African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media by Matthias Krings (review)

Matthias Krings situates African cultural producers as “brokers of global mass culture” in his new book African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. As the title suggests, Krings centers his focus on African cultural productions that appropriate works originating from outside the African continent. Krings explores this through the multiple ways that a single piece of cultural production is reinvented and expressed across time and space, which leads him to a variety of cultural sites. He grounds the research in firsthand experiences and personal accounts of how these productions were created, received, and remembered. The book is an excellent addition to the African Expressive Cultures series.

Krings frames his argument within “experiences of cultural difference,” which serves as an updated version of the anthropological term “culture contact” (3). This nuanced new reading of how culture moves and why it changes rethinks appropriation as “mediations between the foreign and the familiar” that “contribute to the construction of local modernities” (3). Krings asserts that storylines and images that would have been familiar to American audiences took on new meanings and had renewed purposes in their new forms for African audiences. These changes made the cultural product more palatable for local audiences. Krings inserts his work within the subdiscipline of media anthropology and weaves its research strands throughout the book.

Krings extends his argument across several mediums. He begins the chapters by exploring historical roots and historiography, as wells as his own connections to the sources. Although Krings provides deep historical analysis in each chapter, the narrative arc of the book moves through time, with the final chapters delving into more contemporary examples. Krings opens the introduction with a personal encounter of the cultural iterations of the film Titanic in Tanzania, before returning to the topic in a deeper analysis in the third chapter. This example serves as a touchstone for understanding how culture is remade and the meaning embedded in each iteration. The first chapter serves as a slight departure, as Krings details how religious ceremonies featuring spirit possession in northern Nigeria engaged with colonialism. He traces spirits believed to be of European descent back to 1925 French colonial West Africa and argues that possession was not a parody, but rather a cultural appropriation that embodied “spiritualized copies of powerful others” (31). Following the first chapter, Krings engages with cultural productions that emerge from the African cottage industry. His second chapter delves into photo novels featuring Lance Spearman from the 1960s and 1970s. Through still images from issues of Lance Spearman, an analysis of the “roots and routes” that photo novels took throughout Francophone West Africa, and interviews with people who read the adventures of the “African James Bond” as children, Krings shows that photo novels demonstrated a new African modernity that readers could identify with during decolonization. He also creatively analyzes his sources by extrapolating the identities of the Spearman fanbase through the demographics of the oral histories he conducted.

Krings’s argument that these photo novels were a “surrogate for film” offers a logical transition to the movie industry in the next three chapters (56). He returns to Titanic in Africa by examining four cultural productions that emerge. The most notable part of his argument centers on a Tanzanian Adventist choir’s song. Although the songwriting origins predate the James Cameron film, the decision to record it in 2000 likely stemmed from the film’s popularity. In this new iteration of the Titanic story, the message becomes a parable with deeper religious undertones. His look at Kanywood addresses how the Hausa film industry has appropriated Indian films while shifting to culturally survive in northern Nigeria, where there was a constant balance between drawing audiences and trying to avoid censorship. Krings’s analysis of Nollywood in Tanzania explores how films are localized, particularly through video narration and dubbing.

The final three chapters are a departure, as they explore how cottage culture industries operated in mediums other than film. Krings argues that Osama bin Laden merchandise...