Suchergebnisse

AbstractSince its establishment more than a decade ago, the cultural and political debate on Afropolitanism has been characterized by several different positions. In particular, the Afropolitan opposition to any kind of essentialism (Eze 2014) has been counterweighed by the necessity of a connection to "knowable African communities, nations and traditions" (Gikandi 2011, 9). This debate has been reproducing a typical oscillation of postcolonial theory and criticism between the celebration of hybridity (Bhabha 1994) and the interpretation of postcolonial texts as "national allegories" (Jameson 1986). At the same time, Afropolitanism appears to be related to a more recent phenomenon, which has been defined as "national failure" in political analysis (Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2004) and "failed-state fiction" in literary criticism (Marx 2008). The latter sheds a different light on Afropolitanism, by showing its advantages and its limits both on a national and transnational level. In view of this, Afropolitan literature – including the paradigmatic works by Helon Habila (2002, 2007, 2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, 2013) here analyzed – appears to be based on the persistence of "old names," or categories, in an uneven but fruitful coexistence with the "new" ones (Eze 2016).

As Phaswane Mpe's novel "Welcome to our Hillbrow" (2001) convincingly shows, the crisis suffered by post-apartheid ideological discourses is intimately related to a crisis in the representation of spaces. As a matter of fact, the demise of the apartheid regime of racial segregation has not led to a completely new spatial organization, producing, rather, a multiplicity of boundaries which range from the apartheid model of the township to newly constituted "migrant ghettos" such as Hillbrow, in the heart of Johannesburg. While South African spatiality is interrogated by Mpe's novel though issues such as inter-African migration, AIDS and persisting forms of prejudice and racism, a comparison between Mpe's novel and Neill Bloemkamp's blockbuster movie "District 9" (2009) hints at the permanence of corporate violence as a major cause for this political and economic failure, by connecting it to a global scenario.

This essay investigates the use of Italian dialects in two novels written by contemporary Italophone writers, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous and I sessanta nomi dell'amore written by Tahar Lamri, both published in 2006. These two texts can be positioned, in the first place, within the ongoing cultural debate on old and new multiculturalisms in today's Italy. Secondly, they are clearly influenced by the discussion on the renewed questione della lingua, so central in the history of (dis)united Italy. The essay seeks to illustrate the different approaches to the use of dialects adopted by these Algerian-born writers and the outcomes achieved. The main focus here is to establish the extent to which literary, cultural and political potential of dialectal use is unlocked in order to challenge the dominant, canonical culture. The essay will also highlight the different ways in which the two authors attempt to question the ideas of Italianness and monolithic national culture in the context of rapidly changing cultural dynamics of contemporary Italy.

Analysing the rise of Southern African middle classes as a specific case study, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the plural and entangled histories of black middle classes within two national contexts. The analysis of the dichotomy between the white rural middle class (as especially recognizable in the history of South African Boers) and the black urban Lumpenproletariat as structuring the political and cultural history both of South Africa and Zimbabwe, in fact, is eventually challenged by the rise of black middle classes in the postcolonial and post-apartheid era. As these processes are rooted in a peculiar habitat such as the farm and exerted through a specific and yet all-encompassing habitus, this paper will retrace these aspects in the history of Southern African literature in English, focusing on recent novels such as John Maxwell Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Peter Godwin's When A Crocodile Eats The Sun (2006).

Understanding, predicting and controlling the dynamics of cholera and other waterborne diseases are crucial goals of public health policies. Appropriate quantitative models to forecast epidemic development and to evaluate possible intervention scenarios would be specially needed during epidemic outbreaks, when preparedness and efficient allocation of resources are key to emergency management. Moreover, these tools ought to be spatially explicit, because waterborne disease epidemics usually display spatially inhomogeneous patterns. Here we describe spatially explicit epidemiological models and methods for real-time forecast of waterborne disease epidemics and design of intervention strategies for epidemic prevention and control. Applications to two cholera epidemics in South Africa and Haiti are briefly illustrated.

Mathematical models of cholera dynamics can not only help in identifying environmental drivers and processes that influence disease transmission, but may also represent valuable tools for the prediction of the epidemiological patterns in time and space as well as for the allocation of health care resources. Cholera outbreaks have been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the 1970s. They have been ravaging the shore of Lake Kivu in the east of the country repeatedly during the last decades. Here we employ a spatially explicit, inhomogeneous Markov chain model to describe cholera incidence in eight health zones on the shore of the lake. Remotely sensed data sets of chlorophyll a concentration in the lake, precipitation and indices of global climate anomalies are used as environmental drivers in addition to baseline seasonality. The effect of human mobility is also modelled mechanistically. We test several models on a multiyear data set of reported cholera cases. The best fourteen models, accounting for different environmental drivers, and selected using the Akaike information criterion, are formally compared via proper cross validation. Among these, the one accounting for seasonality, El Niño Southern Oscillation, precipitation and human mobility outperforms the others in cross validation. Some drivers (such as human mobility and rainfall) are retained only by a few models, possibly indicating that the mechanisms through which they influence cholera dynamics in the area will have to be investigated further. Key Points Markov chain model of cholera dynamics in the Lake Kivu area (DRC) Global climate anomalies are the main drivers, together with rainfall The influence of mobility and remotely sensed chlorophyll a were also tested