Download or read book African Appropriations written by Matthias Krings and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of African adaptations of global pop culture is “a genuinely innovative book unlike most others in either anthropology or African studies” (American Ethnologist). Why would a Hollywood film become a Nigerian video remake, a Tanzanian comic book, or a Congolese music video? Matthias Krings explores the myriad ways Africans respond to the relentless onslaught of global culture. He seeks out places where they have adapted pervasive cultural forms to their own purposes as photo novels, comic books, songs, posters, and even scam letters. These African appropriations reveal the broad scope of cultural mediation that is characteristic of our hyperlinked age. Krings argues that there is no longer an “original” or “faithful copy,” but only endless transformations that thrive in the fertile ground of African popular culture. “The text is jargon free, a pleasure to read, remarkably well researched, and enriched by 40 illustrations . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Download or read book Critical Appropriations written by Simone C. Drake and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the novels of Toni Morrison to the music of Beyoncé Knowles, the cultural prevalence of a transnational black identity, as created by African American women, is more than a product of geographic mobility. Rather, as author Simone C. Drake shows, these constructions illuminate our understanding of a chronically marginalized demographic. In Critical Appropriations, Drake contends that these fluid and hetero-geneous characterizations of black females arise from multiple creative outlets -- literature, film, and music videos -- and reflect African Ameri-can women's evolving concept of home, community, gender, and family. Through a close examination of Toni Morrison's Paradise, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Erna Brodber's Louisiana, and Kasi Lemmons's film Eve's Bayou, as well as Beyoncé Knowles's B-Day album and music-video collaboration with Shakira, "Beautiful Liar," Drake reveals how concepts of hybridity -- whether positioned as créolité, Candomblé, négritude, Latinidad, or Brasilidade -- are appropriated in each work of art as a way of challenging the homogeneous paradigm of black cultural studies. This redefined notion of identity enables African American women to embrace a more complex, transnational blackness that is not only more liberating but also more pertinent to their experiences. Drawing from this borderless exchange of ideas and a richer concept of self, Critical Appropriations offers a rewarding reconsideration of the creative implications for African American women, mapping new directions in black women's studies.

Download or read book Staging Habla de Negros written by Nicholas R. Jones and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.

Download or read book Global Nollywood written by Matthias Krings and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-27 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Reveals in fascinating detail the wild popularity, controversies, and complaints provoked by this film form . . . shap[ing] the media landscape of Africa.” —Brian Larkin, Barnard College Global Nollywood considers this first truly African cinema beyond its Nigerian origins. In fifteen lively essays, this volume traces the engagement of the Nigerian video film industry with the African continent and the rest of the world. Topics such as Nollywood as a theoretical construct, the development of a new, critical film language, and Nollywood’s transformation outside of Nigeria reveal the broader implications of this film form as it travels and develops. Highlighting controversies surrounding commodification, globalization, and the development of the film industry on a wider scale, Global Nollywood gives sustained attention to Nollywood as a uniquely African cultural production. “Offers original material with respect to the transnational presence of Nollywood.” ?Moradewun Adejunmobi, University of California, Davis “Unveils a fascinating variety of the ways in which Nollywood cinema is viewed and interpreted.” ?Research in African Literatures “Delightfully entertaining yet appropriately erudite. . . . A welcome addition to the fields of film, media, African, and cultural studies.” —Cinema Journal “Highly recommended.” ?Choice “[T]he cumulative effect of [these] studies is to provide invaluable information for those wishing to keep up with where African cinema is today.” ?Journal of African History “Global Nollywood represents the most up-to-date research on Nollywood as a transnational cultural practice and is a must-read for scholars and students of African screen media.” —African Studies Review “Ground-breaking. . . . It proves that, in spite of appearing to be a niche market, Nollywood . . . can no longer be excluded from the canon of African cinema in the field of film studies.” ?African Affairs

Download or read book White Rebels in Black written by Priscilla Layne and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the appropriation of black popular culture as a symbol of rebellion in postwar Germany

Download or read book Soul Thieves written by T. Brown and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the misappropriation of African American popular culture through various genres, largely Hip Hop, to argue that while such cultural creations have the potential to be healing agents, they are still exploited -often with the complicity of African Americans- for commercial purposes and to maintain white ruling class hegemony.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music written by Allan Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Robert Johnson to Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson to John Lee Hooker, blues and gospel artists figure heavily in the mythology of twentieth-century culture. The styles in which they sang have proved hugely influential to generations of popular singers, from the wholesale adoptions of singers like Robert Cray or James Brown, to the subtler vocal appropriations of Mariah Carey. Their own music, and how it operates, is not, however, always seen as valid in its own right. This book provides an overview of both these genres, which worked together to provide an expression of twentieth-century black US experience. Their histories are unfolded and questioned; representative songs and lyrical imagery are analysed; perspectives are offered from the standpoint of the voice, the guitar, the piano, and also that of the working musician. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact the genres have had on mainstream musical culture.

