Postcolonial Automobility

Download or read book Postcolonial Automobility written by Lindsey B. Green-Simms and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Communications in Africa, 1880–1939 (set) written by David Sunderland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 1494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Xala written by James S. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Communications in Africa, 1880–1939, Volume 1 written by David Sunderland and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Ghana on the Go written by Jennifer Hart and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures written by Anna-Leena Toivanen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism written by Patricia García and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: