Journal of African Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"In Defense of the False","authors":"Luise White","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2020.1859996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2020.1859996","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Taking stories that have been commonplace in East and Central Africa for over a century of Africans who worked for whites to capture other Africans to take their blood as my starting point, I argue that fake and false are not necessarily wrongs to be identified or problems to be corrected. Instead stories like these are concrete and frequently analytical expressions of Africans’ experiences. They may be presented in narrative genres that signal the possibility of fiction, they may come and go over a period of years, but they are spread over a large area by people who think these stories are worth repeating, people who think they sound plausible. They are fake in the way that fake medicine and fake currency are fake, but that is not to say such stories fill the void left by the scarcity of real medicine and real currency. Instead, they coexist with other, often official stories, but these provide a description of life and work and hospital visits that reveal hidden motives and horrendous practices.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"320 - 324"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43840288","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 Fake is News”: On Popular Visual Media, Fakery and Legitimacy Contestations in Charismatic Christianity in Contemporary Ghana","authors":"Joseph Oduro-Frimpong","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1950524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1950524","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Three key questions guide this investigation into specific accusations of fakery related to some Christian religious leaders’ acts in contemporary Ghana. The first question is: what do moving images and other popular visual forms (such as cartoons) contribute to assessments and accusations of fakery? The second question is: what can we learn from a close examination of religious leaders and their actions that citizens consider fake? The last question is: who gets to make public accusations of fakery on Ghanaian religious matters? I argue that the various analyzed cartoons and memes contribute to ongoing public discussions of the religious leaders as fake. I show how some of these religious leaders seem motivated by the need to be recognized as possessing superior supernatural powers which they exchange for material wealth. I draw attention to specific categories of Ghanaians, such as certain politicians with clout, to level accusations that these religious pastors are fakes.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"325 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43028954","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":"Re-imagining How We Want to Be Touched","authors":"Gorata Chengeta","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925090","url":null,"abstract":"each of these responses, Macharia’s invitation to imagine freedom is saluted, embraced, and extended, in registers that match the rigour and exuberance of Macharia’s own writing. Above all, his fluency in many genres is saluted. Readers familiar with Macharia’s work and its emphasis on community and care will notice these threads weaving across this set of responses; and once again, in Macharia’s closing comment.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"225 - 228"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925090","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41631097","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":"Keguro Macharia: On Grinding, Grating, and Creating Friction against Kenyatta’s Figurations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity","authors":"M. N. Jayawardane","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925092","url":null,"abstract":"Keguro Macharia’s body of work – his blog, Gukira and other online writing, his Twitter feed, and now, his long-awaited text, Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora – has always challenged us to imagine freedom and its relationship to the erotic. In Frottage, Macharia adds new elements to existing histories and theories of diaspora and blackness, asking readers to consider sex and sexuality, gender-construction, desire, and eroticism as central elements of Black freedom struggles. For Macharia, “frottage” presents a metaphor and a methodology for “grasp[ing] the quotidian experience of the intra-racial experience, the frictions and irritations and translations and mistranslations, the moments when blackness coalesces through pleasure and play and also by resistance to anti-blackness” (Macharia 2019, 7). Histories rub up against histories – igniting some versions, while wearing down or erasing others. In chapters focused on four figures in revolutionary struggles and “freedom thinking” – Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay – Macharia illustrates how foregrounding heteronormative relationships and kinship models, which have historically dominated “visions of diasporic encounter” (64), has limited our understanding of Black freedom struggles. These were moments when hierarchies of power were continually shifting, and people’s ways of relating to each other (including erotically) were fundamentally affected. Expanding on that idea, Macharia asks: how, then, might we situate “erotic pleasure and diversity as practices of freedom, complicating dominant visions of diasporic encounter as heteronormative kinship” (64)? If we were to “enlarge the vocabularies and frames of diasporic encounter to include lover, fuck buddy, and trick... [and] a range of erotic desires and encounters” (64), howmight we re-conceptualise struggles for freedom, and practices of freedom? Many of us know the poetics and politics of Macharia’s writing – essays theorising freedom, imagining the ways bodies and psyches find passage, even when political decrees and power structures attempt to immobilise them – through reading his blog, Gukira. As Lindsey Green-Simms writes in her contribution, Macharia’s academic writing and his intimate engagements within blogging culture are illustrative of his complex","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"232 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925092","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44737627","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":"Method and Antimethod: Reflecting on Keguro Macharia’s Frottage","authors":"Lindsey B. Green-Simms","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925093","url":null,"abstract":"our society’s deep attachment to particular concepts of family. In reading Frottage, I wondered why we form such attachments. Perhaps we hold on to the genealogical imperative and to the family, because they have been imbued with so much social power – reinforced. Or perhaps it is that the work of relation – of being together – is already difficult and the structures of hetero-kinship are within the closest reach. Perhaps the attachment stems from wanting belonging; something to offer repair in the face of displacement. Regardless of the reason for the attachment, abolitionist thought refuses the acceptance of the current configuration of the world. Abolitionist though dares and demands us to imagine alternatives. In line with this, Macharia’s question “How do you want to be touched?” needs us to flesh out its answers. Taking this further, throughout Frottage, an underlying question reverberates: “How are we being held together?” Macharia thinks of relation as frottage – as rubbing together; the persistent, recurring meeting of bodies in space – and in doing so, prompts us to touch in more meaningful ways. For one, the concept does respond to differences by trying to conceal them. Within it, irritation is to be expected, rather than suppressed – it functions as a part of intimacy. This perspective on dealing with difference, in my view, has the potential to strengthen our collectives. In adopting Macharia’s perspective on intimacy, we might manage to sustain touch until it becomes holding. I love that there is potential for us to be held.