Publication of the fifth issue of the journal "Sources"

The fifth issue of Sources just came out and is accessible here.

As Sources welcomes new editors-in-chief (see editorial), this fifth issue builds bridges between past and future publications. The interview conducted by Florent Piton with Rwandan historians on the question of using local sources to write the history of the genocide of the Tutsi, initially published in French, is here translated into Kinyarwanda. Together with Maëline Le Lay's article on the uses of the transcript of a round-table discussion on post-genocide theatre in Rwanda, they form a mini-dossier questioning the historical and artistic sources through which to approach genocidal violence.

These questions, centred on the language of research, also run through Émilie Guitard's interview with Christian Seignobos, geographer and drawer. Alongside Enrico Ille and Mohamed Salah’s unorthodox paper on perambulatory fieldwork as research method for investigating date palm fires in Sudan, they extend Sources’ previous thematic on knowing nature.

The opening article, by Justin Pearce, analyses the making of revolutionary and anti-imperialist imaginaries through inscriptions found in former internationalist training camps in Angola. Supported by numerous snapshots, it announces our next dossier on the uses of photography as a source. 

This issue also examines the growing role of the digital language in African studies research: Haya Bayoumi provides a careful analysis of the advantages of an interactive cartography web platform built from the Egyptian population census’ data, while Claire Riffard offers us a dive into the genetics of texts through the study of the digitisation of the corpora of three African writers. Valmont Layne concludes this varia issue by inviting us to think about the rush towards digital technologies from the perspective of South African archives, and through the prism of the inequalities of access, production and circulation of knowledge between North and South.