Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania by Laura Fair (review)

Laura Fair's Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania is a detailed look at changing race relations, resistance politics, urban spaces, female empowerment, and African agency through the lens of the cinema industry in twentieth-century Tanzania.

One of Fair's central arguments in Reel Pleasures is that cinema and its industries were spaces of encounter where East Africans defied the spatial and racial geographies meant to define their lives. They did so with creativity, ingenuity, and agility that resulted in a sense of "in-commonness" experienced across racial, class, and political divides. In making this argument, Fair builds on a long tradition of urban social, cultural, and leisure histories of Africa. By emphasizing the myriad ways in which Zanzibaris and Tanzanians (including those descended from immigrants) worked to build inclusive and accessible institutions and to foster communities mobilized around commonalities, Fair pushes back against East African Studies literature that tends, as she rightly points out, to be dominated "by images of othering minority populations" that grant "normativity to the racism of nationalist rhetoric" (22). The book is thus a story of resistance—against colonialism, socialism, patriarchal institutions, and images of East Africa drawn by scholars and historians.

In the tradition of the best social histories, Reel Pleasures is full of detail about East Africans' experiences with cinema, from street-level to censorship boards. This richness is due in part to the diversity of sources Fair consulted and to the intimate relationships she built with her interlocutors. In addition to over 100 interviews, Fair sourced data from beyond the traditional archive to paint a picture of "what going to the movie meant [to Tanzanians] and how people made use of films in their own lives" (32). She used Kiswahili terms, memories of movie-going (places are "containers of memory"), random sampling and surveys, and personal photo collections. She located uncollected holdings and business records of departments, ministries, offices, and parastatals. At the building that formerly housed the Tanzania Film Company, she found reams of records staff presumed had been lost; she hosted an essay competition that produced colorful evidence.

Reel Pleasures includes an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction clearly sets out her arguments, embeds the work in the broader scholarship, and gives readers a sense of how she conducted the research. In Chapter One, Fair looks at business relations between budding cinema entrepreneurs in the early 1900s. Here she sets the stage for an argument that unfolds across several chapters about the importance of reputation and cooperation for businessmen operating in and around the cinema. Elements of the "patron-client relationships that infused nineteenth-century business and leisure networks" shaped the nature of the cinema business such that the goal was "never to eliminate one's rival but to outclass him" (42). For East African cinematic capitalists, reinvesting in their communities with acts of philanthropy was another element inherited from older patterns of thought (70). Chapter Two illustrates the power of cinema to enhance valuable social and cultural capital for a range of people. Stories of managers, ticket sellers, projectionists, concession stand operators, reelers, and human billboards illustrate the social networks, human interactions, and distinct personalities that made cinema central to communities. Fair shows black marketers to be skilled practitioners engaged in what many considered to be a prestigious way to earn a living; unlike in the American mafia, there was little competition (108). Affective ties grew up in this space, creating family and friendship ties across race and class.

Chapter Three (which will be familiar to readers of Cole and Thomas's Love in Africa) focuses on the way in which Hindi films—particularly the film Awara—created space for East Africans to explore the growth of romance and the rise of nationalism (139). This discussion also illustrates Fair's emerging argument about the ways in which film served as a tool for individuals...