Postcolonial Automobility

Author : Lindsey B. Green-Simms
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2017-10-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781452954714

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Postcolonial Automobility by Lindsey B. Green-Simms Pdf

For more than a century cars have symbolized autonomous, unfettered mobility and an increasingly global experience. And yet, they are often used differently outside the centers of global capitalism. This pioneering book considers how, through the lens of the automobile, we can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. Through new and provocative readings of famous plays, novels, and films, as well as recent popular videos, Postcolonial Automobility reveals the surprising ways in which automobility in the region is, at once, an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy, and an affective activity intimately tied to modern social life. Lindsey B. Green-Simms begins with the history of motorization in West Africa from the colonial era to the decolonizing decades after World War II, and addresses the tragedy of car accidents through a close reading of Wole Soyinka’s 1965 postindependence play The Road. Shifting to screen media, she discusses Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart and reviews popular, low-budget Nollywood films. Finally, Green-Simms considers how feminist texts rewrite and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car stands in for patriarchal power and capitalist achievement. Providing a unique perspective on technology in Africa—one refusing to be confined to narratives of either underdevelopment or inevitable progress—and covering a broad range of interdisciplinary material, Postcolonial Automobility will appeal not only to scholars and students of African literature and cinema but also to those in postcolonial and globalization studies.

Author : David Sunderland
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 2144 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2018-10-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351112260

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Communications in Africa, 1880–1939 (set) by David Sunderland Pdf

This collection presents rare documents relating to the development of various forms of communication across Africa by the British, as part of their economic investment in Africa. Railways and waterways are examined.

Author : David Sunderland
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2019-01-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351112536

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Communications in Africa, 1880–1939, Volume 1 by David Sunderland Pdf

This collection presents rare documents relating to the development of various forms of communication across Africa by the British, as part of their economic investment in Africa. Railways and waterways are examined.

Author : Jennifer Hart
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2016-10-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253023254

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Ghana on the Go by Jennifer Hart Pdf

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

Author : Anna-Leena Toivanen
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2021-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004444751

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Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures by Anna-Leena Toivanen Pdf

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures, Anna-Leena Toivanen explores the representations and relationship of mobilities and cosmopolitanisms in Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts from the 1990s to the 2010s. Representations of mobility practices are discussed against three categories of cosmopolitanism reflecting the privileged, pragmatic, and critical aspects of the concept. The main scientific contribution of Toivanen’s book is its attempt to enhance dialogue between postcolonial literary studies and mobilities research. The book criticises reductive understandings of ‘mobility’ as a synonym for migration, and problematises frequently made links between mobility and cosmopolitanism. Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms adopts a comparative approach to Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, often discussed separately despite their common themes and parallel paths.

Author : Lianne McTavish
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780228009962

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Voluntary Detours by Lianne McTavish Pdf

After visiting hundreds of museums across Alberta, Lianne McTavish chronicles some of the most challenging and unexpected sites where the idea of the museum is being reshaped. The concept of the visit as a “voluntary detour” encapsulates the way visitors travel along backroads to find small-town and rural museums, as well as the agreement to turn away from standard museum scripts when they arrive. Addressing themes of place, land, colonization, rurality, heritage, childhood, and play, McTavish reveals the museum visitor as multifaceted, with locals and tourists often interpreting museums very differently. Case studies include the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, and the Museum of Fear and Wonder. A key chapter analyzing sites devoted to resource extraction explores how these places promote settler colonial understandings of land use. By contrast, Indigenous museums and cultural centres defy colonial messages in displays that adapt and refuse conventional museum formats. Honouring local, rural, and Indigenous knowledge, Voluntary Detours enriches critical accounts of the past, present, and future of museums.

Author : James S. Williams
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2024-05-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781839025990

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Xala by James S. Williams Pdf

Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.

