Paul Bjerk
Biographic Data
| ID | 317181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Bjerk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Bjerk |
| SIGNATURE | BJERK P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas Tech University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0353-3809 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
African Activists in a Decolonising World
Agency and the Arusha Declaration
Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arush…
Political Biography and the Agency of Audience
Development as Rebellion, the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida's postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning ta…
Nation-building Project in Tanzania
Building a Peaceful Nation in Tanzania is a significant contribution to the growing literature on state-and nation-building in Africa. Cast in the analytic framework of sovereignty and discursive agency, the book examines the historical context within which, Julius Nyerere, the founding President of Tanzania, navigated the challenges and policy processes of reconstructing a colonial state apparatus and re-fashioning into a new sovereign state wit…
Building a Peaceful Nation
Building a Peaceful Nation
In the early 1960s, nationalist politicians established in Tanzania a stable government in the face of external threats and internal turmoil. Paul Bjerk's volume chronicles this history and examines the politics and policies of the nation's first president, Julius Nyerere. One of the great leaders of modern Africa, Nyerere unified the diverse people who became citizens of the new nation and negotiated the tumultuous politics of the Cold War. In a…
Books
Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania
Observers of the Tanzanian political scene would point out that the country makes its own decisions on matters of internal and international importance. The policy of Ujamaa Vijijini [African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power. In an edited volume entitled The State in Tanzania , published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philo…
Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (review)
Reviewed by: Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa Paul Bjerk Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Edited by Henri Médard and Shane Doyle. Athens: Ohio University Press; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Oxford: James Currey, 2007. This new edited volume of essays by a remarkable collection of scholars is notable for its insights into unfree labor and trade in people in a region wholly separate from the Atlantic World that is,…
Dar es Salaam
These insightful essays on Tanzanian social history are the latest addition to a growing collection of such edited volumes, and it is this august company that makes this book, despite its colourful subject matter, a little dull. Meant as a corrective to the classical interest in the big events of history, social history easily becomes facile substitute rather than critical complement. But such is not the case here; this material shows changes and…
They Poured Themselves Into the Milk
This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that…
Building A New Eden
A study of three songs by a Tanzanian youth choir reveals a synthesis of historical and intellectual sources ranging from pre-colonial social philosophy to Lutheran theology to Nyerere's Ujamaa socialism. The songs show how the choir performances break down the barrier between Bourdieu's realms of the disputed and undisputed. In appropriating an active role in shaping Christian ideology, the choir members reinterpret its theology into something w…
African Files in Portuguese Archives
When I first mentioned to David Henige my plan to go to Portugal to do some archival research, he expressed the hope that it would be a somewhat more welcoming atmosphere than he had encountered in 1971, with armed soldiers patrolling the grounds. Indeed it was. I spent three weeks in Lisbon doing archival research in modern African history, with a specific interest in Tanzania. The Arquivo Histórico Diplomàtico (AHD) and the Arquivo Histórico Ul…
Building a Peaceful Nation
In the early 1960s, nationalist politicians established in Tanzania a stable government in the face of external threats and internal turmoil. Paul Bjerk's volume chronicles this history and examines the politics and policies of the nation's first president, Julius Nyerere. One of the great leaders of modern Africa, Nyerere unified the diverse people who became citizens of the new nation and negotiated the tumultuous politics of the Cold War. In a…
They Poured Themselves Into the Milk
This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that…
Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania
Observers of the Tanzanian political scene would point out that the country makes its own decisions on matters of internal and international importance. The policy of Ujamaa Vijijini [African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power. In an edited volume entitled The State in Tanzania , published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philo…
Building A New Eden
A study of three songs by a Tanzanian youth choir reveals a synthesis of historical and intellectual sources ranging from pre-colonial social philosophy to Lutheran theology to Nyerere's Ujamaa socialism. The songs show how the choir performances break down the barrier between Bourdieu's realms of the disputed and undisputed. In appropriating an active role in shaping Christian ideology, the choir members reinterpret its theology into something w…
African Files in Portuguese Archives
When I first mentioned to David Henige my plan to go to Portugal to do some archival research, he expressed the hope that it would be a somewhat more welcoming atmosphere than he had encountered in 1971, with armed soldiers patrolling the grounds. Indeed it was. I spent three weeks in Lisbon doing archival research in modern African history, with a specific interest in Tanzania. The Arquivo Histórico Diplomàtico (AHD) and the Arquivo Histórico Ul…
Building A New Eden
A study of three songs by a Tanzanian youth choir reveals a synthesis of historical and intellectual sources ranging from pre-colonial social philosophy to Lutheran theology to Nyerere's Ujamaa socialism. The songs show how the choir performances break down the barrier between Bourdieu's realms of the disputed and undisputed. In appropriating an active role in shaping Christian ideology, the choir members reinterpret its theology into something w…
They Poured Themselves Into the Milk
This article synthesizes metaphors and practices surrounding human and bovine milk and semen appearing in the James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history. The King's control of the flow of milk in society was the source of his power and the mechanism by which he controlled the state. A fluent understanding of this Zulu political philosophy in the Stuart Archive opens up a rich and underutilized source of historical information for Zulu history that…
Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa (review)
Reviewed by: Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa Paul Bjerk Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. Edited by Henri Médard and Shane Doyle. Athens: Ohio University Press; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Oxford: James Currey, 2007. This new edited volume of essays by a remarkable collection of scholars is notable for its insights into unfree labor and trade in people in a region wholly separate from the Atlantic World that is,…
Dar es Salaam
These insightful essays on Tanzanian social history are the latest addition to a growing collection of such edited volumes, and it is this august company that makes this book, despite its colourful subject matter, a little dull. Meant as a corrective to the classical interest in the big events of history, social history easily becomes facile substitute rather than critical complement. But such is not the case here; this material shows changes and…
Sovereignty and Socialism in Tanzania
Observers of the Tanzanian political scene would point out that the country makes its own decisions on matters of internal and international importance. The policy of Ujamaa Vijijini [African socialism in the villages], it would be argued, was formulated here and not at the dictate of any foreign power. In an edited volume entitled The State in Tanzania , published in 1980 just before the precipitous denouement of President Julius Nyerere's philo…
Books
Building a Peaceful Nation
Building a Peaceful Nation
In the early 1960s, nationalist politicians established in Tanzania a stable government in the face of external threats and internal turmoil. Paul Bjerk's volume chronicles this history and examines the politics and policies of the nation's first president, Julius Nyerere. One of the great leaders of modern Africa, Nyerere unified the diverse people who became citizens of the new nation and negotiated the tumultuous politics of the Cold War. In a…
Nation-building Project in Tanzania
Building a Peaceful Nation in Tanzania is a significant contribution to the growing literature on state-and nation-building in Africa. Cast in the analytic framework of sovereignty and discursive agency, the book examines the historical context within which, Julius Nyerere, the founding President of Tanzania, navigated the challenges and policy processes of reconstructing a colonial state apparatus and re-fashioning into a new sovereign state wit…
Agency and the Arusha Declaration
Opening its general meeting on 27 December 1966, the state-sponsored National Union of Tanganyika Workers, known as NUTA, proposed a combative response to a presidential commission's investigation into mismanagement in the union. The union's general secretary also issued an azimio (resolution) that prefigured much of the socialist rhetoric and policy prescriptions that appeared a month later in Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere's Azimio la Arush…
Political Biography and the Agency of Audience
Development as Rebellion, the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida's postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning ta…
African Activists in a Decolonising World
Political science (11 works) · African history and culture studies (9 works) · History (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Ethnology (5 works) · History (5 works) · Tanzania (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works)