Exploring the vehicle's role in imposing colonialism on Indigenous people, this book proposes an Indigenous automobility that reclaims sovereignty over place and centricity.

Exploring the vehicle's role in imposing colonialism on Indigenous people, this book proposes an Indigenous automobility that reclaims sovereignty over place and centricity.

For more than a century cars have symbolized autonomous, unfettered mobility and an increasingly global experience. And yet, they are often used differently outside the centers of global capitalism. This pioneering book considers how, through the lens of the automobile, we can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. Through new and provocative readings of famous plays, novels, and films, as well as recent popular videos, Postcolonial Automobility reveals the surprising ways in which automobility in the region is, at once, an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy, and an affective activity intimately tied to modern social life. Lindsey B. Green-Simms begins with the history of motorization in West Africa from the colonial era to the decolonizing decades after World War II, and addresses the tragedy of car accidents through a close reading of Wole Soyinka’s 1965 postindependence play The Road. Shifting to screen media, she discusses Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart and reviews popular, low-budget Nollywood films. Finally, Green-Simms considers how feminist texts rewrite and work in dialogue with the male-centered films and novels where the car stands in for patriarchal power and capitalist achievement. Providing a unique perspective on technology in Africa—one refusing to be confined to narratives of either underdevelopment or inevitable progress—and covering a broad range of interdisciplinary material, Postcolonial Automobility will appeal not only to scholars and students of African literature and cinema but also to those in postcolonial and globalization studies.

Emirs in London recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience to the Northern Nigerian people. Moses E. Ochonu shows how rather than simply serving as puppets and mouthpieces of the British Empire, these aristocrats leveraged their travel to the heart of the empire to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to translate and domesticate imperial modernity in a predominantly Muslim society. Emirs in London explores how, through their experiences visiting the heart of the British Empire, Northern Nigerian aristocrats were enabled to define themselves within the framework of the empire. In doing so, the book reveals a unique colonial sensibility that complements rather than contradicts the traditional perspectives of less privileged Africans toward colonialism. Emirs in London was named in the Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2022 list.