By stressing the importance of modernities that run parallel to the classical paradigm of the West I want to criticise recent work in African studies and media studies that has been dominated by the focus on local 'resistance' to various forms of 'dominant culture'. Abu-Lughod has warned that the 'romance of resistance' tends to focus on the creativity of resistors and fails to explore fully the effectiveness of systems of power (1990). My concern is different, arguing that concepts of resistance in African studies and elsewhere often depend on a reductive binary distinction between oppression and resistance. The effect of this is that phenomena that cannot be neatly organised within that binary distinction then fall out of view. In a recent review essay on African historiography Frederick Cooper addresses some of these concerns:
The difficulty [in contemporary Africanist historiography] is to confront the power behind European expansion without assuming it was all-determining and to probe the clash of different forms of social organisation without treating them as self-contained and autonomous. The binaries of coloniser/colonised, Western/nonWestern and domination/resistance begin as useful devices for opening up questions of power but end up constraining the search for precise ways in which power is deployed and the ways in which power is engaged, contested, deflected, and appropriated. [Cooper, 1994: 1517]
Cooper wishes to move away from what he sees as monolithic constructions of civilised coloniser and primitive colonised (and the related labels of modernity and tradition) by asserting the heterogeneity of both colonial rule and African resistances. While complicating the picture, he nevertheless remains wedded to a structural binarism that looks at the organisation of African experience in terms of its response to Western rule and its consequences.
Recent theories of postcolonialism have also unintentionally tended to reify this distinction in that the term 'postcolonial', despite a variety of different definitions, connotes a historical periodisation based on the core period of colonialism.(5) