Journal of African Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"Fake Wax","authors":"Diana Kamara","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2020.1869534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2020.1869534","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When reading about African textiles online, one is likely to come across several articles that show concern about the authenticity of the African Wax print. This commentary is an attempt at understanding the historical implications of the central questions around the authenticity of textiles in Africa. I argue that the authenticity question opens up wider possibilities for understanding the gendered dynamics of textile production and consumption in Africa.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"364 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46143220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Racialization of Drug Fakery and Pharmaceutical Markets","authors":"Kristin Peterson","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1917343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1917343","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, I show that fake drugs circulate widely in markets that chronically experience non-equilibrium. Moreover, those who manufacture, buy, and sell low priced drugs for African markets are negotiating chronic market volatility and downward pricing pressures that are transnational in scope. I argue that global policy experts; state, regional, and global regulation agencies and organizations; and international NGOs that have stakes in eradicating fake drugs falsely assume that pharmaceutical traders work within market equilibrium conditions. These assumptions are racialized because they hold actors and markets accountable to a market equilibrium and rational actor standard that are characterized by a European imagination that came into being at the height of trans-Atlantic slavery and capitalist formation. Yorùbá and Ìgbò non-equilibrium theories of the market, in contrast, have characterized markets as volatile and precarious since the 15th century arrival of the Portuguese to West Africa. The implications are that preconceived ideas of equilibrium de facto racialize those who have little opportunity in a deeply precarious system – they are labeled as “fraudsters” rather than seen as rational actors working under conditions of extreme market volatility.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"344 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46218162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fakeness, Human-Object Fluidity and Ethnic Suspicion on the Kenyan Pharmaceutical Market","authors":"Mathieu Quet","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1886057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1886057","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The authenticity of things is often seen as an intrinsic characteristic – one that would depend only upon their internal properties. One way of renewing the analysis of fakeness has consisted in showing on the contrary how dependent things are upon external factors such as social and normative contexts. In addition, research has shown the fluidity that results from such an observation: fakeness is not a stable identity, as it is continuously built along social and technical interactions. This article contributes to this analysis by demonstrating how discussions over pharmaceuticals in Kenya have been shaped across time and space. It shows that from colonial history to the grip of global market forces, pharmaceutical fakeness is a recurring manifestation of the never ending circulations between the status of people and the properties of things.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"359 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42097372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chihuahua Promises and the Notorious Economy of Fake Pets in Cameroon","authors":"D. Fuh","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1949967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1949967","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is a reflection on the notorious figure of the fake that became popular in Cameroon and other African cities at the height of the continent’s socio-political and economic decline following the structural adjustment measures introduced to salvage the economic crisis. The article discusses this economy of Internet puppy scams and the ways in which these are intertwined with young people’s activism to disrupt neo-colonial continuities and global practices and processes of social abandonment and greed that invest in what is construed locally as derelict humanism and misplaced humanitarianism. The article explores the meaning of dogs in Cameroon to show the absurdity of transacting with American and European clients who revere and are ready to spend significant sums of money to import puppies from a place in which people are struggling to survive. I conclude by arguing that puppy scammers are at once seductive criminals, creative destructors and radical decolonial disruptors.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"387 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46922311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Work of Repetition in 1960s Nigerian Epistolary Pamphlets","authors":"Stephanie E. Newell","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2020.1848532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2020.1848532","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nigerian epistolary pamphlets in the 1960s contained large quantities of reprinted material from globally circulating publications dating back to the early nineteenth century. Anachronistic English templates were offered to readers as models for copying in their own correspondence. This article argues that even when local authors copied English sources verbatim, they manifested anything but a passive duplication of metropolitan texts. Their relationship to anglophone materials was more complicated than allowed for by the category of plagiarism. A neglected trajectory of world literature can be opened up by the study of repetition and copying. In postcolonial contexts where emerging social classes sought empowerment through the production of writing in English, the layering and juxtaposition of diverse source materials in epistolary pamphlets presents a challenge to the linear, evolutionary timelines through which national literary-development and literary success or failure are often judged by scholars.