Download or read book Green Grabbing A New Appropriation of Nature written by James Fairhead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the world, ecosystems are for sale. ‘Green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance. A vigorous debate on ‘land grabbing’ already highlights instances where ‘green’ credentials are called upon to justify appropriations of land for food or fuel. Yet in other cases, environmental green agendas are the core drivers and goals of grabs. Green grabs may be drivn by biodiversity conservation, biocarbon sequestration, biofuels, ecosystem services or ecotourism, for example. In some cases theyse agendas involve the wholesale alienation of land, and in others the restructuring of rules and authority in the access, use and management of resources that may have profoundly alienating effects. Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances. This book draws together seventeen original cases from African, Asian and Latin American settings to ask: To what extent and in what ways do ‘green grabs’ constitute new forms of appropriation of nature? What political and discursive dynamics underpin ‘green grabs’? How and when do appropriations on the ground emerge out of circulations of green capital? What are the implications for ecologies, landscapes and livelihoods? Who is gaining and who is losing? How are agrarian social relations, rights and authority being restructured, and in whose interests? This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Download or read book Are You Entertained written by Simone C. Drake and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Dwan K. Henderson, Imani Kai Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily J. Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, H. Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Richard Schur, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson

Download or read book A Companion to African Literatures written by Olakunle George and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture written by Grace A Musila and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

Download or read book Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940 2020 written by Matthew J. Christensen and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens. Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.

Download or read book Free French Africa in World War II written by Eric T. Jennings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only in recent years have historians rediscovered the critical role that French colonial troops played in the twentieth century's two world wars. What is perhaps still deeply under-appreciated is how much General de Gaulle's Free France drew its strength from 1940 to the middle of 1943 from fighting men, resources, and operations in French Equatorial Africa rather than London. Territorially, Free France spanned from the Libyan border with Chad down to the Congo River, and to the scattered tiny French territories of the South Pacific and India. Eric T. Jennings tells the story of an improbable French military and institutional rebirth through Central Africa and gives a unique, deep look at the key role Free French Africa played during World War II to help the Allied cause.

Download or read book South African Essays on Universal Shakespeare written by Chris Thurman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South African Essays on ’Universal’ Shakespeare collects new scholarship and extant (but previously unpublished) material, reflecting the changing nature of Shakespeare studies across various ’generation gaps’. Each essay, in exploring the nuances of Shakespearean production and reception across time and space, is inflected by a South African connection. In some cases, this is simply because of the author’s nationality or institutional affiliation; in others, there is a direct engagement with what Shakespeare means, or has meant, in South Africa. By investigating the universality of Shakespeare from both implicitly and explicitly ’southern’ perspectives, the book presents new possibilities for considering (and reassessing) shifting manifestations of Shakespeare’s work in major Shakespearean ’centres’ such as Britain and the United States, as well as across the global North and South.

Download or read book A History of African Popular Culture written by Karin Barber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey through the history of African popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Download or read book Monarchs Missionaries and African Intellectuals written by Bhekizizwe Peterson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the work in the field of African studies still relies on rigid distinctions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’. This book moves well beyond these frameworks to probe the complex entanglements of different intellectual traditions in the South African context, by examining two case studies. The case studies constitute the core around which is woven this intriguing story of the development of black theatre in South Africa in the early years of the century. It also highlights the dialogue between African and African-American intellectuals, and the intellectual formation of the early African elite in relation to colonial authority and how each affected the other in complicated ways. The first case study centres on Mariannhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal. Here the evangelical and pedagogical drama pioneered by the Rev Bernard Huss, is considered alongside the work of one of the mission’s most eminent alumni, the poet and scholar, B.W. Vilakazi. The second moves to Johannesburg and gives a detailed insight into the working of the Bantu Dramatic Society and the drama of H.I.E. Dhlomo in relation to the British Drama League and other white liberal cultural activities.

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to African Religions written by Elias Kifon Bongmba and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions brings together a team of international scholars to create a single-volume resource on the religious beliefs and practices of the peoples in Africa. Offers broad coverage of issues relating to African religions, considering experiences in indigenous, Christian, and Islamic traditions across the continent Contributors are from a variety of fields, ensuring the volume offers multidisciplinary perspectives Explores methodological approaches to religion from anthropological, philosophical, and historical perspectives Provides insights into the historical developments in African religions, as well as contemporary issues such as the development of African-initiated churches, neo traditional religions, and Pentecostalism Discusses important topics at the intersection of culture and religion in Africa, including the arts, health, politics, globalization, gender relations, and the economy