Welcome to Lagos

Author: Chibundu Onuzo
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1936787814
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
“Storylines and twists abound. But action is secondary to atmosphere: Onuzo excels at evoking a stratified city, where society weddings feature ‘ice sculptures as cold as the unmarried belles’ and thugs write tidy receipts for kickbacks extorted from homeless travelers.” —The New Yorker When army officer Chike Ameobi is ordered to kill innocent civilians, he knows it is time to desert his post. As he travels toward Lagos with Yemi, his junior officer, and into the heart of a political scandal involving Nigeria’s education minister, Chike becomes the leader of a new platoon, a band of runaways who share his desire for a different kind of life. Among them is Fineboy, a fighter with a rebel group, desperate to pursue his dream of becoming a radio DJ; Isoken, a 16–year–old girl whose father is thought to have been killed by rebels; and the beautiful Oma, escaping a wealthy, abusive husband. Full of humor and heart, Welcome to Lagos is a high–spirited novel about aspirations and escape, innocence and corruption. It offers a provocative portrait of contemporary Nigeria that marks the arrival in the United States of an extraordinary young writer.

Welcome to Lagos

Author: Chibundu Onuzo
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226219
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Mediascapes of Ruined Geographies in the Global South

Author: Diego Granja do Amaral
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031315901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
This book undertakes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural interrogation of the Global South through the prisms of media and cultural studies. It closely explores the quotidian (re)territorialization, and brazen ruination of the material geographies of this vast expanse of the world by forces and proxies of (neo)colonialism and global capitalism of resource extraction. We cite the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homelands by occupational forces, the emerging detritus dump across Mexico City and Lagos, the infrastructural precariousness of the favelas of Brazil, the unending resource-war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the flagrant operation of the oil industry in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria as examples of this geographic cataclysm. The centripetal forces of neo-colonialism and resource extraction at full-flight in the Global South, aided by toxic hegemonic forces, have overtly tossed some of the population to the peripheries of existence and the society at large. As such, this book, additionally, explores the resistance of the subalterns from the margins to this socio-political malaise, and further unmasks the knowledge production from these margins of the Global South. This project is divided into five (5) parts of three essays each. The first part examines the territorial contestation in the Middle East framed and expressed through films and literary lenses. The second part examines the environmental burden of modern consumerism and urbanization on metropolis across Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria, while the third part explores the attritional violence of resource extraction in the DRC, Brazil, and Nigeria via filmic and journalistic lenses. The fourth part offers a swift response from the margins through ethnographic and journalistic interrogation of the subjectivity of the subalterns of Brazilian favelas, and street artists. The fifth part offers an engaging critique of the political climates of South Africa and Brazil that reinforce the environmental catastrophe of the regions of the world.

Histories of Dirt

Author: Stephanie Newell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007060
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
In Histories of Dirt Stephanie Newell traces the ways in which urban spaces and urban dwellers come to be regarded as dirty, as exemplified in colonial and postcolonial Lagos. Newell conceives dirt as an interpretive category that facilitates moral, sanitary, economic, and aesthetic evaluations of other cultures under the rubric of uncleanliness. She examines a number of texts ranging from newspaper articles by elite Lagosians to colonial travel writing, public health films, and urban planning to show how understandings of dirt came to structure colonial governance. Seeing Lagosians as sources of contagion and dirt, British colonizers used racist ideologies and discourses of dirt to justify racial segregation and public health policies. Newell also explores possibilities for non-Eurocentric methods for identifying African urbanites’ own values and opinions by foregrounding the voices of contemporary Lagosians through interviews and focus groups in which their responses to public health issues reflect local aesthetic tastes and values. In excavating the shifting role of dirt in structuring social and political life in Lagos, Newell provides new understandings of colonial and postcolonial urban history in West Africa.

They Eat Our Sweat

Author: Daniel E. Agbiboa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198861540
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.

Art as an Interface of Law and Justice

Author: Frans-Willem Korsten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509944362
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. 'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another. Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light. The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.

Beyond observation

Author: Paul Henley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526131374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

Aladinma

Author: Peter Obidike
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1532088205
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
The life of a public servant’s kid in Aladinma, a quiet neighboorhood in Imo state’s capital city of Owerri in Nigeria. As expected from a religious and hardworking family, the kid imbibes the family values and grows with the resilience needed to navigate the changing times from analogue to a digital age. In all his learnings though, nothing prepared him for the fight brewing inside a Dallas courtroom in a US federal criminal trial against a copyright thief where his character and resilience will be tested to the limit.

Sweet Mother Told Me....

Author: Joseph Okotiuero
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1503540790
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
It is a series of stories that most of them contain love, romance, adventure and tragedy.

Watch Out for the Elephants!

Author: C. Angela Todd
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN: 1480988928
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Watch Out for the Elephants! By: C. Angela Todd & C. Ann Todd You can achieve anything you want to – just Watch Out for the Elephants! The year was 1945, and the lives of black Americans showed little sign of improvement. We were still relegated to third-class status–forced to sit at the back of the bus, to drink from separate water fountains, to take only those menial jobs the white population considered beneath them. In sharp contrast, that same year, our father became only the 11th black man “permitted” to join the United States Foreign Service. His first posting was Cairo, Egypt, where he was sent as a Civilian Security Guard. For the next 35 years, our family traveled the world, moving from country to country and culture to culture, where–perhaps surprisingly–we lived very ordinary lives in very extraordinary settings. We have always considered our unusual upbringing a distinct privilege, and feel that this privileged background entails the responsibility to pass along important life lessons to others, such as: · If our parents could do it as black Americans living abroad in 1945, you can achieve anything you want to in the 21st century and beyond! · There is a big, beautiful world out there beyond your own personal boundaries, and we want to share some of the world’s wonderful people and cultures with you through our stories and pictures. · As you travel though your life, always remember to Watch Out for the Elephants!--regardless of what shape or form they might take! It is our dream that this book will open the hearts and minds of young people to the endless possibilities and wonders of diverse cultures and ways of life. It is our hope that these stories will highlight the strength of the human spirit that is possible despite sometimes overbearing obstacles, such as the prejudices that our parents faced. It is our conviction that the world of opportunities is open to everyone. Remember: If you can dream it, you can achieve it!