Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, africa, art, cinema, film, neoliberalism, nollywood, politics, postcolonialism
“What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.”
Publisher Indiana University Press, 2011
African Expressive Cultures series
ISBN 0253356792, 9780253356796
230 pages
PDF (updated on 2021-1-28)
Comments (2)Jenna Burrell: Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · actor-network theory, africa, electronic waste, internet, mass media, net neutrality, networks, spam, web, youth
“The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country’s elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties–activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind.
Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region’s famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region.
Burrell, integrating concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, captures the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2012
ISBN 0262017369, 9780262017367
Acting With Technology series
236 pages
David McNally: Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, body, capitalism, folklore, literature, neoliberalism, political economy, popular culture, zombies
Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.
Publisher BRILL, 2011
Volume 30 of Historical Materialism Book Series
ISBN 9004201572, 9789004201576
308 pages
review (Mark Worrell, Marx & Philosophy)
Comment (1)