Plageman, Nate. Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana—when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor—in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "highlife" music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20thcentury and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

[Source: Book description by publisher, Indiana University Press].

Roland Pongou

Professor of Economics

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa

Contact: rpongou@uottawa.ca/6135625800(7067)

Pool, Hannah Azieb. Fashion Cities Africa. Bristol: Intellect, 2016.

In a searing 2012 Guardian op-ed, Hannah Azieb Pool took Western fashion designers to task for their so-called African-inspired clothing. “Dear Fashion,” she wrote, “Africa is a continent, not a country. Can you imagine anyone describing a fashion trend as ‘European-inspired?’ Of course not. It’s meaningless.” Now, with Fashion Cities Africa, Pool aims to correct the misconceptions about African fashion, providing key context for contemporary African fashion scenes and capturing the depth and breadth of truly African fashion. Tied to the Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at the Brighton Museum, the book gives much needed attention to four key African fashion scenes: Nairobi, Lagos, Casablanca, and Johannesburg - one from each region of the continent. Filled with interviews of leading African fashion designers, stylists, and commentators, alongside hundreds of exclusive street-style images, Fashion Cities Africa is a landmark book that should be celebrated in fashion houses the world over.

[Source: The University of Chicago Press].

Prabhu, Anjali. Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora. Malden: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2014.

Analyzing art house films from the African continent and the African diaspora, this book showcases a new generation of auteurs with African origins from political, aesthetic, and spectatorship perspectives.

[Source: Wiley].

Prabhu, Anjali. “Négritude: A Passion in Abiola Irele’s Work.” Journal of the African Literature Association 14, no. 1 (2020): 126–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2019.1681770.

This essay focuses on Abiola Irele's passionate and life-long engagement with négritude and the centrality of his thinking and writing about négritude to his œuvre. Using one of Irele's final lectures, if not the last public lecture he gave, the author, who witnessed the lecture, takes up several moments of that presentation and links them to Irele's landmark work on négritude, his contributions to scholarship in African literary studies, and his footprint in the field through his publications, editorial leadership, and mentoring.

Source: Essay's abstract

Premack, Laura, 2015. “Prophets, evangelists, and missionaries: Trans-Atlantic interactions in the emergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism.” Religion, 45:2, 221-238.

This article historicizes the contemporary Pentecostal movement in Nigeria by examining relationships between Nigerian prophets, British missionaries, and American evangelists in the 1930s and 1940s. First, the article challenges assumptions about the genealogy and chronology of Nigerian Pentecostalism by taking a close look at the beginnings of the Christ Apostolic Church. Then, it discusses new evidence which reveals the surprising influence of a marginal American evangelist and renegade British missionary on the church's doctrine. Making use of a wide range of evidence from Nigerian, Welsh, and American archives, the article argues that while the Aladura movement may have had indigenous origins, its development made significant use of foreign support and did so much earlier than has been appreciated by previous studies. The larger significance of this argument is that it shows the mutual constitution of American, British, and Nigerian Pentecostalism; instead of emerging first in the US and UK and then being taken to Africa, Pentecostalism's development across the Atlantic was coeval.

(Source: Article abstract).

Presence Africaine

Publishing

Paris

Contact:+33 (0)1 43 54 15 88/Email: info@presenceafricaine.com

‍presenceafricaine.com

Pulane Kingston

Collector (Art), Webber Wentzel, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art (South Africa), and UK’s Tate Gallery

Location: UK

International

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