Celebrating Fruits of Joblessness
On this street, I joked about my joblessness while living with my sister-mum, but what I did not mention was that though I was jobless, I was not workless. I learned long ago that a job is what they give you; work is what you create for yourself that adds value. You can leave your job(resign in my case), but you may not abandon your work. If you have ever had a job taken from you, go to work.
In some circles, some people have said I claim busyness like I am running a country. I don't run a country but my people; I run my life. When the noise of the crazy generator does not let me sleep, I pull out my laptop and do the work I created for myself during that period. During the day, I navigate between sleeping, eating, gisting, and reminiscing with sister-mum. On a few occasions, I do ethnography research around the sister-mum community. These two book chapters are some of the products of that period of joblessness. If you know academic publishing practice, a child may have started tetting before your work gets out. One of the chapters was out a month ago, and the other just came out.
I wouldn't have had a productive time without my sister-mum and her husband. Two of them think I am a celebrity visiting their home that should be made comfortable, even if it means regulating my sleep and work. One time I noticed that the generator went off at a specific time. Yet when either of the couples is leaving the house, they will tell me that if I need to work, someone will put on the generator for me. I knew this was not the pattern since I came, but I imagined that fuel was exhausted. For some time, the pattern did not change. One day, I asked my sister-mum if she knew she didn't sleep well in the heat and how she coped. She said there was nothing anyone could do. Later, I learned that my sister-mum used to tiptoe to spy on me at night, and once she saw I was not sleeping, she went back and told her husband, "Rosemary o sun." They both decided to turn off the generator at a particular time since I was not nursing a baby and pretend it went off; maybe if I didn't see the light, I would sleep. My people, their decision worked.
Great Book on Africans on Gender
In this chapter, I reviewed four books on gender by Africans across gender and generations to assess what the value of these books means to my scholarship and the study of gender on the continent. I evaluate the methodological intervention and the cutting-edge ways these books, to my mind, are transforming how we understand gender and gender issues. The books I reviewed include.
1. Oyewumí, O. (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN & London, UK: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Achebe, N. (2011). The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
3. Aderinto, S. (2014). When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
4. Balogun, O. M. (2020). Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Corophilanthropy
This chapter captures how we may understand the politics of philanthropy from church, politicians, corporate bodies, and celebrities during COVID-19. On philanthropy of the state and politicians, I engaged with government palliatives, public distrust, and politics of political philanthropy. With church's charities during the pandemic, I question whether religious leaders' philanthropy was piety or performance. With the contributions of corporate organizations such as Access Bank, Otedola, and Dangote, I wondered whether their philanthropy was part of corporate social responsibility, given the tax relief they are likely to get from the donation. I asked, is it good samaritan or robbing Peter to pay Paul? Finally, with celebrities, I interrogate whether it was altruism and attention seeking. I argued that philanthropy was not only performative in ways that seemed like public masturbation. My argument draws on Littler (2008) that philanthropy during COVID-19 was the "public displays of support for "the afflicted" and a way for "philanthropists" to appear to raise their profile above the zone of the crudely commercial into the sanctified, quasi-religious realm of altruism and charity while revealing or constructing an added dimension of personality: of compassion and caring".
No profit can ever equal your pain, but never waste your pain.
The links to the chapters are below.
1. Corophilanthropy. https://rowman.com/.../Multidisciplinary-Explorations-of...
2. Great books by Africans on Gender. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8576-8
Posted on Facebook on July 27, 2022
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