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Showing 1 - 4 of 4 matches in All Departments
The tradition of the veil, which refers to various cloth coverings of the head, face, and body, has been little studied in Africa, where Islam has been present for more than a thousand years. These lively essays raise questions about what is distinctive about veiling in Africa, what religious histories or practices are reflected in particular uses of the veil, and how styles of veils have changed in response to contemporary events. Together, they explore the diversity of meanings and experiences with the veil, revealing it as both an object of Muslim piety and an expression of glamorous fashion.
Reel Pleasures brings the world of African moviehouses and the publics they engendered to life, revealing how local fans creatively reworked global media-from Indian melodrama to Italian westerns, kung fu, and blaxploitation films-to speak to local dreams and desires. In it, Laura Fair zeroes in on Tanzanians' extraordinarily dynamic media cultures to demonstrate how the public and private worlds of film reception brought communities together and contributed to the construction of genders, generations, and urban citizenship over time. Radically reframing the literatures on media exhibition, distribution, and reception, Reel Pleasures demonstrates how local entrepreneurs and fans worked together to forge the most successful cinema industry in colonial sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a major contribution to the literature on transnational commodity cultures.
The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic
change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political
lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the
abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide
of urban migration. "Pastimes and Politics" explores the era from
the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and
varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town
struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to
create a sense of community within this new environment. In this
study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices
that gave expression to slaves' ideas of emancipation, as well as
how such ideas and practices were gendered.
Laura Fair is Professor of History at Michigan State University in the U.S.A. She lived in Zanzibar for many years doing research for her first book: Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945. In this book she illustrates how former slaves used the social and cultural tools at their command to demonstrate their freedom from slavery and articulate alternative visions of justice under colonialism. Her current book project is a wide-ranging study of commercial cinema in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania, exploring changes in exhibition, distribution and reception over time.
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