African Appropriations Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media [Paperback]

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.

Matthias Krings is Professor of Anthropology and African Popular Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. He is editor (with Onookome Okome) of Global Nollywood: The Transnational Dimensions of an African Video Film Industry (IUP, 2013).

Overall, African Appropriations is an engaging, readable, creative, and well-researched piece of scholarship.

Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday by Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome (Routledge, 2013). ISBN 9780415532921.

Not only does [Krings] straddle different societies . . . he also ranges across a host of differing cultural forms: spirit possession, music, graphic novels, film, posters, 419 letters, photo novels, and stickers, among others. The result is, and this should be stressed, a genuinely innovative book unlike most others in either anthropology or African studies.African Appropriations is rich compendium of useful commentary on cultural and media forms that otherwise have received scattered treatment. It will certainly be a valuable resource for scholars andan accessible and interesting text for classrooms.The text is jargon free, a pleasure to read, remarkably well researched, and enriched by 40 illustrations. . . . Highly recommended.Matthias Krings has brilliantly fused together vignettes of contemporary African visual£-