{"title":"The Amba Uprising: Beyond France's Plantation Economy","authors":"Patrice Nganang","doi":"10.1111/ajes.12491","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the roots of the current conflict between the French neocolonial regime in Cameroon and the English-speaking minority in southern Cameroons, or Ambazonia. It proposes the use of the Gramscian concept of hegemony as the best frame for understanding the specific forms of submission and dominance that are driving this conflict. It analyzes the geopolitical motives that have empowered and continue to enable French hegemony, comparing them to the motives that empowered and enabled the plantation economy in the U.S. South prior to the U.S. Civil War. It explores the range of forms of cultural rebellion taking place against this imposed hegemony, especially in the realms of education and language, including and beyond the Amba uprising.</p>","PeriodicalId":47133,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Economics and Sociology","volume":"81 5","pages":"905-926"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Journal of Economics and Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12491","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article explores the roots of the current conflict between the French neocolonial regime in Cameroon and the English-speaking minority in southern Cameroons, or Ambazonia. It proposes the use of the Gramscian concept of hegemony as the best frame for understanding the specific forms of submission and dominance that are driving this conflict. It analyzes the geopolitical motives that have empowered and continue to enable French hegemony, comparing them to the motives that empowered and enabled the plantation economy in the U.S. South prior to the U.S. Civil War. It explores the range of forms of cultural rebellion taking place against this imposed hegemony, especially in the realms of education and language, including and beyond the Amba uprising.
期刊介绍:
The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.