Papers by Fassil Demissie
Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 1984
Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 1985
Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 1985
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2018
1. Introduction Fassil Demissie 2. Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual cultu... more 1. Introduction Fassil Demissie 2. Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil Julio Cesar de Tavares 3. Retaking the Middle Passage: glimpses of a modern African diaspora in Brazil Wangui Kimari 4. Afro-Brazilian poetry: a laboratory of identity Cyril Vettorato 5. Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in and out of Brazil Scott Head and Heloisa Gravina 6. The jogo de capoeira and the fallacy of 'creole' cultural forms T.J. Desch Obi 7. A Benca: The Blessings of the Bando de Teatro Olodum Cheryl Sterling 8. Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the 'African' cuisine of Northeast Brazil Allan Charles Dawson 9. Black leaders and their concept of freedom in nineteenth century northeast Brazil Tshombe Miles 10. The struggle for black land rights in Brazil: an insider's view on quilombos and the quilombo land movement Merle L. Bowen 11. Race talk in a public high school in Salvador Bahia: discourses of power and resistance Jenifer Crawford-Lima, Jadiel Navarro Lima, Luis Carlos Ferreiro and Adilbenia Freire Machado
Preface 1. What if diasporas didn't think about development?: a critical approach of the inte... more Preface 1. What if diasporas didn't think about development?: a critical approach of the international discourse on migration and development 2. 'Saving the Congo': transnational social fields and politics of home in the Congolese diaspora 3. Immigrants and transnational engagement in the diaspora: Ghana associations in Italy and the United Kingdom 4. Guinea-Bissau immigrant transnationalism in Portugal: A substitute for a failed state? 5. Being here and there: migrant communities in Sweden and the conflicts in the Horn of Africa 6. From 'remittance' to 'tax': the shifting meaning and strategies of capture of the Eritrean transnational party-state 7. Transnational mobility, social capital and cosmopolitan women traders in Ghana 8. 'Voting with their feet': Senegalese youth, clandestine boat migration and the gendered politics of protest 9. Affective economies: Eastleigh's metalogistics, urban anxieties and the mapping of diasporic city life
1. The new scramble over Africa's farmland: an introduction 2. Geopolitical drivers of foreig... more 1. The new scramble over Africa's farmland: an introduction 2. Geopolitical drivers of foreign investment in African land and water resources 3. The perils of development from above: land deals in Ethiopia 4. Forest investments and channels of contestation in highland Ethiopia 5. Scrambling for the promised land: land acquisitions and the politics of representation in post-war Acholi, northern Uganda 6. Asian capitalism, primitive accumulation, and the new enclosures in Uganda 7. Land grab in new garb: Chinese special economic zones in Africa The case of Mauritius 8. Fixity, the discourse of efficiency, and enclosure in the Sahelian land 'reserve' 9. Water resources and biofuel production after the fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2017
In a video shot outside by an anonymous bystander very close to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut... more In a video shot outside by an anonymous bystander very close to the Ethiopian Consulate in Beirut, Lebanon on February 2012, a 33-year-old Ethiopian female domestic worker was savagely beaten and violently dragged by Ali Mahfouz who is the brother of a labor recruiter into the back seat of a black BMW, while a chorus of men silently watched the unfolding event and no one came to help her or stop the beating and dragging. 1 This videotaped incident was later aired by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBIC) on 8 March 2012, and the video went viral. The same report records that, after the incident, police arrived at the scene and took Alem to a detention center 'without arresting any of her tormentors'. Alem was transferred to Deir al Saleeb Psychiatric Hospital for medical care where she committed suicide by hanging herself using her bed sheets, early in the morning on March 14, 2012 (Beydoun Ali 2006; Human Rights Watch 2012). Five years later in a horrifying video of an Ethiopian domestic worker falling from what media reports indicated was the seventh floor of an apartment building in Dubai, Kuwait went viral instantly. The video appears to have been filmed by the worker's employer inside the apartment with the domestic worker dangling outside the window. Rather than assist her from falling, the employer was videotaping the incident from inside while the panicked worker calls out for her to grab her. But within 12 seconds of the video recording starting, the dangling woman lost her grip and fell from the seventh floor. Considered a miracle by many in the Ethiopian domestic workers community in Dubai, the domestic worker only suffered a broken hand, bleeding nose and ear according to the Kuwait Times (2012). The authorities arrested the employer and charged her for failing to assist her worker. These two incidents separated by geographyin Lebanon and Dubai and time are part of a wide culture of systematic abuse perpetuated by families and individual employers who have hired Ethiopian female domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf States in the last two decades. Numerous other cases documented by international media and local agencies as well as the Human Rights group have reported widespread violence, rape, beating, starvation, and slavery-like practices, excessive domestic work, debt bondage, sexual slavery, and servitude of Ethiopian female domestic workers in the region. In the last two decades, the migration (both legal and clandestine) of Ethiopian female domestic workers to globalizing cities of the Middle East and Gulf States particularly, to Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, Aman, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Sana'a, and Cairo has increased dramatically because of the dynamics of globalization and neoliberal economic policies which ushered in increased free trade, deregulation,
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2012
African and Black Diaspora an International Journal, 2008
Buildings Landscapes Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2012
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2016
cautionarymigration-tales-are-no-deterrent.
