Africana Studies

This study examines Senator Barack Obama's record as an Illinois State Senator. Specifically, the authors look at his sponsorship and cosponsorship of legislation to determine his level of activity, type of legislation proposed, and overall legislative success. The authors find that Senator Obama was the most active in sponsoring social welfare legislation and using cosponorship as a way to address other substantive policy areas. These findings will be central in how his opponents for the Democratic nomination will characterize him during the nominations process.

In this article, we present demolition data to explore the way the patterns of demolition carried out by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) were constituted as a social problem by residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and members of the broader New Orleans community. Through a study of newspaper stories and press interviews about the implementation process, we find evidence of a gap that exists between the interpretation of the demolitions by residents of the Lower Ninth, and the need to carry out disaster clean-up among city officials and the USACE. This gap, we suggest, is constitutive of an implementation problem that may best be dealt with in policymaking processes focused on planning for disasters.

The diversity management literature is inconsistent regarding factors that affect job satisfaction of marginalized groups. We examine job satisfaction of LGBTs in the US federal workforce by following the path of the diversity management and job satisfaction research. We empirically test this relationship using the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey employing confirmatory factor analysis and structural equal modelling. We find that increased perceptions of a culture of diversity contribute to LGBT employee perception of their skills being effectively utilized as well as employee job satisfaction. We also find that LGBT's perception of their skills directly contributes to job satisfaction. We conclude by offering policy implications for public managers to consider when developing diversity management strategies for marginalized groups. Résumé Quels sont les facteurs qui influencent la satisfaction au tra-vail des groupes marginalisés? À cette question, la littérature sur la gestion de la diversité propose des réponses variées. Dans cet article, nous examinons la satisfaction au travail des personnes LGBT dans l'effectif fédéral américain en suivant la piste des recherches sur la gestion de la diversité et la satisfaction au travail. Nous testons empiriquement la relation entre les deux concepts en nous appuyant sur le Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey réalisé en 2014, sur l'analyse factorielle confirmatoire et sur la modélisation égale structurale. Les résultats montrent que les perceptions accrues d'une culture de diversité contribuent non seulement à la perception que l'employé LBGT a de l'utilisation effective de ses compétences, mais aussi à sa satisfaction au travail. Par ailleurs, la perception qu'il a de ses compétences contribue directement à la satisfaction au travail. Nous concluons en proposant les aspects politiques que les gestionnaires publics doivent considérer pendant la mise sur pied de stratégies de gestion de la diversité en faveur des groupes marginalisés.

Nigerian video movies are one of the most visible developments of an emergent African culture industry that, while participating in global forms, does not take its ideological or imaginative directions from academic or corporate forces from abroad. The emergence of a popular video movie industry in Nigeria reveals a need for critical reevaluation of the fi eld of African cinema. Video movies are now viewed in the homes of millions of Africans who never had access to, or perhaps even interest in, the celluloid fi lm productions of African cinematographers. Produced by self-trained artists, these movies fall outside current paradigms of academic fi lm criticism. This paper examines one such movie as a cultural narrative cited by an Igbo native doctor in an ethnographic interview. Analysis of the movie positions it in relation to the cultural links developed in the interview. These links include an indigenous model of madness, popular representations of global capitalism, and socioeconomic conditions in Nigeria as Nigerians interpret them.

Dancing the past: experiencing historical knowledge in Ohafia, Nigeria 2/9 quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text---idx?c=passages;view=text;rgn=main;idno=4761530.0006.006 10/26/12 Dancing the past: experiencing historical knowledge in Ohafia, Nigeria 3/9 quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text---idx?c=passages;view=text;rgn=main;idno=4761530.0006.006

A review of three sources on Nollywood:

Pierre Barrot. Nollywood: The Video Phenomenon in Nigeria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xii + 147 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22117-9

Franco Sacchi, dir. This is Nollywood. Produced by Franco Sacchi and Robert Caputo. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2007. 56 minutes. DVD.

Dorothee Wenner. Nollywood Lady. New York: Women Make Movies, 2008. 52 minutes / color.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].