Search results for "African"

Genetic structure of wildcat (Felis silvestris) populations in Italy

2013

Severe climatic changes during the Pleistocene shaped the distributions of temperate-adapted species. These species survived glaciations in classical southern refuges with more temperate climates, as well as in western and eastern peripheral Alpine temperate areas. We hypothesized that the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris) populations currently distributed in Italy differentiated in, and expanded from two distinct glacial refuges, located in the southern Apennines and at the periphery of the eastern Alps. This hypothesis was tested by genotyping 235 presumed European wildcats using a panel of 35 domestic cat-derived microsatellites. To provide support and controls for the analy…

Cultura y Derechos Humanos

1999

West African Monsoon influence on the summer Euro-Atlantic circulation

2011

International audience; The West African Monsoon (WAM) influence on the interannual variability of the summer atmospheric circulation over North Atlantic and Europe is investigated over the period 1971-2000. A set of sensitivity experiments performed through the Arpege-Climat atmospheric general circulation model is analyzed, using the so-called "grid-point nudging" technique, where the simulated atmospheric fields in the WAM region are relaxed towards the ERA40 reanalysis. Observations confirm that a sizable part of the Euro-Atlantic circulation variability is related to the WAM, with anomalies of reinforced convection in the Sudan-Sahel region associated with positive North Atlantic Oscil…

Why is COVID-19 especially impacting the African American population?

2020

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, penetrates human cells through direct binding with ...

How “African” Is the African Peace and Security Architecture? Conceptual and Practical Constraints of Regional Security Cooperation in Africa

2012

ABSTRACT With the creation of the African Peace and Security Architecture in 2004, African states were aiming to assume the primary responsibility for peace and security on the continent and establish a structure to assemble the necessary financial and military means. However, despite the constant evocation of “African ownership,” it is non-African actors that call the tune and can define and drive African security. Based on a detailed juxtaposition of rhetoric and empirical evidence, this paper argues that significant conceptual and practical problems constrain the “Africanization” of African security and that it appears increasingly unlikely that the continent's states will be able to ach…

Nuevos sujetos urbanos en el audiovisual africano: del modernismo a la industrialización cultural

2010

La espectacular transformación de las ciudades africanas en las últimas décadas ha cumplido un papel fundamental en el desarrollo de nuevas subjetividades y en el surgimiento de lenguajes artísticos y culturales nuevos. Ya en los años sesenta, en el alba de las independencias políticas, los primeros cines africanos tematizaron insistentemente esa relación entre las nuevas geografías urbanas y los nuevos sujetos africanos. El modernismo cinematográfi co africano, de Ousmane Sembène a Abderramahne Sissako, ha puesto siempre a la ciudad en el corazón de sus refl exiones. En los últimos tiempos, la creciente industrialización de la producción audiovisual africana de la que el fenómeno de Nollyw…

The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative"

2015

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to th…

Border diplomacy and state-building in north-western Ethiopia,c. 1965–1977

2017

In the first half of the twentieth century, the north-western lowlands of imperial Ethiopia were the typical interstitial frontier of the Ethiopian–Sudanese borderlands. Starting in the early 1960s, a cash crop revolution paved the way to the transformation of the Mazega into a settlement frontier and the emergence of a dispute with Sudan for demarcation of the international border. This article explores the entanglement between the political economy of frontier governance and border diplomacy in the contested area. It highlights how the management of the border dispute was deeply affected by the contradictory interests of the various layers of government and “twilight” entities that projec…

Framing Migrant Memories: Lampedusa's Fragmented Archives

2022

The small island of Lampedusa, a key destination of the Central Mediterranean Route connecting Africa to Italy, offers a special observatory on the contemporary trans-Mediterranean odyssey of migrants, although often transformed into a “border spectacle.” Upon landing, migrants are stripped of their belongings, as these are impounded by the authorities. Such an act of dispossession is intended to deprive them of their histories, family ties and cultural identity. Photographer Mario Badagliacca has portrayed a selection of these lost and retrieved items in his work Fragments (2013). Each object reveals expectations, fears, desires, endurance, but cannot tell a full story. They are fragments …

A prequel to Nollywood: South African photo novels and their pan-African consumption in the late 1960s

2010

This article interrogates the history of the photo novel in Africa with particular reference to African Film, a magazine of almost pan-African circulation, published between 1968 and 1972 in South Africa. Featuring the adventures of Lance Spearman, an African crime fighter, the magazine was read widely across Anglophone Africa, from Nigeria and Ghana to South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. After a brief introduction to the history of the photo novel, the author discusses the production, content, reception, and legacy of the Lance Spearman photo novels. It is argued that Lance Spearman may be understood as a crossover of James Bond and Philip Marlowe, and several influences from…