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.17 People may have any of these literacies in their home language, andless in a lingua franca (or vice versa).In addition to all of these forms of literacy-employinglanguage, there are also the "languages" of the media, the body, the space, the "signs in the street."It may be possible to be "critically" literate without being book literate; and it might be possible tobe critically book literate and also be politically impotent.When Appiah appeals to the "changingeveryday practices of African life," it is to this concatenation of signs that he appeals.But how to read them? The strategy for reading that is generally adopted normally involves someschematization derived from one or other matrix borrowed from the postcolonial library.Thisinvolves many forms.For example, in putting together the exhibition Africa Explores, SusanVogel and her colleagues came up with a fivefold classification to enable them to organizeAfrican art: traditional art, new functional art, urban art, international art, and "extinct" art.Thisneat packaging within the exhibition concealed a curiosity of place: much of the discussion of"traditional" art rests on an examination of Dogon masks from Mali: that of "new functional" artfrom Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana; that of "urban" art from Zaire; that of "international" artand "extinct" art randomly from different parts of Africa.-132-file:///C|/Archivos%20de%20programa/eMule/Incoming/Stanley%20Fis.Jameson%20(Ed)%201998%20The%20Cultures%20Of%20Globalization.htmlAlthough there is some heuristic advantage in coming up with some form of classification, it ispertinent to raise the question: In whose interests is this classification made? The answer mustsurely be the collector.Obviously, this collector is of a tradition different from the one carefullyexplored by Annie E.Coombes in her detailed study of the British "collecting" of African art inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the relationship among imperialism,ethnography, natural history, and the development of the museum.18 If anything, the Vogelsystem is a way of trying to transcend that earlier form of classification, and even Vogel's ownschema for the earlier exhibition in 1987.In her foreword, Vogel admits that "this book is mainlythe work of Western writers who speak as intimate outsiders.There is nothing specifically Africanabout this kind of study; we are aware that the whole exercise is typical of late-twentieth-centuryWestern scholarship.The use of the category 'art' to describe the objects included here -- like thecategory 'museum' -- can be defended on grounds of theory and of convenience, but this conceptis in no way inherent in all of the African objects under discussion.It is a strictly Westerncategory that we employ here as a useful tool." 19 This disclaimer (even if Mudimbe is given thelast word in the catalogue) posits the ongoing problem of creating a discourse that does not havepostcolonial written all over it.The African artist, crafter, shaman, schoolteacher, hairdresserengaged in their everyday practices operate without knowledge of these categorizations or throughthem.What takes place in a gallery in New York or Paris is part of a discourse that may trickledown to the seamstress or the teak carver, but chances are that it will do so only if it becomesfrozen into the search for particular commodities.But if the language is not bounded by the museum, where is it? Take two readings, one on themedia and another in the languages of everyday negotiation.These have the advantages of beingvery specific and randomly general.The media is not merely new technology or an opportunity togain new means of communicating: it is, like every language, processed through power, ideology,and community relations.20 Some of the explorations of African film, for example, such asDiawara's African Cinema: Politics and Culture and Lizbeth Malkmus and Roy Armes's Arab andAfrican Film Making, necessarily stress not only the political economy of making films but alsothe importance of language and community and contrasting narratives.Important as these booksare in providing overviews, they barely address the nuances of the negotiating process that placesmedia at the center of both personal and-133-file:///C|/Archivos%20de%20programa/eMule/Incoming/Stanley%20Fis.Jameson%20(Ed)%201998%20The%20Cultures%20Of%20Globalization.htmlpolitical-economic pressures.African film, in spite of its being based on newer communicativetechnologies than print, is still, in its African version, less immediate than newspapercommunication.African film, because of the processes of funding and distribution, is a minorityculture, celebrated through the work of the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI) andthe biennial festival at Ougadougou, but otherwise an artform for European and North Americanfilm festivals.Most of the Africans who watch films see B movies from the United States, Britain,France, or India, either in their local movie houses or, if they have access, on a television stationcontrolled by the government or owned by an associate of the government.Newspapers, however, in most parts of Africa, are something different.Although operating undervarious forms of censorship and government or foreign ownership, their existence is somehowtaken as a sacred mandate (because freedom of speech is guaranteed in every constitution?because every country has some commitment to literacy, which is equated with the press?).Nocountry has banned newspapers and magazines altogether, and the idea that "news" shouldsomehow be transmitted in print provides something of an ongoing commitment to a conceptionof the fifth estate.In his book I Accuse the Press, Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan journalist-intellectualliving in Africa, at times editor of quite different daily newspapers in Kenya, Uganda, andTanzania, provides a strategic view of the problems of being a journalist in Africa.21 This KenyanJ'Accuse is ultimately a collective self-accusation.Its importance is that Kenya, in many ways,presents itself as the model of a diversified newspaper industry.Apart from a number of weekliesthat come and go, there are three daily newspapers: the Nation, the Times, and the Standard.Thefirst is owned by the Aga Khan, the second by the governing party, the Kenya African NationalUnion (KANU), and the third by the British conglomerate Lonrho.Ochieng worked on two ofthem either as journalist or in various editorial capacities.In addition, he also worked on theUganda Sunday Times and in Dar es Salaam [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]