CAT Questions ~ CSO 302 Qualitative Research Methods, November 2016

UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

CSO 302: QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS

September-December 2016 SEMESTER [Module II]

TAKE-AWAY CAT QUESTIONS [Released: 2:05 p.m., November 8, 2016]

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ARCHIVE: A Review of Colin Leys' Underdevelopment in Kenya

Colin Leys' book, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism, caused quite a conversational stir when it was published just over forty years ago. Here is a review of it that I wrote in 1976, and which remains a manuscript:

The central purpose of this study is to examine the "significance of independence for the mass of (Kenyan) people." Before doing so, however, it is imperative, so the author argues, to "try to disengage oneself" from the biases of existing literature. It is imperative for three reasons:

First, it is impossible to understand the relationship between the 'private sector' and the pattern of Kenya's post-independence development in purely Kenyan terms. Second, a focus on the 'private sector' or the 'economy' as something distinct from the 'political system' is seen as an artificiality and an obstacle to clear understanding of "the reality." The suggestion here is that existing literature has committed this 'sin'. Third, in order to answer the basic questions about the significance of independence, one must reject the false 'value-freedom' of existing literature and make a choice as to what interests and political practice one's framework of inquiry "should try to embody" or serve. Leys' conscious choice, or 'bias', is what we may call the "underdevelopment" or "dependency" model which in his view represents "an immense advance , politically and intellectually, over conventional development theory, in spite of some very serious defects of its own" (p. xiii), The theoretical context of the book is indicated in chapter I. 

Leys argues that the theory of underdevelopment originated in the writing of Marx and Lenin (one supposes that 'Marx' includes Engels) -- though their "prime concern" was with Europe and European Russia. A "major theoretical development has been required," he adds, since the first socialist revolution did not... 

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CITATION: Tsitsi Jaji on the Price of Listening

Tsitsi Jaji has written an absorbing essay titled "The Price of Listening: James Baldwin, Black Music, and Black Lives", which appears in the October 19, 2015 issue of Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). It is not so much a review of, as a review essay revolving around, Ed Pavlić's book, Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners, which was published by Fordham University Press in the same month of October 2015. So Tsitsi has been quick to the punch, so to speak.

Mostly anecdotal, the essay starts with a vignette of a June 1973 meet up between James Baldwin and Ray Charles, purposed to fine-tune preparations for a Carnegie Hall showing of their collaboration in The Hallelujah Chorus. It was to be a montage of musical pieces from Ray Charles' oeuvre and a stage adaptation, stage set pieces so to speak, of James Baldwin's own short story, "Sonny's Blues", about a jazz drummer. All mouth-watering stuff.

But what Tsitsi really wants to talk about here -- alas, too briefly even for the conversational space she has appropriated herself, with the acquiescence of LARB, for herself -- is Ed Pavlić's three-volume book. A three-books-in-one sort of fare -- a book nonetheless. Ed Pavlić is himself an artist and a poet, a poet of no mean repute, but is here mostly a critic and something of a biographer. His effort, Tsitsi sees (with South African eyes), is "a wondrous testament to the ore to be mined from lonely hours in the archive's shaft." 

In essence, Pavlić's book, so we are told, "offers an extended tutorial in that same blues principle" which Baldwin enunciated in his "Uses of the Blues", namely: "the 'necessary toughness' required to embrace pain as the only road to joy." A corollary to that essential content, if not purpose, is that "what his new volume does is give us a new approach to the lyric, that artistic mode that joins poetry and music." And so the story the book really tells is the lyrical-musical side of James Baldwin's artistic calling. 

Lyricism is very much in the air, in this world to which Tsitsi invites us, and to which she's so very obviously a frequent flier. It's not sun-shiny lyricism, for sure. Too much suffering -- too much masufferer experience, to borrow a rough-cut slang from Kenya -- underpins it. Rather, it is of a brooding, "bluesy", pained and conflicted kind, I reckon. It's about a world of which James Baldwin has said so much about, and in which he above all lived. 

The book, Tsitsi tells us, "plays in the pocket between actual musical performances, interpretations of the lyrical mode in Baldwin’s poetics, and intricate historical detail." But  her review covers more ground than the book strictly set out to do, offering more background and context but also digressing, about one-third of the time, into rather distracting, if 'related', matters. It is a hermeneutics of a much larger canvas of experience.



READ: Tsitsi Jaji ~ "The Price of Listening": James Baldwin, Black Music and Black Lives.