2 african appropriations
that it highlights some of the myriad ways a single cultural product may
be appropriated—that is, interpreted, reworked, and adapted to suit new
social contexts, interests, and media environments once it has entered
transnational media circuits.
Simply speaking, this book is about African ways of dealing with cul-
tural difference. These approaches to cultural difference may take place
through what we conventionally consider to be media—audiocassettes,
videotapes, and comic books. They may also occur through more tradi-
tional forms of mediation—live performances, such as ritual, dance, song,
and theater. Both may be considered the means through which cultural
producers might translate and transmit practices and symbolic elements
rooted in life-worlds different from their own. They thus constitute “con-
tact zones” (Pratt 1991) situated between two life-worlds which are expe-
r ienced a s bei ng d i fferent f rom each ot her. Therefore, i f t h is is to be a book
about African ways of dealing with cultural difference, it also needs to be
about t he accompa ny i ng med ia. I n fac t , most med iat ions of c u lt u ra l d i ffer-
ence I discuss in the following chapters are at the same time remediations
(Bolter and Grusin 2000). African cultural producers mediate between
two contrasting life-worlds, and this frequently occurs on the basis of
a difference in the media employed. Colonial military parades are thus
turned into rituals; foreign films become photo novels, comic books, and
songs; and the news coverage of international media houses is made into
stickers, posters, and even scam letters.
Seen from a slightly different angle, I am interested in one of several
possible effects of what in older anthropological writing has been dubbed
“culture contact.” This needs some explanation. Unlike older anthropol-
og y, I a m avoid ing any essentia l ist or substantia l ist rei fication of “cu lt ure”
as a homogeneous and neatly circumscribed entity. Instead, I conceptu-
alize “culture” first and foremost as an ideological construct that comes
into play whenever groups with different social norms, values, and beliefs
(embodied in corporeal practices and material objects) come into con-
tact with one another. Fredric Jameson (1993: 33) writes, “Culture is not a
‘substance’ or a phenomenon in its own right, it is an objective mirage that
arises out of the relationship between at least two groups. This is to say that
no group ‘has’ culture all by itself: culture is the nimbus perceived by one
group when it comes into contact with and observes another one.” Despite