“The Hour of Decision: Power, Persistence, Purpose, and Possibility in African Studies” was the theme of last November’s meeting of the African Studies Association, which was held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Northwestern faculty, graduate student, and alumni partici-pation was significant.Adia Benton (anthropology faculty) chaired two panels, “Coronavirus on the Continent: Government and Citizen Responses” and “Mental Health and Healing in Africa.” Visiting scholar Abdulbasit Kassim presented the paper “Holy Defiance and Faith Skepticism: COVID-19, Science, and the Palliative Force of History and Religion in Nigeria.” Florence Nthiira Mugambi (Herskovits Library) partici-pated in the roundtable “Persistent Collecting: Building and Supporting African Studies Collections in the 21st Century.”
Five graduate students presented papers:
Colin Bos (history), “‘The Owner of All Antique Work’: Antiquities and Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1930–1970”
Andrew Kim (anthropology), “Evaluating the Mental Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Urban South Africa: Perceived Risk of COVID-19 Infection and Childhood Trauma Predict Adult Depressive Symptoms”
Moritz Nagel (history), “African Trade Policy during the Establishment of Colonial Rule: Debt, Port Fees, and Prices in Cameroon, 1884–1897”
David Peyton (political science), “Beating the Odds: Strategies of Property Protection in Eastern Congo’s Urban Areas”
Andrea Rosengarten (history), “Gathering the ‘|Haohâb’: Territory in Translation on the Mission Stations of Southern Namibia, ca. 1830–1880.” Rosengarten also chaired the panel “Reconsidering German Colonialism in Africa: Timelines, Comparisons, Legacies.”
PAS alumni presenting papers included:
Nana Akua Anyidoho (University of Ghana), “Social Difference and Individual Agency in the School-to-Work Transitions of Ghanaian Tertiary Graduates”
James Brennan (University of Illinois), “Passing Familiarity: Leo C. Aldridge Jr., Mozambique, and the Politics of Mimesis in 1950s Los Angeles”
Catherine Cole (University of Washington), “The Credibility of Performance and the Postcolonial Incredible”
Moses Khisa (North Carolina State University), “Africa’s Global Security Regionalism: Pushing Up from the Bottom Tier” Susanna Sacks (College of Wooster), “The Poet and the University: The Malawi Writers’ Group and the Contestation of National Identities”
Published in the PAS Newsletter Winter 2021, 31.2