"In this groundbreaking work, Brian Larkin provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point. Concentrating on the Muslim city of Kano in the north of Nigeria, Lar
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kin charts how the material qualities of technologies and the cultural ambitions they represent feed into the everyday experiences of urban Nigeria. Media technologies were introduced to Nigeria by colonial regimes as part of an attempt to shape political subjects and create modern, urban Africans. Larkin considers the introduction of media along with electric plants and railroads as part of the wider infrastructural project of colonial and postcolonial urbanism. Focusing on radio networks, mobile cinema units, and the building of cinema theaters, he argues that what media come to be in Kano is the outcome of technology's encounter with the social formations of northern Nigeria and with norms shaped by colonialism, postcolonial nationalism, and Islam. Larkin examines how media technologies produce the modes of leisure and cultural forms of urban Africa by analyzing the circulation of Hindi films to Muslim Nigeria, the leisure practices of Hausa cinemagoers in Kano, and the dynamic emergence of Nigerian video films. His analysis highlights the diverse, unexpected media forms and practices that thrive in urban Africa." (Publisher description)
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"1979: Im Iran wird der Schah gestürzt, die islamische Republik entsteht; parallel eskaliert mit dem sowjetischen Einmarsch der Bürgerkrieg in Afghanistan. Bilder über Afghanistan waren seither zumeist Bilder der Zerstörung. Diesen Außenansichten setzt ›Kabul/ Teheran 1979 ff‹ Perspektiven
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aus Kabul entgegen. Nachrevolutionäre Filme aus dem Iran gewinnen Preise auf internationalen Festivals; zugleich steht Kino im Iran selbst für Modernität. Die iranische Filmszene unterstützt und beeinflusst die wieder entstehende afghanische Filmproduktion. Auch die vielen afghanischen Flüchtlinge, die im Iran leben, verbinden beide Länder. So wurde der Bauboom in der Megastadt Teheran maßgeblich von AfghanInnen bewerkstelligt. ›Kabul/Teheran 1979 ff‹ zeigt Geschichte(n), erzählt von iranischen und afghanischen FilmemacherInnen von 1979 bis heute, versammelt Beiträge vom Alltag der beiden Millionenstädte und aus den Flüchtlingslagern im Grenzgebiet der benachbarten Länder." (https://www.bbooks.de/verlag/kabul-teheran-1979ff)
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"India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these works are avidly consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by the Indian communities in Australia, Britain, the Caribbean Islands, and North America. Jyotika Virdi focuses on how this dom
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inant medium configures the "nation" in post-Independence Hindi cinema. She scrutinizes approximately thirty films that have appeared since 1950 and demonstrates how concepts of the nation form the center of this cinema's moral universe. As a kind of storytelling, Indian cinema provides a fascinating account of social history and cultural politics, with the family deployed as a symbol of the nation. Virdi demonstrates how the portrayal of the nation as a mythical community in Hindi films collapses under the weight of its own contradictions--irreconcilable differences that encompass gender, sexuality, family, class, and religious communities. Through these film narratives, the author traces transactions among the various constituencies that struggle, accommodate, coexist uneasily, or reconstitute each other over time, and, in the process, reveal the topography of postcolonial culture." (Publisher description)
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