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At the start of the 21st century, the relationship between media and development has never felt more important. Following a series of ‘media revolutions’ throughout the developing world – beginning with the advent of cheap transistor radio sets in the late-1960s, followed by the rapid expansion of satellite television networks in the 1990s, and the more recent explosion of mobile telephony, social media and the internet – a majority of people living in the Global South now have access to a wide variety of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), and live in media saturated environments. Yet how can radio, television and mobile phones be most effectively harnessed towards t...
Gives an ethnographic account of the complexities of the use of photography in Africa, both historically and in contemporary practice. This collection of studies in African photography examines, through a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic cases, the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged across a range of social contexts. In so doing, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other forms of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, these studies develop areflexive turn, examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, an...
Through an analysis of the recent political history of Tanzania and Uganda, Wealth, Power, and Authoritarian Institutions offers a novel explanation of why authoritarian parties and legislatures vary in strength, and why this variation matters. Michaela Collord elaborates a view of authoritarian political institutions as both reflecting and magnifying elite power dynamics. While there are many sources of elite power, the book centres on material power. It outlines how diverse trajectories of state-led capitalist development engender differing patterns of wealth accumulation and elite contestation across regimes. These differences, in turn, influence institutional landscapes. Where accumulati...
This trove of recently discovered photographs offers an unprecedented opportunity to take a closer look at Idi Amin's dictatorship and its impact on Ugandan history. Chosen from a collection of 70,000 negatives from the archive of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the images in this remarkable collection were taken by Amin's personal photographers between the 1950s and mid-1980s. Like many dictators, Amin used photography as a means of spreading propaganda that would flatter his regime while obscuring its failures and abuses. Organized into thematic sections, these photographs show how Amin sought to gain support for acts such as his expulsion of tens of thousands of South Asians in 1972 ...
Since the introduction of photography by commercial studio photographers and the colonial state in Kenya, this global medium has been intensely debated and contested among Muslims on the cosmopolitan East African coast. This book does not only explore the making, circulation, and consumption of popular photographs, but also the other side, their rejection and obliteration, an essential aspect of a medium's history that should not be neglected. It deals with various »social spaces of refusal« in the local Muslim milieu and in that of »traditional« spirit mediums in which (gendered) visibility was (and is) contested in various and creative ways. It focuses on the »aesthetics of withdrawal«: the various ways and techniques that process the photographic act as well as the photographic image to theatricalize the surface of the image in new ways by veiling, masking, and concealing. In a fragmented historical perspective, Heike Behrend seeks to complement, decenter, and counter the history of photography as it has been told by the West and to narrate another history beginning with preceding local media such as textiles and spirit possession.
Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship betw...
Recent decades have seen a flourishing interest in and speculation about the origins of photography. Spurred by rediscoveries of ‘first’ photographs and proclamations of photography’s death in the digital age, scholars have been rethinking who and what invented the medium. Photography and Its Origins reflects on this interest in photography’s beginnings by reframing it in critical and specifically historiographical terms. How and why do we write about the origins of the medium? Whom or what do we rely on to construct those narratives? What’s at stake in choosing to tell stories of photography’s genesis in one way or another? And what kind of work can those stories do? Edited by Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón, this collection of 16 original essays, illustrated with 32 colour images, showcases prominent and emerging voices in the field of photography studies. Their research cuts across disciplines and methodologies, shedding new light on old questions about histories and their writing. Photography and Its Origins will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, and the history of science and technology.
The emergence of newly independent African nations onto the world stage in the mid-twentieth century precipitated a contest for influence among Cold War superpowers, leading the United States to mount an international campaign of photographic diplomacy underpinned by a faith in the medium’s capacity to cross cultural boundaries. However, the increasing global visibility of racial injustice undermined US claims that the nation had transcended colonial racism. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and concentrating on the period from the mid-1950s through to the late 1960s, Darren Newbury traces the role of photography in the United Stat...
A unique survey of each country in the region. It includes an extensive collection of facts, statistics, analysis and directory information in one accessible volume.
This work is an investigation into the events and historical context of the Kanungu fire in south-west Uganda in which several hundred members of MRTC (Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God), a charismatic Christian sect, were burned to death in March 2000.