Browsing by Subject "Mozambique"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    ‘Açúcar nem Sempre Doce’: Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a ‘New’ Mozambique
    (2017-12) Lazzarini, Alicia
    “'Açucar nem Sempre Doce': Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a 'New' Mozambique” analyzes contemporary investment in Mozambique, Southern Africa. Capitalizing on the idea of the continent as ‘rising’ and a ‘last frontier’ of investment, after 16 years of civil conflict Mozambique has sought international financing to rehabilitate the nation’s sugar industry. The Xinavane Sugar Mill, a former colonial estate and today’s largest sugar producer, has played a crucial role in this effort. While lauded for its reinvestment success, the dissertation asks what the ‘re’ in Xinavane’s rehabilitation signifies, and its importance to understanding the contemporary nation. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the dissertation interrogates codifications of social difference through land dispossession, forced labor migrations, and spatial divisions of raced and gendered labor in the production of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ space. Enrolling Xinavane as an entry point to explore colonial legacy in the increasingly investment oriented nation, the dissertation argues that sugar’s rehabilitation draws centrally on, and reformulates, violent forms of colonial industry and rule. Ultimately, the dissertation investigates how space and place are produced in African historical specificity, and how social inequality is reconfigured in active relationship to it.
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    AIM, FOCUS, SHOOT: Photographic Narratives of War, Independence, and Imagination in Mozambique, 1950 to 1993
    (2013-06) Thompson, Drew
    Photography's production and exhibition were important mediums for self-representation, political expression, and economic survival for photographers in Mozambique and their audiences from 1950 to 1993. Furthermore, conversations on race in Mozambique happened in the experiential realm of the visual as state-implemented categories for defining race determined the audiences for specific pictures, the venues in which audiences viewed photographs, and the types of images published versus those relegated to state and personal archives. Few scholars have studied photography in Mozambique along with how questions of race persisted after Portuguese colonialism and shaped post-independence life. In turn, to address these absences, this dissertation looks at Mozambique's history of colonialism, liberation, and economic hardship through the camera's lens and the lives of Mozambican commercial and press photographers, whose careers reflect this history. A reconstruction and historicization of the production, circulation, and appropriation of photographs from the late-colonial period into the present day illuminates the ways in which visual technologies shaped popular perceptions of racial identification and the ways in which independence movements developed. Pictures read against collected oral histories offer a context to recreate the class formations, social activities, and image worlds fashioned by photography. This approach to photography as both the object of study and as methodological approach to historical studies highlights the ways in which popular and government discourses on race, issues silenced by ideologies of racial democracy, co-opted photography's technical and visual languages, and the ways in which photography sometimes contested and contradicted these discourses on race. Ultimately, this study raises new issues about how photography's practice and archiving gave rise to conditions of citizenship and nation and about the nature of artistic resistance movements in colonial and post-independent Mozambique.
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    "As Long as There's Conflict, There Will Be Landmines": Comparing Technocratic and Community, Victim-Based Approaches to Landmine Action and Victim Identification in the Context of the Principles of Non-Repetition and Remedies
    (2023) Gorrin Castellano, Guillermo
    This paper examines the practice of anti-landmine action by contrasting technocratic, top to bottom approaches and community, victim-informed approaches and how they relate to the concepts of non-repetition and remedies in Human Rights. The goal is to search for prescriptive conclusions that harmonize both practices in support of future landmines action. The paper establishes important stipulative definitions in two parts 1) a descriptive discussion based on the literature around the pitfalls of the current international law regime regulating landmines, how victims are defined, and the issue of non-repetition and remedies in the context of landmines, and 2) a discussion around community, victim centered approaches and technocracy as they relate to non-repetition and remedies. To understand these stipulations in practice, two paradigmatic case studies were chosen: Colombia and Mozambique. A descriptive comparative analysis places the two previous discussions in the context of these case studies and aims to signal at how the successful incorporation of both the technocratic and the community, victim -based approach have yielded substantial positive outcomes in redressing victims by not focusing solely on the framework of prohibition, removal, and disposal.
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    A history of music and politics in Mozambique from the 1890s to the present
    (2021-01) MALAUENE, DENISE
    This dissertation focuses on music and its historic connection with politics in Mozambique from the 1890s to the present, through the ‘lenses’ of songs in gitonga language from Inhambane in Mozambique. I studied the Vatonga people’s historical origins and culture and the development of popular music, I explored the processes of ‘Mozambicanization’, gender mainstreaming and internationalization of Mozambican popular music, I examined the role of national festivals of culture in the consolidation of Mozambicaness, and I examined the trajectories of Mozambican musicians in the diaspora and their contribution for the internationalization of Mozambican music. I argued that the relation between music and politics was continuous from pre-colonial, colonial to post-colonial periods. Music was affected by politics and affected politics. During the pre-colonial period, music was used as praise poetry to praise the rulers, kings, and elders, as entertainment, in social, religious, and political ceremonies, in rites and rituals, and as a social and political commentary. In the colonial period, the Portuguese tried to control music and remake it within their cultural politics of assimilation and the creation of a Portuguese nation and national identity incorporating the ultramarine colonies. They also used music to try and win over the hearts and minds of black troops in the colonial army. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) relied heavily on songs and dance as an integral part of the liberation struggle. From 1962 the liberation movement used song and dance not only as a source of entertainment for its followers but more significantly to recruit new members, to instill pride in the past, to generate a sense of nationalism, to cut across ethnic, religious, and racial divisions. After 1975, music continued to be intertwined and interconnected with politics. The Mozambican authorities used music as a way of sowing artificial and external elements of identity in the collective memory of people, as part of the state-nation and cultural identity formation project. However, musicians appropriated music as ways of social critique and resistance, sometimes facing sanctions.
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    Tracking Wildlife Conservation in Southern Africa: Histories of Protected Areas in Gorongosa and Maputaland
    (2015-10) McKeown, Kathleen
    In this dissertation, I argue that the development and demarcation of protected areas in southern Africa has not only been a process of defining boundaries but also of defining belonging. I focus specifically on how wildlife has been determined to belong in particular areas and how these animals have been claimed as belonging to individuals, communities, provinces, nations, and regions. I focus on the histories of wildlife conservation in Mozambique and the northern part of KwaZulu Natal, with particular emphasis on Gorongosa and Maputaland during the period from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, a time of great social and political change in both South Africa and Mozambique. I have selected these areas not to propose points of comparison between conservation practices in these neighboring countries, but rather to demonstrate complex continuities, exchanges, and cross-fertilizations. Ideas about wildlife conservation crossed national borders, as did animals, their advocates, and, eventually, protected area boundaries. By employing a transnational perspective on protected area histories, I illustrate and analyze this movement of personnel, non-human animals, and conservation practices between nation-states. By interrogating the scientific knowledge production and policy-making of protected area development, my narrative foregrounds the ways that wildlife has been implicated in and impacted by ideas about where these animals belong and to whom. Conceptions of indigeneity and nativeness, which tie belonging to place, have impacted the territories and scales of protected areas, as well as what (or who) has the right to dwell within their borders. However, these categories of belonging are not inherent to the wildlife species they have been attributed to. Instead, “belonging” is a condition that is made through a complex network of biocultural interactions. It is produced through dynamic constellations of political conditions, cultural values, economic interests, scientific ways of knowing, and animal behavior.