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The District
Commissioner in Colonial Africa: Hollywood, Empires and Reinvention of
Patriarchy
by
Paul Ugor
WHAT Simon Gikandi calls the “colonial factor”--the force and commanding
influence of the colonial power-- is central to most narratives about Africa and
Africans by westerners (including even those written by African writers). And
the one distinguishing figure intensely symbolic of the so-called “colonial
factor” is the character of the District Commissioner. As the chief agent of the
colonial force, he represented the imperial interest(s) both by running its
administrative machinery in the colonies and ensuring the actual implementation
of its policies. The most memorable and prototypical personage of the District
Commissioner is encapsulated in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. There, we see
his characteristic imperial authority and indifference to local concerns when he
proposes to frame the entire communal misfortune of Umuofia, symbolized in the
tragedy of Okonkwo, in just one paragraph. It is this patronizing and off-handed
temperament of the District Commissioner that we see in the filmic adaption of
Edger Wallace’s novel.
Sanders of the River is a classical imperial epic which unabashedly espouses the
colonialist perspective. Fastened with the master trope of empire novels, it
presents history from “the-good-man’s” perspective where the District
Commissioner is pitched in a Manichean battle against the monstrous and
lascivious African political despot, king Mofalaba.
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African spaces in European
places: Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones and Donato Ndongo’s Shadows of Your Black Memory
by Rosetta Codling
THE very genre of the African novel serves to disembowel colonist, literary
tendencies and philosophies and assume an independent position in the landscape
of World Literature. Ancestor Stones and Shadows of Your Black Memory are among
the upcoming works that adhere to the formula of the African, not Western,
novel. And the characters Forna and Ndongo attest to the survival of ancestral,
ontological identities that can only be attributed an ‘African literary’
antecedent that defies the usurpation of Modernity.
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Socio-Linguistic Innovation in Modern Poetry
by Romanus Aboh
ALTHOUGH symbolic interaction theories of ideology
provide strong empirical evidence of how ideology is a process of everyday
interaction they often ignore how lexical items facilitate in weaving these
ideological interactions. However lexical items are imbued with contemporary
socio-political discourses since issues of society significantly influence a
writer's creative use of lexical items. Is technical communication ideally
neutral, or inevitably political? Or does it rest in some positions between
these extremes? The fact is that no socially situated text is 'neutral'. This
chapter shows how larger hegemonic norms influence the lexical construction of
some writers. Here we examine two contemporary Nigerian poets – Joe Ushie and
Ademola Dasylva – to show how their lexical selections are instances of a
socio-political hegemonic history of Nigeria which the poets attempt to
dislodge.
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The
Search for Female Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's
Bluest Eye
Subjectivity and Identity in The
Bluest Eye.
The bluest eye depicts the tragic
life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wants nothing more than to
be loved by her family and her schoolmates. She surmises that the reason she
is despised and ridiculed is that she is black (even blacker than most
people), therefore, ugly. Consequently, Pecola sublimates her desire to be
loved into a desire to have blue eyes and blond hair; in other words, to
basically look like Shirely Temple who Pecola thinks is adored by all.
Pecola soon after entering young womanhood is raped and impregnated by her
father, Cholly. Her mother, Pauline finds haven, hope, life and meaning as a
servant to the white, blond blue-eyed, clean and rich family to which he
dedicated her love and her respect for an orderly life that poverty not
afford. Unable to endure the brutality toward her frail self-image, Pecola
goes quietly insane and withdraws into a fantasy world in which she is the
most beloved little girl because she ends up having the bluest eyes of all.
At this point, one can pose a few
hypothetical questions as to how race plays a role in determining subjective
psychological identity. Do theories from psychology and psychoanalysis
provide valid assumptions for black identity construction or
re-construction? How much of the theory of Lacan can stand in a
psychoanalytical reading of Morrison’s novel under study?
The Imaginary Other: The stage of
mirroring others
As
the process of construction of self as social identity is initiated at the
Mirror stage and brought to fulfilment only with the resolution of the
Oedipal crisis, Lacan introduces the Imaginary and Symbolic to the
conception of child identity. For Lacan the pre-Odipal child ‘lives in what
he sees --‘The Imaginary’. This stage, as he stresses, predates
language and ‘The child can yet speak, it is subject to impression and
fantasies’ (quoted in Bertons 161). So what he does experience here is a set
of unified image of its body, a ‘Gestalt or organized pattern’ (161). In the
mirror stage, which is a forbidden realm for real image, we come into an
‘image’ which that world gives to us; not a complete one, but fragmented,
distorted image, which leads us to ‘misrecognition’ (161). According to
Lacan, a normal subject must eventually move from the mirror phase (The
Imaginary) to an acceptance of the function and power of the symbolic. So
Lacan uses the term 'imaginary' to designate the other of the subject's
experience that is dominated by identification and duality.
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Portrait of a Contemporary Griot: Orality in the Films and Novels of
Ousmane Sembène
by
Jen Westmoreland Bouchard
THE majority of Ousmane Sembène's literary and cinematic work is a
critique of the conflictual relationships between the colonizer and the
colonized, the state and the people, the rich and the poor, and the elders
and the youth. Thus, his novels and films address issues involving tensions
that are commonly created by uneven power relations. Well-known novels by
Sembène include Les bouts de bois de dieu (1960), L'Harmattan (1964), and
Xala (1974). In 1963, he created his first short film "Borom Saret" (1963),
followed one year later by "Niaye" (1964). In 1966, Sembène completed "La
Noire de ...'', his first full-length film that won first prize at the Film
Festival of Carthage and gained him the title of Best African Filmmaker at
the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. Films to follow included "Le
Mandat'' (1968), "Emitai'' (1971), "Xala'' (1974), "Ceddo'' (1977), ''Camp
de Thiaroye'' (1988), ''Guelewar'' (1992), ''Faat Kiné'' (2000) and ''Molaadé''
(2004). Though one could write numerous articles on the themes covered by
Sembène's large, multimedia corpus (poverty, African feminisms,
circumcision, religion, politics, etc.), one aspect of profound interest is
the role of the griot, or West African storyteller, in Sembène's work.
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Ayi Kwei Armah:
Provincialising Old Centres and Remaking the African Myth
by Divine Neba Che
FOREMOST revisionist African mythologists like Cheikh Anta Diop and Chinweizu
have successfully debunked the Western collusion in Black inferiorisation. They
are joined by Ayi Kwei Armah, a dogged revisionist mythologist who in the novel
Osiris Rising attempts to demythologize the racist maxim that the black
world is "forward never, backward ever" by resuscitating the African past as a
means of restoring her lost values. This process of resuscitation, recycling and
integration may not totally erase assimilated or hybrid values, for Africa owes
a debt to the modern nation states and vice versa, but is simply a process of
bringing into limelight what has been rejected or ignored for
centuries: the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris and
Isis and the building of the image of a vibrant Africa via literature.
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Gender
Issues in Ola Rotimi’s Drama
by Omolara Kikelomo
Owoeye
I
OLA Rotimi’s dramaturgy adapts Classical tragedy in order to represent
history and act as a commentary on issues of tragic import in society.
Moreover, the plays have severally portrayed the notions of such matters as
tradition and change, the metaphysical and the very controversial issue of
destiny and predestination using “the historical perspective to explain the
man-God interplay in matters of destiny” (Elegbeleye and Adeoti 258).
Rotimi’s achievement in the treatment of destiny is patented in The gods are
not to Blame, an adaptation of Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex and such other works
as Kurunmi and Ovoramwen Nogbasi. It is not surprising that critical works
on Rotimi’s plays have focused more on the above subject matter than women
and gender issues in the stories. However, a close look at the works would
expose the gender imbalance and patriarchal nature of the African societies
in which the plays are set. The little significance of women in the plays
may be due to authorial choice to adjust history for his artistic and
thematic intentions. Adapting authors do not owe history the loyalty to
historical facts and details and this enables Rotimi, for instance, to alter
the type of death that Kurunmi meets at the end of the play, Kurunmi.