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"228 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925093","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45722358","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":"Imagining Freedom with Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora","authors":"G. Musila","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925091","url":null,"abstract":"Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (2019) is consistent with what his readers have come to associate with his thought on the different platforms he inhabits. Across his blog, Gukira, his Twitter timeline and his scholarly writing is a consistent sense of curiosity, imagination, play, rigour, and commitment to widening the horizon of the possible. Macharia remains one of the most dexterously multi-lingual scholars I know; not in the usual sense of speaking multiple languages – though he does –, but in the sense of speaking multiple genres and code-switching between these so elegantly, as he toggles between bodies of ideas that on the surface seem inhospitable to each other. Who else can seat the opening formula for Kiswahili folklore –","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"223 - 225"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925091","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47402815","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":"With Gratitude, Toward Freedom","authors":"Keguro Macharia","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1925094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925094","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"236 - 238"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1925094","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48708055","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 Governor and the Everyday Woman: Reflections on Dina Ligaga’s Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media","authors":"Caroline Mose","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1917344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1917344","url":null,"abstract":"In June of 2020, the Honourable Anne Waiguru, one of only two women Governors in Kenya, was impeached by her county government following charges of corruption and misappropriation of county governm...","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"118 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1917344","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59754532","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":"Roundtable on Dina Ligaga's Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media","authors":"Pauline Mateveke","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1917346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1917346","url":null,"abstract":"One of the fundamental issues that Dina Ligaga addresses in her book Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media (2020), is how the Kenyan public culture controls Kenyan femininities. It is a question so simple that I fell into the trap of assuming that its answer(s) would be straightforward. As a relatively young scholar whose research and teaching are also at the crossroads of gender, sexuality and popular culture, I have seen the same question being posed by various Zimbabwean scholars. Zimbabwean scholarship has attempted to reflect on how Zimbabwean popular media works as a breeding ground for enforcing and displaying masculine identities (Chiweshe and Bhatasara 2013), while at the same time silencing Zimbabwean women’s voices through its misogynistic predispositions (Mateveke and Chikafa 2020). Through seven chapters, Dina Ligaga explores contemporary Kenya’s politics of visibility and how this impinges on the subjectivities of Kenyan women. Ligaga goes on to consider the role played by stereotypes in constructing what is deemed ideal womanhood and sexuality in Kenya. If, as revealed in the book, stereotypes are the chains that are effectively used to restrain and to dictate notions of femininity to the Kenyan public female figure, then radio drama is the physical enactment of those social restrictions. In her chapter which looks at radio and the construction of African womanhood, Ligaga reflects on the power of radio to air public constructions of Kenyan womanhood. Ligaga successfully provides a bilateral historical account of the uses of the institutionalised form of radio drama in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Across these two distinct historical contexts, the development of conservative notions of sexuality is constant. The author intricately links the formulaic structure of the radio drama genre to dominant, state-endorsed, narratives about women. The analysis is expertly manoeuvered across genres to consider the role played by the tabloid newspaper in its representation of Kenyan womanhood. Ligaga persuasively argues that the spectacles and scandals that drive the tabloid newspaper genre are forms of surveillance over “unruly femininities”. The book accounts for how Kenyan tabloid genres unsympathetically crucify “unruly women” through gossip and sexual scandal narratives. Ligaga’s further exploration of consumption, good-time girls and violence in public discourses, and her analysis of women celebrities, hypervisibility and digital subjectivity in Kenya, raises her most powerful but devastating analysis. It is powerful because she firmly brings to the fore a subject with which not only conservative Kenya, but conservative African countries such as Zimbabwe, are not ready to publicly engage. Ligaga’s research on the “good-time girl” and the social media female celebrity indicts Kenyan popular media for its sexism and misogyny. The analysis is also devastating","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"115 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1917346","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46543758","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":"Pondering the Gaps: A Response","authors":"Dina Ligaga","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2021.1929088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2021.1929088","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"125 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13696815.2021.1929088","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46431988","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}