1. Imperial Legacies and Post-Colonial Predicament: An Introduction. 2. Metropolitanism, Capital ... more 1. Imperial Legacies and Post-Colonial Predicament: An Introduction. 2. Metropolitanism, Capital and Patrimony: Theorizing the Postcolonial West African City. 3. Casting a Long Shadow: Colonial Categories, Cultural Identities, and Cosmopolitan Spaces in Globalizing Africa. 4. Viewing Post-Colonial Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania Through Civic Spaces: A Question of Class. 5. Transforming urban landscapes: Soccer fields as sites of urban sociability in the agglomeration of Dakar. 6. Narrating The African City From The Diaspora: Lagos As A Trope In Ben Okri and Chika Unigwe's Short Stories. 7. The City Beyond the Border: The Urban Worlds Of Duiker, Mpe & Vera. 8. Governing the city? South Africa's struggle to deal with urban immigrants after apartheid. 9. Cinema and The Edgy City: Johannesburg, Carjacking, And The Postmetropolis. 10. Visual Fragments of Kinshasa
Urban Affairs Review, 2007
In the aftermath of the imposition of a structural adjustment program by the World Bank and the I... more In the aftermath of the imposition of a structural adjustment program by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, African cities entered a new crisis characterized by the collapse of urban services, growing poverty, high rates of unemployment, disease, ...
African Identities, 2014
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, more than 3 billion people, about half of th... more During the first decade of the twenty-first century, more than 3 billion people, about half of the world’s population, lived in urban areas for the first time in human history, outnumbering the number of people who lived in rural areas. Indeed, by 2050, this number is expected to increase to 10 billion people (Wolfgang, Sanderson, & Scherbov, 1997). Most of the increase will take place in the impoverished cities of the Global South where many if not most people live in slums with income below the poverty line. At the height of the recent food price crisis in 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that in order to meet the world’s growing needs, food production would have to double by 2050, with the required increase mainly in developing countries, where the majority of the world’s rural poor live and where 95% of the population increase during this period is expected to occur. This major demographic transition is taking place today, characterized by global crisis where climate change, peak oil and rising food prices have made food security and energy the primary political issue of our time in which,
Journal of Developing Societies, 2011
The end of the Cold War and the restructuring of the global order had refocused our attention on ... more The end of the Cold War and the restructuring of the global order had refocused our attention on emerging areas of social and political confl ict. Increasingly, the Global South is alleged to have become a dangerous site for chaos, anarchy, environmental degradation, widespread crisis, and social collapse in which governments are unable to manage or contain the unprecedented crisis engulfi ng their cities and societies (Dalby, 1996). The crisis facing the global cities of the South was the subject of Robert Kaplan’s infl uential essay published in the Atlantic Monthly (1994) which provided a terrifying and depressing portrait of the last decade of the twentieth century. In his sweeping article titled, “The Coming Anarchy,” journalist Kaplan argues that much of the Global South is on a path to violence-ridden “anarchy,” where states are collapsing at an alarming rate accompanied by the rise of private armies and organized crime, establishing themselves as effective structures of local government (Kaplan, 1994, pp. 47–76).1 In order to portray the social collapse, rapidly spreading diseases and crimes in the Global South, Kaplan’s article was accompanied with selected photographs taken in various countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and in the Kurdish guerrilla control area of Turkey as evidence of how places in the Global South have become “killing zones” littered with “mass graves” where “violent retributions” are the order of the day. In addition, there were also photos showing teeming crowds at public transportation hubs in Lagos and people doing their daily washing in the lagoons of Abidjan, as well as photographs of overcrowded cities and shantytowns in the global cities of the South. The fi nal photographs accompanying the article were of looters following the trial of police offi cers in the Rodney King case in Los Angeles, suggesting that the scenes were indications of things to come in the United States (Dalby, 1996, pp. 476–477) and other “tame” zones of postmodern prosperity which require containment of these unruly masses, if necessary by military force (Tuathail & Luke, 1994).
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Papers by Fassil Demissie