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"251 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42698686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unmuting Conversations on Fakes in African Spaces","authors":"P. Kingori","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1951183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1951183","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue began its life as a conference panel which, like many in 2020, was then cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The idea that the whole world was grinding to a halt because of a novel virus transmitted through tiny particles, invisible to the naked eye, which was killing people worldwide in their thousands on a daily basis, was fantastical and unbelievable. While we tried to make sense of the pandemic, the world was gripped in dismay and disbelief as in May 2020 George Floyd was filmed being murdered in broad daylight on the streets of The USA – for many it was less the fact that black men are murdered by law enforcement and more witnessing how casually he was killed which was beyond belief. It was against this background of unbelievable and fantastical events that the fourteen papers in this special issue came together as a collection. With international conferences cancelled or shifted online and offices and libraries closed, many of us began working from home. Not only in the physical sense but also in terms of working with our thoughts, memories and reflections on things observed but which were often left unevaluated in our hectic pre-pandemic lives. Working from home also meant caring responsibilities, managing ill-health and being simultaneously both locked-out and locked-in geographically and physically through travel bans, redlists, social distancing and “bubbles” altering our closeness with family members, friends and colleagues. Working from home produced different relationships with ourselves, institutions and the type of work we were able to do. During this time of the “new normal”, we came to rely more on online interactions, on memes for humour and learnt the importance of remembering how to un-mute ourselves when we were talking on virtual meetings. According to business and communication analysts, “You’re on mute!” became the most uttered phrase during the first 12 months of the pandemic (New York TImes 2021). Consequently, this special issue represents an opportunity for the authors included in this collection to unmute, to discuss our reflections and share insights on questions of the fake and authenticity from different disciplinary positions. The fake is controversial and is best understood as a site of contestation in which questions are continuously asked and boundaries pushed – where what is considered real is constantly exposed, not taken for granted and in need of open dialogue globally, but in particular in African contexts. In recent years, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been mounting concern expressed in public and scholarly domains about fakes in African spaces. From drugs and medicines, to food and publications, there are few areas of everyday","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"239 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59754856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Things We Now Call Fake Will in the Future Become Authentic Objects: Global African Art Markets and the Space and Time of the Fake","authors":"Jiaying Tu","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925089","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT “Invented” out of a history of colonial displacement and the modernist art movement, African art has long been valued for its supposedly precolonial and tribal qualities. Objects made within a traditional context are deemed as authentic, whereas others made for sale, often imitating traditional styles, are deemed as fake. While such a distinction continues to be upheld and perpetuated by different actors in the transnational African art trade, I argue that the regenerative vision of time and diversified geography of interactions have begun to challenge the pervasiveness and inconvertibility of authentic and fake in African art. Specifically, I use my study of the African art market in Lomé and a Chinese collection and display of African art in Beijing as starting points to look at the constructedness of authenticity, and the time and space of the fake. The aim of this article is to show the effects of market commoditisation and changing geographies of participation in reinforcing and destabilising the distinction of real and fake in African art.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"377 - 386"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49450432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fakery and Fabrications in Kumasi’s “Modern” Market","authors":"Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1950523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1950523","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this contribution, I trace the fake and fabrication in the production of contemporary African urban space. Reflecting on the dispossession and displacement of vendors in Kumasi, Ghana, as part of the city authorities’ “modern” market project, I argue that these narratives demonstrate a fabrication of modernity where local authorities impress Westernized design, space, and aesthetics as if this is a singular and inevitable urban future, despite vendors’ ubiquitous commercial operations otherwise. I also argue that this modernity is fabricated through material design projects like the “modern” market, built through global financing, Western imported materials, and technologies that enable local authorities to render their own narrow and aspirational vision of “modern” space as the singular urban future.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"370 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46820969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Academic Fakes","authors":"C. Coetzee","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2020.1848533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2020.1848533","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this contribution to the special issue on Fakery in Africa, I catalogue some examples of academic fakes. I show that our fields are shot through with fakery, and ask what is at stake in holding these fakes up not only as real, but as what we value most highly. Fakes and fakery, I suggest, are not exceptional and deviant forms, but are in fact endemic to academia, and in particular to African Studies scholarship. Acknowledging that much around us in academia is fake, and admitting that many practices are fakery, I argue, will allow us to talk more openly about the hierarchies and inequalities of power and resources that shape knowledge production.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"272 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46434570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Covid Cure (1)”: Anas’s Investigative Journalism and the Ethics of Uncovering Fakes in African Spaces","authors":"C. Atuire, Grace Addison, S. Owusu, P. Kingori","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1940887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1940887","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Investigative journalists sometimes resort to the use of fake identities in order to reveal fakes and malpractice, a phenomenon that can be described as revelatory fakery. Acclaimed investigative journalist, Anas Aremeyaw, in collaboration with BBC Africa Eye, employs revelatory fakery to expose and prosecute wrongdoers in Ghana. From an ethical viewpoint, Anas’s revelatory fakery, a second order fakery, becomes a seedbed for an exponential level of fakery. This article poses the question whether Anas’s work is journalism or instead yet another expression of fakery that allows a prosecutor to act as a journalist. This question is contextualised within the ethics of the broader narratives created by the BBC Africa Eye investigations, which feed and promote a spectacular but “fake” narrative about Africa as a place of negatives, difference, and darkness.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"312 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43053954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}