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Voices of the poor in Africa / Elizabeth Isichei.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Isichei, Elizabeth Allo.
- Series:
- Rochester studies in African history and the diaspora 1092-5228
- Rochester studies in African history and the diaspora, 1092-5228
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Ethnology--Africa.
- Ethnology.
- Popular culture.
- Ethnoscience.
- Africa.
- Oral tradition--Africa.
- Oral tradition.
- Mythology, African.
- Ethnoscience--Africa.
- Popular culture--Africa.
- Discourse analysis, Narrative.
- Africa--Historiography.
- Historiography.
- Africa--Social life and customs.
- Manners and customs.
- Local Subjects:
- Africa--Social life and customs.
- Africa--Historiography.
- Physical Description:
- ix, 287 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2002.
- Summary:
- An ambitious new approach to African studies, utilizing indigenous sources to bring back the voices of the native Africans in their own words rather than that of colonizers and foreigners.
- Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory -- an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years. She brings together a wide range of disciplines -- anthropology, fiction, art and art history, philosophy, and contemporary literary theory -- to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premisses. The result is a history of popular consciousness which shows the experiences of ordinary people, often in protest at their exploitation by generation after generation of powerful foreigners and locals.
- Contents:
- 1 Introduction: Truth from Below 1
- Part 1 Perceptions of the Atlantic Slave Trade
- 3 The Slave Traders 35
- 4 The Imported Commodities 49
- 5 Cowries 65
- 6 Transformations: Enslavement and the Middle Passage in African American Memory 77
- Part 2 Interpreting the Colonial and Post-Colonial Experience
- 8 The Entrepreneur and the Zombie 98
- 9 Colonial Vampires: The Theft of Life and Resources 111
- 10 Changing Bodies, Changing Worlds 126
- 11 Symbolic Money 138
- 12 Dangerous Women in an Age of AIDS 153
- 13 Village Intellectuals and the Challenge of Poverty 169
- 14 Mami Wata: Icon of Ambiguity 188
- 15 Symbolic Appropriations of Modernity 210
- 16 Converging Worlds, Polarized Worlds: the Realm Beneath the Sea Revisited 224
- 17 Eating the State: Ridicule and the Crisis of the Quotidian 235.
- Notes:
- Errata slip included.
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-272) and index.
- ISBN:
- 1580461077
- OCLC:
- 49225822
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