Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa

Description

For more than a century cars have symbolized autonomous, unfettered mobility and an increasingly global experience. And yet, they are often used differently outside the centers of global capitalism. This pioneering book considers how, through the lens of the automobile, we can assess the pleasures, dangers, and limits of global modernity in West Af

Lindsey B. Green-Simms is assistant professor of literature at American University in Washington, D.C.

"Clear, lucid, and engaging. Lindsey B. Green-Simms does an excellent job mediating close literary analysis, broader historical and cultural focus on the car in Africa, and astute theoretical readings."-Marian Aguiar, Carnegie Mellon University "With Postcolonial Automobility, Lindsey B. Green-Simms produces a veritable socio-cultural biography of the automobile and illustrates this through various sources including literary texts, African art and popular movies, the variable opinions of car owners and their users, and the multiple urban legends that have grown up with and around vehicles in this part of Africa. It is a beautifully written gift offering to this most desired object of African modernity."-Ato Quayson, University of Toronto, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism