Romancing the Sugar Daddy in Rosemarie Owino's Sugar Daddy's Lover

Abstract

As a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated, the romance genre in Africa plays a series of important functions. Whereas in the West, romance is often seen as a formulaic genre that has run its course, in Africa, it is used to explore a range of pressing social issues. Romantic fiction offers advice and suggests solutions and hence makes legible contemporary ideas on gender and romance. However, thus far, the body of scholarship on romance has tended to focus largely on the female protagonists who dominate the genre. By examining the figure of the sugar daddy, we can widen the boundaries of investigation. This article investigates these ideas in relation to a reading of a popular Kenyan novel, Sugar Daddy's Lover.     

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play

ABSTRACT

little sister: An Afro-Temporal Solo-Play is at once a memory-scape and a mytho-biography set to poetry, movement, and mixed media. A performance poem spanning from the Antebellum South to present-moment Chicago, it tells the story of a nomadic spirit named little-she who shape-shifts through the memories and imaginings of her sister, the narrator. Through the characters little-she and the narrator, the solo-performance explores embodied ways to rupture and relieve the impact of macro forms of violence in the micro realm of the everyday. To this end, little sister witnesses and disrupts the legacy of violence in the lives of queer Black women through a trans-temporal navigation of everyday encounters within familial, small groups and intimate partner spaces.     

Exponential random graph models for little networks

Statistical models for social networks have enabled researchers to study complex social phenomena that give rise to observed patterns of relationships among social actors and to gain a rich understanding of the interdependent nature of social ties and actors. Much of this research has focused on social networks within medium to large social groups. To date, these advances in statistical models for social networks, and in particular, of Exponential-Family Random Graph Models (ERGMS), have rarely been applied to the study of small networks, despite small network data in teams, families, and personal networks being common in many fields. In this paper, we revisit the estimation of ERGMs for small networks and propose using exhaustive enumeration when possible. We developed an R package that implements the estimation of pooled ERGMs for small networks using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), called “ergmito”. Based on the results of an extensive simulation study to assess the properties of the MLE estimator, we conclude that there are several benefits of direct MLE estimation compared to approximate methods and that this creates opportunities for valuable methodological innovations that can be applied to modeling social networks with ERGMs.     

The expression of mourning in an eight-year-old girl

This is a case of a just-turned eight-year-old girl whose mother was murdered on September 18, 1983. Since the child was already in treatment, the mourning process started immediately and continued until the end of June 1984. The case is distinctive because of the relative ease with which this child was engaged in the process and educated to it. Unconscious feelings readily emerged because they had been so recently repressed. The mourning was accomplished mainly through the process of interpretation of her play and behavior, although at times she would bring things up directly. The focus of therapy remained on the mourning during the entire nine months of treatment.     

Personal predictors of spectator aggression at little league baseball games

Parents from two baseball leagues completed questionnaires regarding their likelihood of engaging in various aggressive behaviors (yelling, swearing, shoving, fighting, humiliating) toward targets at youth baseball games (other spectators, umpires, coaches, other players, their child). Overall, the likelihood of all forms of aggression was very low, particularly physical aggression and swearing. Hierarchical entry stepwise regressions were calculated to determine predictors of yelling and humiliating using demographics, trait aggression, anger, hostility, and vengeance as predictors. Parents with greater hostility reported a greater likelihood of humiliating a child's teammate, while those with elevated trait anger reported a greater likelihood of yelling at other spectators. Finally, parents with a more vengeful attitude reported a greater likelihood of humiliating umpires.     

Treatment of an acting-out adolescent girl: An interpersonal experience

The current emphasis on psychotherapy as an interpersonal or intersubjective experience is highly relevant to clinical work with adolescents. This paper presentes and discusses the treatment of an acting out adolescent girl from the perspective of the two-person relationship, emphasizing the interaction between the patient's dynamics and the therapist's responses.     

The resolution of faulty identification process in a borderline adolescent girl

This paper discusses problems of identification which interfere with a borderline adolescent girl's completion of her adolescent developmental tasks. Therapeutic work entails the provision of a protective environment to assist processes of identification, separation and completion of structural restoration.     