Ashaolu comments that “although this historical tragedy derives directly
from the 19th-century Ijaye Ibadan warfare, it casts a suggestive glance at
contemporary socio-political events not only in Nigeria but also elsewhere
in Africa”. (99)
Anita Kern talking specifically of the prose genre makes the observation
that “female characters have figured more or less prominently in various
novels or short stories according to the writers’ purpose or to their
particular levels of consciousness regarding women”. (157) Indeed in all the
three traditional genres of literature, authorial perception has always been
a vital factor in female character depiction. It then becomes obvious that
the absence of female participation in the political process in Rotimi’s
plays, for instance, is attributable to authorial intention especially since
it is a trend in his three major historical tragedies. The playwright
appears caught in a patriarchal hold that makes him overlook the
significance of women in socio-political struggles and familial aspirations
thereby prompting the question: what could have been the benefit of
complimentary female involvement as the protagonists in all the plays
daringly battle to safeguard their physical and ideological territories from
colonial and territorial invasion?
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The
Miriam Makeba Story
by
Benjamin Odhoji
THE above lines from her musical composition, Homeland, produced in 2000
soon after she had returned home to South Africa, are true memorials of
Miriam Makeba's life. Most of these “memories of days gone by” Makeba had
inscribed in her autobiography: Makeba: My Story. In this collaborative
biography – Makeba was assisted by one James Hall – she grapples with
memories of a painful past as an individual and as a member of a group
subordinated and disenfranchised under the apartheid regime.
Miriam Makeba’s story emerges as a self-making "therapoetic" process. It is
a therapy, not so much "for dealing with psycho-pathology…as for savoring
the aesthetic richness of everyday life" (Kenyon and Randall 2). It is both
a spiritual as well as a radical political commitment that entails
subversive forms of self-representation. The painful past Makeba remembers
entails mental and emotional re-experiencing of trauma. Memory is a weapon.
It is a weapon against forgetfulness of a painful past. When discussing
racial conflict and identity in South African novels, Jane Davies reminds us
that the desire to forget seems associated with a false belief that
forgetting the painful past means recovering from it while, in fact, healing
is reached through reflection on and understanding of the past. Makeba urges
the traumatized to remember her story. In terms of narrative form, the text
presents crucial questions regarding the issues of testimony and witnessing.
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Crisis of Identity in Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People
by Smita Jha
WHEN we
talk of identity crisis in African writing it is a kind that is both individual
and territorial in character and does have strong social, political, religious
or cultural implications within the continent. Through a century of colonial
governance Africa lost much of its traditional and cultural identity to
artificial nation state and ideological formations. The violence inscribed upon
the continent imposed by the colonizing power has witnessed traumatic physical
and psychological conditions that affect generations of African peoples and
cultures. For the first generation of modern African writers led by Senghor,
Achebe, etc., it was a daunting task to seek to restore belief in the lost and
maligned traditions of Africa through their writings.
Achebe’s search for innate human qualities takes an ironic manifestation in A
Man of The People wherein he portrays two well-rounded characters immersed
in their own rationale of success and achievement and proves that western
cultural invasion together with the infiltration of material luxuries poses a
serious threat to tribal African values and amidst such confusion the society
lost its way.
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Memory
and Palimpsestic Time in Ben Okri’s Famished Road
by Kei Okajima
1. Introduction
IN his influential work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney
critically examines the impact of the slave trade in Africa showing how the
European slave trade systematically underdeveloped the African continent.
However, despite the tremendous influence that the slave trade exerted on
every corner of contemporary African life, most West African writers
appeared to turn away from the traumatic memory of the slave trade, pursuing
milder themes of pre-colonial Africa or post-colonial challenges of emerging
nations. Indeed critics and scholars have read Ben Okri’s 1991 novel The
Famished Road as such a novel.
For instance, Olatubosun Ogunsarwo, focusing on the narrative modes of the
novel, celebrates the magical-realist framework used to create the typical
“postcolonial” novel (50). Ogunsarwo argues that the juxtaposition of the
African folkloric myth with the description of the nation’ s predicament in
form of a European realist novel signals the discursive multiculturality of
“postcolonial” conditions, which allegedly re-formulates the colonial
perception of different cultural phenomena. Ogunsarwo maintains “The
inescapable intertextuality and the consequent mutual ‘rubbing off’
underline the interdiscursivity of the novel’s textual discourse; there is a
relation of mutual interdependence between the dominated and the dominators
that must be recognized, since neither the imperial city nor the colony can
return to a ‘pure’ state following colonization” (45). Along similar lines,
John C. Hawley applies the label “postcolonial postmodernity” to The
Famished Road, asserting that “The significance of an abiku narrator … is
that it moves African literature closer to the postmodern movement” (31 his
italics). According to Hawley, Azaro’s presence as an abiku child embodies
alternative ontological systems that are foreign to the western master
narrative of history while at the same time Azaro allegorizes postmodern
“resistance to the fixing of boundaries” that enable him to “imagine
something new” (36). On balance, these scholars praise the happy blending of
essential elements of the African mythological consciousness with the
postmodern stylistic features, which ultimately creates this “postcolonial”
novel. While such arguments may have its own credits, their rather easy
celebration of the “postcolonial” hybridity seems to overlook the
significance of the traumatic memory of the colonialism that is still alive
and manifest in Okri’s novel.
On closer reading, The Famished Road could bear some memories of the
transatlantic slave trade. Following M. Jacqui Alexander’s palimpsestic
notion of time, we can trace Azaro’s repetitive movements between the worlds
of the Living and the Unborn as symbolic of the slave trade. African
sentiments on the slave trade may also be illustrated in Azaro’s parents’
reaction toward their son’s unstable movements between the two worlds. Thus,
Ben Okri’s novel could serve to save the memory of the colonial violence
that was inflicted on Africa from oblivion through Azaro’s palimpsestic
existence that perpetually re-scrambles the past and present.
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New Kenyan
Writers: The Narratives of Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Owuor
by
Jonathan Fitzgerald
KENYA elected a new leader, Mwai
Kibaki, in December, 2002, after 24 years under the presidency of Daniel
Arap Moi. This was not only a major change in Kenyan politics; it opened the
door for a major shift in the lives of all Kenyans and especially the
nation's artists. It was not long, however, before the new administration
faced accusations of corruption and business as usual, but the spark had
already been lit under a burgeoning artist community; change was on the
horizon.
In that same year a Kenyan writer, recently returned from years living and
working in South Africa, published a story called “Discovering Home”.
Binyavanga Wainaina was awarded the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing for
that story, the first time a Kenyan had received the honor. With the prize
money Wainaina formed Kwani Trust, an organization that, among many other
things, publishes Kwani?, East Africa's only literary magazine. The first
issue of the magazine featured 2003's Caine Prize winning story, “Weight of
Whispers” by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, another Kenyan.
In his introduction to the first issue of Kwani? (a Sheng word that
literally means, “So?” but is better likened to the English slang, “What's
Up”) Wainaina declared that he had been meeting talented young Kenyans
working in all fields, from hip-hop artists to writers, since his return
from South Africa, and, more significantly, these artists all seem to be
making art that is particularly Kenyan.
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History,
Memory and Tradition in African Poetry
by
Sarah Anyang Agbor
POETRY has become a means of remembering
history and documenting the oral lore of a people. It is a medium of
transposing the culture of the people as well as exposing the abnormalities
within it through memory. This study points to the function of African
poetry, to educate, entertain, and moralize. It examines attempts to deploy
elements of orality, history and memory in through poetry.
Niyi Osundare belongs to the third generation of Nigerian poets along with
Odia Ofeimun, Tanure Ojaide, Ezenwa-Ohaeto and Olu Oguibe while Dasylva can
be pitched in the fourth generation poets along with the host of Chin Ce,
Esiaba Irobi, Onookome Okome, Uche Nduka, Chiedu Ezeanah, Usman Shehu, Kemi
Atanda-Ilori, Idzia Ahmad, Sesan Ajayi, Remi Raji, Nnimmo Bassey, Toyin
Adewale, Joe Ushie, Maik Nwosu, (Ushie 22-23) etc. It has been noted that
the third generation poetry is characterised by social contradictions that
are "resolved in favour of the masses" (Aiyejina 122), while the fourth and
younger generation are more forceful in expression because their
“impatience” with the prevailing condition of their country “has widened in
dimensions of anger, hate, contempt and sheer distrust for the prevailing
status quo” (Ce 18).
By definition, memory is the “mental faculty of retaining and recalling past
experience based on the mental processes of learning, retention, recall, and
recognition” (Stedman par.1). Poetic memory recollects past events or
history (his story) which are can be couched in orality. Maurice Taonezvi
Vambe notes how the notion of orality is broad and elastic, “including
everything from allegory, folktale, spirit possession, fantasy and myth to
ancestor veneration, ritual, legends, proverbs, fables and jokes”(235).
The recourse to orality in Africa is an attempt by her writers “to gain
aesthetic independence from Western traditions involved the revitalisation
of traditional African cultural modes. It was perceived that the use of
elements of African oral traditions could become a powerful tool in the
establishment of an alternative, oppositional discourse” (MacKenzie 348).
Because of the influence and history of colonialism, the indigenous people
resorted to their oral culture to create a sense of belonging and identity
against imposed Eurocentric traditions. As Maurice Vambe states:
“Colonialism's attempt to suppress African culture (had) instead (produced)
a united community with the single aim of achieving freedom” (235).
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“Genealogies
of the Spirit”: Ancestral Reclamation in the dramas of August Wilson
by Shirley J. Carrie
CONTEMPORARY Black intellectuals and artists like August Wilson often signify
the historical dispersal of peoples of African descent in a redemptive narrative
that suggests that diasporic body can be re-born through the restoration of the
dead. More importantly, the commemoration of the ancestor figure anchors the
diasporic subject to their own uncertain present by enabling them to redeem the
past. This cultural reclamation of an African origin and/or roots is often tied
to the solemn remembrance of the Ancestor. Thus, the demand for the humane
treatment of the ancestral dead is viewed as having both social and psychic
consequences for the generations that follow.
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British Racial
Problems and the Poetry of Fred D’Aguiar
by Dilek Sarikaya
FRED D’Aguiar is black British poet whose poetry gives voice to the
problems of black immigrants who were considered as the problem groups by
the British public during the 1970s and the 1980s. Fred D’Aguiar was born in
England but was sent back to Guyana at the age of two, to live with his
grandmother during his childhood (Slade 1). D’Aguiar focuses on the problem
of racism and its negative effects on the lives of black people in his
poetry. He concentrates on both contemporary racism and colonial racism, and
the psychological trauma of the black people caused by racism. D’Aguiar
inclines to dwell upon the cultural alienation and psychological isolation
of the black people in a completely foreign society, and their feelings of
exile in a different society together with their desire to return back to
their black African roots. The aim of this article, therefore, is to study
Fred D’Aguiar’s poetry in terms of the problems of immigration and racism
which shape social and political circumstances of Britain during the 1970s
and the 1980s.
Racism, an “ideology of racial domination based on (i) beliefs that a
designated racial group is either biologically or culturally inferior and
(ii) the use of such beliefs to rationalize or prescribe the racial group’s
treatment in the society” (Bulmer and Solomos 4), has been a highly
contested issue playing a socially and politically important role on the
contemporary global platform. Attributing different origins to each human
community, racism aims at creating cultural, social and class barriers
between people. The configuration of racial issues in contemporary Britain
goes back to the social, economic and cultural impact of mass immigration
after World War II, which took place after the loss of the British empire at
the end of the 1940s (Solomos 3). The gradual racial re-structuring of
Britain has been determined by its economic and Capitalistic interests which
were essentially instrumental in regulating immigration to Britain (Brown
7). The homogenised structure of Britain is changed into a multiracial
structure; as stated by Ian Spencer, “Britain had ceased to be a white man’s
country” (2). This multiracial structure brought about a series of problems
for the black people like “struggles to achieve equal opportunity, fairness
in criminal justice system, equal access to good housing and obtaining
satisfactory education” (Goulbourne 75). The problems of “health, social and
community services” were the issues that immigrants had to face during the
process of their integration into British society (Goulbourne 75). Entangled
within such unpredicted problems as an outcome of immigration, Britain found
itself endeavouring to restructure its social, political and economic laws
according to the problems of immigrants. Black immigration was conceived as
a threat endangering the British way of life since those people who
immigrated to Britain, instead of incorporating themselves into the
mainstream British culture, tried to preserve their own racial identity by
creating a kind of counter-cultural identity in opposition to Britishness.
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African Mythic
Context and Postmodern Philosophy in Aminata Sow Fall's Le Jujubier du
patriarche
by
Médoune Guèye
IN THE wake of the announcement of the death of grand narratives by
postmodernism, postcolonial critics announced the death of such
“essentialisms” as race, nation or even gender in their works.1Aminata Sow
Fall's Le Jujubier du patriarche2 illustrates that deconstructive vein of
postcolonial literature with a discursive strategy, underwritten by the
interaction of genres. Le Jujubier du patriarche opens in the mode of
novelistic fiction and closes through that of epic poetry. Constructed in a
dialogic relationship between the novel and the epic, the work transposes
one genre, which is tied to the African oral tradition, into another, which
emerges from the Western literary tradition.3 The novel's structure is
characterized by the weaving of traditional mythological elements into a
contemporary fictional text. This literary strategy allows the author to
produce a narration written in the fiction of orality4 by creating a
framework of oral enunciation via the technique of alternating voices. By
achieving a collage of traditional speech within her novelistic discourse, Aminata Sow Fall makes Le Jujubier du patriarche emerge as the prolongation
of the myth, which she installs at the core of the real.5 Here we examine
the novelistic and epic styles of the work and the discursive implications
that convey an ethno-nationalist counter-discourse on Senegalese society.
The novel opens with a narration that recounts the ritual pilgrimage to
Babyselli that happens every year. The description of the physical setting
lingers on a canal which used to be “the cradle of the Natangue6 river [...]
[and] has long been dry, but [...] has had the time to crystallize, better
to echo the epic song that tells the extraordinary adventures of their
glorious ancestors” [le berceau du fleuve Natangué […] [lequel] a tari
depuis longtemps, mais […] a eu le temps de se cristalliser pour mieux
rendre l'écho du chant épique qui conte les aventures extraordinaires de
leurs glorieux ancêtres] (9). In combining the past of such a locus with the
present of the residents and pilgrims that inhabit it, the novel's opening
announces, through the temporal interlacing of the narration, the
interaction of genres that dominates the work's structure.
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The Revolutionary Lyrics of Fela Anikulapo Kuti
by Albert Oikelome
BY the nineteen seventies, a
unique popular musical typology emerged from the continent of Africa
pioneered by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Afrobeat, Fela's musical synthesis from
rhythm, jazz and highlife was defined by this fusion of foreign elements in
a socio-stylistic musical framework whose roots are African traditional.
Felá Anikulapo Kuti remained an enigma to his generation. Some said he was
one of Africa's best musicians. To others he was a prophet. And to the
governments that ruled in his time, he was an odious rebel. In all, Felá
stood as an outspoken musician that employed his music as a weapon to
propagate both political and social ideologies. His irresistible rhythms and
instrumental composition were laid with originality that grew increasingly
political and revolutionary in nature. Coker describes Fela as a brilliant
artist:
He was able to establish an entirely new genre of resistance. He despised
political corruption, and the persecution of the masses. Self-identifying as
an artist of the people, he managed to upset the ruling class of his own
society and to cast a spell of reform on the elites of other societies.
(95-95)
Fela Anikulapo Kuti's music was unique in the sense that his fearless
projection of anger released new creative possibilities. These resulted in
his forceful, aggressive, socially and politically explosive lyrics.
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“Global
flows”: Ethnographic studies of the Hindi Movie in Africa
by
Anjali Gera Roy
THE celebration of Bollywood as a culture of globalization to illustrate the
reverse flows from the non-west to the west is juxtaposed against the long
history of transnationalization through which Hindi cinematic texts were
incorporated into African cultural practices to assume African ethnic or
national identities. Attention to the difference between the subaltern audience
of Hindi cinema in the past and the cosmopolitan consumers of Bollywood in the
present also point to an alternative narrative of subaltern cosmopolitanisms
through which cultural exchanges took place between ordinary folks in the
process of trade and travel.
The global
flows of Indian images to Africa must be framed against oceanic flows of images
between Africa and India in contact zones of the past forged through travel and
trade. Positing “the coastline of Benin Republic and Togo as a vortex,
incorporating items and ideas from across the sea into its littoral”, Dana Rush
focuses on one such “vortextual phenomenon”, that is, the incorporation of India
− via chromolithographic images (mostly Hindu) − into the eternally organic
religious system of Vodun (2008: 150). While the Vodun imagemaker Joseph Kossivi
Ahiator, who incorporates Indian items into his own images, claims to have been
inspired by his spiritual journeys to India, Rush provides a rational
explanation of the travels of Indian images to Africa through the arrival of
chromolithographs to Africa as early as 1891 when the first colour reproductions
were executed in Mumbai (Rush 2008: 59-60).
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