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The influence of globalisation and its attendant modern technologies has reconfigured the manner in which orality functions in the contemporary African context. Confronted with the powerful presence of media technologies that threaten to supplant its central role in many African societies, orality has been compelled to reinvent itself by means of appropriating the same media for its survival. The result has been a process that seeks to recontextualise imported technologies in locally relevant ways. This article focuses on how video technology adapts to local Kenyan cultural contexts. Arguing that vernacular video films form part of contemporary cultural productions in Kenya, the article demonstrates how strategies of remediation, such as subtitling, re-oralisation, repurposing and immediacy, contribute to the reactivation of orality. It emerges from the analyses that local knowledge cultures actively engage modern technologies in a way that debunks any simple linear perceptions of the impact of mediatisation on African epistemologies. Through local agency, communities actualise their aspirations for a domesticated modernity that is simultaneously fresh and familiar, and therefore less culturally alienating.
"The greatest son of our Heimat": reading German Leichhardts across the National Socialist era
(2015)
The article discusses German commemorations of Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848) in the National Socialist era when officials, journalists, educators and writers, spurred by the double anniversary of the explorer's 125th birthday and the 90th anniversary of his disappearance, began to re-imagine the explorer's life and fate in the light of the ideological imperatives of the day. Our analysis of this period pays particular attention to how these reimagined Leichhardts emphasise or neglect some of the key elements that make up his story to this day, among them: Leichhardt's ethnicity; his sense of attachment to place and home; his homosocial relationships; his evasion of Prussian military service; his role in the British colonial project; and finally, his engagements with Aborigines. On the one hand, our analysis reveals, how Leichhardt was portrayed first on the local and, later, the national level in ways that increasingly sought to elide ambiguous aspects of his life and deeds. However, it also uncovers some of the ideological labour required to render him useful to the National Socialist cause. Often enough, these re-imagined Leichhardts escaped party politics, and cast up some of the logical inconsistencies and limits to key terms in National Socialist thinking.
In this essay, I explore various politics of mimicry on Ludwig Leichhardt's second Australian expedition. Following Michael Taussig, I read mimicry as embedded in a complex economy of gift exchange which disrupts the binary categories of self and other, subject and object, man and nature. Mimetic exchanges, in other words, bear the potential for a non-dualistic dynamics of depropriation, a dynamics which may be avowed or disavowed by various actors in the colonial encounter. Focussing on three actors in particularLudwig Leichhardt himself, his British botanist Daniel Bunce, and the intriguing figure of Mr Turner, an Indigenous AustralianI trace the ways in which mimicry-as-depropriation is dealt with across the colonial archive.
Lost in a liminal space?
(2015)