A right to live: girl workers in the Bangladeshi garment industry

According to a survey conducted in 1989, there are 772 approved and registered garment factories in Bangladesh. These factories employ approximately 300,000 individuals, 90% of whom are women. A more recent estimate in a Bangladeshi newspaper, however, posits that up to five million people are directly or indirectly dependent upon the garment industry. Many of the women who work in Bangladesh's garment factories are under age 15 years. In some countries, such as the US, the employment of such young individuals constitutes a violation of child labor laws. Therefore, under the Harkin Bill, the US will no longer import garments produced by children younger than age 15 years. Many garment workers under age 15 years have already been put out of work or will soon be terminated. The authors explain that while the intent of the Harkin Bill may be to protect children, it is difficult to adopt the moral high ground in a poor country like Bangladesh. Regardless of one's age in Bangladesh, having a job may be the only way to survive. No job often means no food or shelter. The authors discuss women in the garment industry, one girl's case, alternative employment opportunities, and the future.     

Protest and profanation: Agrarian revolt and the little tradition,Part II

Conclusion Perhaps one reason why political scientists and historians generally overlook the moral and political ideas of the little tradition is that both, unlike the anthropologist, tend to concentrate on the written record-the product, par excellence, of the great tradition. The little tradition achieves historical visibility only at those moments when it becomes mobilized into dissident movements which pose a direct threat to ruling elites. It is for this reason that I have had to rely so heavily on evidence from millenial revolts in constructing my argument. Yet it seems to me that there is a shadow history which remains to be written for almost every mass movement in the Third World.Consider, for example, the case of nationalism. There is evidence that the meaning of independence at the base of many nationalistic movements diverged markedly from its meaning to the intelligentsia who nominally led them. David Marr concludes that in Vietnam salvation from the foreigner was taken by the peasantry to include salvation from hunger, tenancy, and taxes (emphasis added). For the Filipino peasantry, Sturtevant claims that ... independence took on miraculous connotations. Some barrio dwellers began to look forward to the anticipated condition as a panacea for everything from hook worms to hacenderos. It is only when the nationalist legions elude the control of their erstwhile leaders that this shadow history and its participants move into the spotlight. Much the same may be said about communist and socialist movements which are apt to look radically different from the village than from the national headquarters. If it is worth writing religious history and sociology with the beliefs and values of its mass adherents in mind, then it is worth writing the history and sociology of political movements in the same spirit. The enterprise is important not only because it uncovers the experienced history (what French historians would call mentalité populaire) of most actors but also because it is likely to reveal the whole substratum of ideas and values which represent a human potential that is only rarely tapped.In this analysis of the little tradition and popular religion in Europe and Southeast Asia, my point has been to demonstrate that, among the peasantry in most complex agrarian societies, one can find a pattern of profanations-symbolic reversals of the existing social order. The idiom in which they are expressed is, almost universally, religious. Much as the official religious doctrine is selected, reworked, and profaned in little tradition cults, so is the existing political order symbolically negated in popular millenial traditions.For the most part, as we have stressed, these symbolic reversals are an undertone, a counterpoint, to dominant religious and political ideas. When outside forces or natural disasters appear to overwhelm the peasantry and play havoc with the normal categories of experience, however, this alternative world may chart a new course of action and open up new possibilities. This alternative symbolic world is constructed, we must not forget, largely in reaction to what might be described as the historic process of modernization-the creation of a bureaucratic state, the penetration of a market economy, the replacement of custom by law-a process experienced by much of the world's peasantry. It is out of the turmoil and pain of this transformation that the need for a redemptive community grows. How else are we to comprehend a religious symbolism of liberation that displays so many similarities across time, space, culture, and religion?If this examination of peasant religion and politics has revealed anything, it is surely that there is no such thing as a perfect ideological hegemony which socializes subordinate classes to accept either their fate or the values which ordain that fate. In fact, it would appear that the growth of oppression dialectically produces its own negation in the symbolic and religious life of the oppressed. At the very least this negation generates a new resistance to socialization and moral instruction from above. At most, it represents the normative basis for rebellion and revolution. As Lucien Goldmann has pointed out, human action ... can no longer be defined by its actual reality without reference to the potential reality which it seeks to bring into being. We can do no better in closing than to quote Marx on religion, including a passage that is, alas, usually taken out of context: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. If the production of values is a political weapon in the class struggle, then the religious profanations of popular religion are no less a weapon than the doctrines of the high church.

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