The Awkward Squad: Arts Graduates from British Tropical Africa Before 1940

ABSTRACT

Before the Second World War, most Africans from British Tropical Africa who studied abroad were seeking qualifications in three professions: law, medicine and the Church. In all these, they could be reasonably sure of employment on their return. True, government employment was problematic, but law and medicine did offer the alternative – often more lucrative – of private practice. Much more threatening to colonial authority were arts students: those who read philosophy, literature, politics or sociology. This article focuses on several men who graduated in Britain or the USA: Kobina Sekyi, J.B. Danquah, James Aggrey, Bankole Awoonor-Renner (Gold Coast); Eyo Ita, Nathaniel Fadipe, Nnamdi Azikiwe – and his (mostly Igbo) protégés (Nigeria); Hosea Nyabongo, Balamu Mukasa, Ernest Kalibala (Uganda); Peter Koinange (Kenya). It concludes by surveying the career of Nicholas Ballanta-Taylor (Sierra Leone), who studied music in New York and in 1927 won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation for musicological research in Africa. Of these pioneer African Africanists, four wrote successful doctoral theses, Azikiwe published an academic study. Aggrey and Fadipe died prematurely. Danquah applied his intellect to essentially non-academic pursuits. Ballanta, worked as a practical musician in the 1930s, but his African research remains virtually unpublished.     

A Singular and Awkward War: The Transatlantic Context of the Hartford Convention

This essay argues that the Hartford Convention of 1814–15 unfolded as part of a wide‐ranging and vibrant debate concerning the role of the United States in the turbulent Atlantic community of the early nineteenth century. The author’s approach to the convention stands in sharp contrast to those of other scholars, many of whom have treated the convention as either the last gasp of the Federalist party or as a manifestation of New England’s insularity during the War of 1812. This orthodox view fails to account for the distinctly international quality of the convention. Review of newspapers and pamphlets produced in and around Boston, the intellectual and political center of New England, during the period between late 1814 and early 1815 suggests that for all their ideological differences, both Republicans and Federalists in Massachusetts understood the convention as attempting to negotiate a place for New England in the newly formed international relations triangle that comprised Britain, France, and the United States.     

The Impact of Telecommuting on the Activity Spaces of Participants

A spatial analysis of the activity spaces of telecommuters, based on the geocoded travel diary data from the State of California Telecommuting Pilot Project, is performed to analyze the impacts of telecommuting. The study analyzes the spatial location, orientation, and extent of the activity locations within the “activity spaces” of telecommuters and a nontelecommuting control group. To be able to quantitatively compare and contrast the travel patterns and the distribution of trip ends within the activity space, several spatial indicators have been defined. Several hypotheses concerning the selection of activity locations by individuals are presented and the impact of telecommuting on the selection of locations for activity is analyzed. Key findings include: on telecommuting days, 86 percent of telecommuters' activities are performed closer to home than to work, compared to 56 percent on normal commuting days; and destinations on telecommuting days are more evenly distributed in all directions around the home, whereas a majority of destinations on commuting days are oriented toward the work location. To be able to understand the influence of the contributing factors toward the selection of nonwork activity locations, potential causal relationships between the influencing factors and the activity location choice are investigated. Several plausible log-linear model structures for cross-classified data provide a good fit to these relationships. Key results include: interaction effects of activity location with commute distance and with trip purpose are present in all the best-fitting models, confirming the importance of these two variables in the selection of activity location; the interaction of activity location and income is also significant; and day status (telecommuting or not) of the employee influences the trip purpose, which in turn affects location.     

Coordinated Credit Spaces: The Globalization of Chinese Development Finance

This article examines the emergence of Chinese development finance on the global stage and evaluates the extent to which it differs from, complements and/or competes with the Western‐backed development finance institutions. Whereas the new, China‐backed multilaterals are closer to the Western model, especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, this analysis finds that China's national development finance is significantly distinct along three parameters — the scale and business model of Chinese finance relative to its Western counterparts, the composition and approach of China's lending portfolio, and the governance of China's development finance institutions. These differences can be seen as complements to the Western‐backed system, given that much of Chinese development finance has flowed into countries and sectors in which Western development finance institutions have ventured to a lesser extent. However, the globalization of Chinese development finance, patterned on the international diffusion of what is coined in this article as the ‘coordinated credit space model’, contrasts with Western development finance, governance and business models, and has triggered a competitive stance from Western actors. Either contestation or convergence are possible trajectories for the future, and the outcome will be determined by whichever can produce conditions akin to the ‘politics of productivity’.     

Spaces of humanitarian exception

Book reviewed in this article: Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas , by Hikaru Yamashita     

The Spaces of Graduate Student Labor: The Times for a New Union

This paper offers a critical analysis of how pressures to "corporatize" universities are affecting graduate student employees and public higher education in the United States. The argument is that the corporatization of universities is a not a new phenomenon, but is occurring in a very different political, economic, and technological context than in previousdecades. After addressing the definition of corporatization with regard to universities in general and those in the state of Washington in particular, the paper discusses the author's perceptions of the activities and spaces of universities and how the university and the people who work there are connected to larger economic processes and power relations. The paper provides the author's perspective on the current situation of graduate student employees in relation to processes of corporatization, and focuses on the ambiguities of the double identity of graduate student employees and how this relates to current struggles to form graduate student employee unions. The paper considers ways that graduate student employee unions reflect a desire to change the ways that "business" is conducted on university campuses, and could work to build coalitions across employee divides. The paper concludes by outlining some thoughts on the role of academics in addressing pressures to corporatize higher education and suggesting possible ideas for action in the struggle to keep public universities open and democratic.     

The Disappearance of the State from "Livable" Urban Spaces

Abstract:  This paper examines the absence of the state from the discourses and practices of "livable" urban spaces. Drawing from an ethnography of Atlantic Station, the USA's largest new urbanist infill development, we argue that "livable" urban spaces are increasingly arenas for luxury, theater, and consumption, and that the state, while an important actor in the creation of urban spaces such as Atlantic Station, has largely been made invisible. We see this in the absence of public institutions, such as schools, parks, and libraries, and in the absence of a collective political identity among Atlantic Station patrons. The disappearance of the state in the material spaces of the city suggests that the neoliberal project of individualism and consumerism is transforming the very notion of livability and the democratic possibilities of what makes urban space "livable".     

Spaces of the political*

In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss’ Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century’s Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways ‘modernity’ has encountered and dealt with the telluric.