digital aid interventions instantiate.
Identification technologies like biometrics have long been associated with securitisation, coercion and surveillance but have also, in recent years, become constitutive of a politics of empowerment, particularly in contexts of international aid. Aid organisations tend to see digital identification technologies as tools of recognition and inclusion rather than oppressive forms of monitoring, tracking and top-down control. In addition, practices that many critical scholars describe as aiding surveillance are often experienced differently by humanitarian subjects. This commentary examines the fraught questions this raises for scholars of international aid, surveillance studies and critical data studies. We put forward a research agenda that tackles head-on how critical theories of data and society can better account for the ambivalent dynamics of 'power over' and 'power to' that digital aid interventions instantiate.