Author : Patricia García
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031427985

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Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism by Patricia García Pdf

Author : Kenneth W. Harrow
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2023-09-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000938104

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African Cinema in a Global Age by Kenneth W. Harrow Pdf

This book traces the developments in African films that were made from the 1990s to the present within the evolving frame of what came to be called ‘World Cinema’ and, eventually, ‘Global Cinema.’ Kenneth W. Harrow explores how, from the time video and then digital technologies were introduced in the 1990s, and then again, when streaming platforms assumed major roles in producing and distributing film between the 2010s and 2020s, African cinema underwent enormous changes. He highlights how the introduction of the continent’s first successful commercial cinema, Nollywood, shifted the focus from engagé films, with social or political messages, to entertainment movies, but also auteur cinema. Harrow explores how this transformation liberated African filmmakers and resulted in an incredible, enduring flow of creative, inventive, and thoughtful filmmaking. This book presents a number of those critical films that mark that trajectory, projecting a new sense of African film spaces and temporalities, while also highlighting how African films continue to find independent pathways. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African cinema and world cinema, as well as researchers specifically examining African cinemas and their relationship to globalization.

Author : Daniel E. Agbiboa
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780198861546

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They Eat Our Sweat by Daniel E. Agbiboa Pdf

Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.

Author : Cajetan Iheka
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2021-08-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478022046

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African Ecomedia by Cajetan Iheka Pdf

In African Ecomedia, Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka shows how, through visual media such as film, photography, and sculpture, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. Among other works, he examines Pieter Hugo's photography of electronic waste recycling in Ghana and Idrissou Mora-Kpai's documentary on the deleterious consequences of uranium mining in Niger. These works highlight not only the exploitation of African workers and the vast scope of environmental degradation but also the resourcefulness and creativity of African media makers. They point to the unsustainability of current practices while acknowledging our planet's finite natural resources. In foregrounding Africa's centrality to the production and disposal of media technology, Iheka shows the important place visual media has in raising awareness of and documenting ecological disaster even as it remains complicit in it.

Author : Hager Ben Driss
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2021-07-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781527573000

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Mobilizing Narratives by Hager Ben Driss Pdf

Edward Said’s summation that “we live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globe” is an apt description of the riveting and pervasive nature of (im)mobility in contemporary times. Wars, climate change, economic recessions, and social and cultural inequalities all contribute to coercing both individuals and communities into forced movement or imposed immobility. This volume investigates the injustices related to free circulation as represented in various literary texts.

Author : Matthew H. Brown
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478021506

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Indirect Subjects by Matthew H. Brown Pdf

In Indirect Subjects, Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to both state television programs and colonial cinema productions, invite local spectators to experience liberal capitalism not only as a form of exploitation but as a set of expectations about the future. This mode of address, which Brown refers to as “periliberalism,” sustains global power imbalances by locating viewers within liberalism but distancing them from its processes and benefits. Locating the wellspring of this hypocrisy in the British Empire's practice of indirect rule, Brown contends that culture industries like Nollywood can sustain capitalism by isolating ordinary African people, whose labor and consumption fuel it, from its exclusive privileges.

Author : Kenneth W. Harrow,Carmela Garritano
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 550 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781119099857

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A Companion to African Cinema by Kenneth W. Harrow,Carmela Garritano Pdf

An authoritative guide to African cinema with contributions from a team of experts on the topic A Companion to African Cinema offers an overview of critical approaches to African cinema. With contributions from an international panel of experts, the Companion approaches the topic through the lens of cultural studies, contemporary transformations in the world order, the rise of globalization, film production, distribution, and exhibition. This volume represents a new approach to African cinema criticism that once stressed the sociological and sociopolitical aspects of a film. The text explores a wide range of broad topics including: cinematic economics, video movies, life in cinematic urban Africa, reframing human rights, as well as more targeted topics such as the linguistic domestication of Indian films in the Hausa language and the importance of female African filmmakers and their successes in overcoming limitations caused by gender inequality. The book also highlights a comparative perspective of African videoscapes of Southern Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire and explores the rise of Nairobi-based Female Filmmakers. This important resource: Puts the focus on critical analyses that take into account manifestations of the political changes brought by neocolonialism and the waning of the cold war Explores Examines the urgent questions raised by commercial video about globalization Addresses issues such as funding, the acquisition of adequate production technologies and apparatuses, and the development of adequately trained actors Written for film students and scholars, A Companion to African Cinema offers a look at new critical approaches to African cinema.

Author : Éamon Ó Cofaigh
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2022-05-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781802070675

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A Vehicle for Change by Éamon Ó Cofaigh Pdf

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’, to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.