Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa

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Description

Through the lens of the automobile, Lindsey B. Green-Simms considers the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Africa. With readings of famous plays, novels, and films and recent popular videos, she reveals how automobility in the region is an everyday practice, an ethos, a fantasy of autonomy, and an affective activity intimately tied to modern social life.

Reviews

"Clear, lucid, and engaging. Lindsey B. Green-Simms does an excellent job mediating close literary analysis, broader historical and cultural focus on the car in Africa, and astute theoretical readings."Marian Aguiar, Carnegie Mellon University

"With Postcolonial Automobility, Lindsey B. Green-Simms produces a veritable socio-cultural biography of the automobile and illustrates this through various sources including literary texts, African art and popular movies, the variable opinions of car owners and their users, and the multiple urban legends that have grown up with and around vehicles in this part of Africa. It is a beautifully written gift offering to this most desired object of African modernity."Ato Quayson, University of Toronto, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

Author Bio

Lindsey B. Green-Simms is assistant professor of literature at American University in Washington, D.C.