Domesticating the WorldAfrican Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization

Prestholdt, Jeremy

doi:10.1525/california/9780520254244.001.0001

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…To highlight the significance of such networks and practices encourages a shift of perspective away from the most celebrated scenes in the history of exploration. The single most important site in the British exploration of East Africa after 1850, for example, was surely not the source of the Nile, but the town of Zanzibar, a key node in the Indian Ocean trading system and a recruiting station for men and women working as porters on the major African expeditions of Speke, Stanley, and others (Prestholdt, 2008;Simpson, 1975). A similar point could be made about the relationship between the Everest expeditions of the interwar period and the hill settlement of Darjeeling, where the British recruited their Sherpas (Ortner, 1999).…”

Section: Form and Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Driver

2017

Mobilities of Knowledge

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This paper is concerned with two things that depend, essentially, on the spatial mobility of knowledge.1 First there is geographical exploration, a process of knowledge-making involving the translation of ideas, people, and things across space in a two-way movement between known and unknown territory. This is, as is clear from much historical and contemporary research, an uneven process in which certain things get translated more readily than others. There is, so to speak, a politics, as well as a physics, of knowledge transfer. The second is public exhibition, a project designed to disseminate knowledge (in the case I will discuss, knowledge of exploration) to a wider audience, a process sometimes described in higher education under the bureaucratic rubric of "knowledge transfer." The idea linking these two things is simple enough, but deserving of further elaboration in many different ways, as the contributions to this volume attest. The thing transferred-the knowledge explorers brought home, the knowledge imparted through an exhibition-is transformed in the course of its translation. Space, like language, is not a neutral surface over which knowledge travels, or an empty container into which we can pour our learning; it enters into and shapes that knowledge in significant ways

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Section: Form and Contentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Driver

2017

Mobilities of Knowledge

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“…If the fact that the original propagator of clove trees to Zanzibar, Saleh bin Haramil al Araby, "doyen of the Omani merchant class," was a man who was working as a translator for Europeans is taken as an indicator, clove plantations did not simply emerge from Middle Eastern genealogies (Sheriff 1987, p. 49). East Africa in the nineteenth-century was a cosmopolitan place (Prestholdt 2008), and it is important to realize that at least a segment of plantation owners may have been aware of the type of landscapes that dominated European colonial plantation regions such as those of sugar planters on Mauritius (Allen 1999). The enterprise of rapidly establishing investments in large plantation holdings seems to suggest a clear awareness of the growing commodity trading in the Indian Ocean by the early nineteenth-century, perhaps linked to the knowledge of the profits, which could be gained from the sale of ivory from caravan trading.…”

Section: Owning Land On Zanzibarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantation Landscapes

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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From the sea the island [Zanzibar] presents the appearance of an unbroken forest of cocoanut, mango, and other trees, with the clove plantations on the hills forming the background; the island is intersected by paths and green lanes in every direction, affording a neverending variety of pleasant rides and walks. The country-houses of the Arab proprietors, and the huts of their slaves, are thickly dotted over the surface, surrounded with gardens and fields. The hedge-rows are formed covered with flowering creepers, chiefly varieties of jasmine and wild pea. The hedges are formed of a species of laurel, wild orange, lime, and other evergreens; and pineapples grow everywhere in profusion. In many parts are glades of undulating-grass land of park-like appearance, dotted with gigantic mango trees…. The ponds are covered with rushes and white and blue lilies; and the air is perfumed with the blossoms of the mango and clove. (Rigby 1861, pp. 2-3) So wrote Lieutenant Colonel C.P. Rigby, consul and British agent at Zanzibar in 1861, laying out one potential gaze over the clove plantation landscape of the island of Zanzibar. The landscape depicted is an African one, but one that emerges-is given "density of meaning"-through material referents to a very English kind of landscape. By producing this relation, European commentators of the nineteenthcentury to were able to produce a certain kind of mastery over the landscape, while also providing a clear relationship for metropolitan reading publics (Pratt 1992, p. 204). As should become clear through this chapter, this is just one of the complex ways through which landscape on Zanzibar has been perceived. Examining the variety of landscapes in existence, at levels of practice and through scopic regimes (sensu Jay 1988), demonstrates the complex ways in which clove plantations may be placed within capitalism, colonialism, East African cultural practices, and modernity.At the time Rigby was writing, Zanzibar was increasingly under the influence of British imperialism. Although still under the autonomous rule of the Sultanate, within the next 40 years, a British administration had largely taken control of the governance of the islands (Bissell 2011). Narratives of Zanzibar could be seen to be still part of a "contact zone"-an initial period of spatial and temporal copresence of different groups previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures (Pratt 1992, p. 7). British colonial and other European economic interests

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“…This was an important shift from the past, when the colonial government used technology and infrastructural projects to demonstrate colonial authority and produce a particular sort of modern African subject. While Nkrumah saw new development projects, including Kingsway, as tools to refashion modern Ghanaian citizens, he also hoped they would help shed the country's image as a colonial dependency, attract further foreign investment, and assert a sense of global membership (Bhabha 1994;Ferguson 2006;Prestholdt 2008;Alhman 2012).…”

Section: Kingsway Modernity and The Nationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Modern Shopping Experience’: Kingsway Department Store and Consumer Politics in Ghana

Murillo¹

2012

Africa

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ABSTRACTDespite the perception that department stores are a recent phenomenon in West Africa, modern indoor retail spaces have existed in its major cities since the mid-twentieth century. This article uses the history of Kingsway Department Store in Accra as a lens to understand emerging political, economic and social tensions in post-colonial Ghana. Drawing on United Africa Company (UAC) records, staff reports and inspection findings, as well as local newspapers, advertising and oral interviews, I demonstrate how legacies of colonial capitalism, struggles for political independence and negotiations over what constituted the ‘modern’ fuelled both local and foreign support of the project. For the UAC, investment was an opportunity to legitimize its activities in a newly independent Ghana and a means to shed its image as a colonial merchant firm. While local authorities were divided on whether large-scale retail developments should be part of an expanding post-colonial city, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah thought the store might provide a key component in constructing his vision of a new modern nation. However, the presence of white-collar working women, young managers supervising older employees, and the mixing of white expatriate and African shoppers exacerbated social conflicts – challenging local and colonial notions of authority based on race, gender and age.

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Domesticating the WorldAfrican Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Plantation Landscapes

‘The Modern Shopping Experience’: Kingsway Department Store and Consumer Politics in Ghana

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