Category Archives: Africa

Huge Untapped Natural Resources

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Many moons ago, in my first teaching gig at a New England prep school’s summer session, I was responsible for a unit on Africa. I poked around in the school’s library and found an old educational film intended for American … Continue reading →

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Double Consciousness of Double Standards

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Ah, the African Renaissance. Can you feel those winds of change? (photo by Chris Nevins) Feels more like a boat becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea with no breeze in sight. Statues that charmingly invoke North Korean aesthetics? … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa | 3 Comments

Looking Backward

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been fiddling with the syllabus for my Image of Africa class, which I am to teach this fall for the first time in a while. No course in my repertoire has changed as much in my underlying assumptions about … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Production of History | 22 Comments

Africans and the Slave Trade

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Timothy Burke

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks, as the last half of April so often is. Usually that leaves me with a mind like a blown-out tire for the week where everything calms down, and this year has been … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Production of History | 2 Comments

That’s So Funny I Forgot to Laugh

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

In the middle of a New York Times story on corruption in the World Food Program’s aid to Somalia, there’s this gem: “We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this — we know what you … Continue reading →

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Disposed to Propose

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve done a fair bit of judging proposals for grants over the years, and a recent experience doing so pushed me to finally assemble some notes and thoughts I’ve been collecting. These are specific to undergraduates: graduate and faculty proposals … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

District 9

Posted on September 2, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Watching District 9, I could feel my mind splitting into different tracks of internal dialogue and reaction. The first track was simply taking pleasure in the film’s deft mixture of intelligence and high-octane action in a science-fiction idiom. Even potentially … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Popular Culture | 13 Comments

Obama in Ghana

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I joined in a conversation in Second Life about Obama’s speech in Ghana over the weekend. Due to some technical snafus, I had trouble participating in the panel early on, so one of the basic reactions I had to the … Continue reading →

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The Implausibility of Liberal Revolution

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been struck in the past week at some of the similarities between Iran and Zimbabwe. Yes, there are vast differences in geopolitical status, economic health, histories of 20th Century statehood, religious and social ideology and much else besides. But … Continue reading →

Posted in Africa, Politics | 2 Comments

The Usefulness of Scholarship

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If you define erudition as encyclopedic knowledge about a body of discrete facts, then welcome to the age of distributed erudition. It’s still a very good thing to have those facts in your head rather than to pop up on … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Africa, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 5 Comments