264 african appropriations
distancing” process which scholars of transnational media consumption
describe as one of the attractions global media has for local audiences. Ac-
cording to John Thompson (1995: 175), the appropriation of foreign media
enables spec tators “to ta ke some d ista nce f rom t he cond it ions of t hei r day-
to-day lives—not literally but symbolically, imaginatively, vicariously,”
and to critically question their own lives and living conditions.
In Africa, this process has been observed, for example, with the con-
sumption of Bolly wood movies in northern Nigeria (Larkin 1997) and
Kenya (Fugelsang 1994), and with Nigerian video films in Botswana (Kerr
2011) and South Africa (Becker 2013). Unlike the vast majority of such
audiences, the cultural producers whose work I discuss do not content
themselves with merely imagining how local life would look under dif-
ferent conditions, but they express their visions of other possible lives
and hence their “symbolic distancing” from their day-to-day existence
through their own cultural production. This kind of appropriation, which
I define as “mimetical interpretation,” never implies simple reproduction
but always copying and changing. Thus, Kany wood films and Bongo mov-
ies, which usually entertain mimetical relationships to both alien and lo-
cal forms of cultural production, offer their audiences particular visions
of “Afromodernity.” According to Jean and John Comaroff (2004: 202),
who coined this term, Afromodernity is not “a response to European mo-
dernity, or a creation derived from it,” but “a complex formation” that “is
actively forged, in the ongoing present, from endogenous and exogenous
elements of a variety of sorts.” The African appropriators whose work I
discuss herein are among those who are “actively forging” Afromodernity.
This holds equally true for the “crazy white men” I discuss in chapter 8.
They participate in Afromodernity and give their particular brand of it a
certain cosmopolitan spin. Their success with African audiences proves
that by and large their contributions meet with approval.
A s we see in this book, ex plorations of the possible may occur not only
on the representational level of the finished cultural products but also
during their production processes. In chapter 4, I call Kany wood film
sets quintessential heterotopian spaces because they were marked by a
noticeable difference in terms of social conduct. During the film shoots,
which usually lasted only a few days and took place in spatial seclusion,
many of the constraints governing everyday male-female interaction in