Perspectives on Regionalism in (Southern) Africa
This review essay uses the works of Nana Poku (2001), James Sidaway (2002) and Andrew Grant and Fredrik Soderbaum (2003) as principal texts for the discussion on regionalism in Africa. Together, the works of both authors create an elaborate text on regionalism in the continent and provide the intellectual space for re-assessing regionalisation in (southern) Africa against the backdrop of discourses of regionalism elsewhere. The essay is not intended to offer book reviews. Rather, the aim is to tease out salient points in the texts in order to bring them into a coherent discussion. The intensive re-conceptualisation of regions, place, space and scale has yielded a quite different appreciation of regions and their formation than what the areal differentiation school of thought once offered. The result has been to conceive spatial differentiation in terms of practices and processes rather than some given or preconceived qualities. Accordingly, 'it has become typical to understand regions as historically contingent social processes emerging as a constellation of institutionalised practices, power relations and discourse' (Paasi, 2004, p. 540). In this sense, spatial differentiation cannot be reduced to a single scale (Duncan and Savage, 1989). Agents of regionalism are not necessarily limited to the regional scale, but are part of a constellation of practices and a mix of actors. As Beauregard (1995, p. 239) has correctly noted, 'once we focus our attention on the agents who literally make scale, the partitioning of space into global-national-regional-local seems simplistic . . . In fact, it is the mix of those actors, and the distribution of influence among them, that results in such places becoming regional, national or international nodes in the world-system'. It can be argued that the ramification of power relations, together with changes in the nature and scales at which regions are formed, render the notion of the region unstable. Indeed, calls for new regionalisms have become a familiar feature of the debate
Regionalisation and Security in Southern Africa.
Once torn by ideological conflicts and the dominance of command economies, Southern Africa is now moving towards economic liberalism and openness. In general, the ascendancy of 'market economics' is acknowledged by its governments, albeit with different degrees of enthusiasm. Theoretically rich and empirically engaging this timely book offers a critical insight into the ensuing debate on regionalism and the process of regionalization in southern Africa
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.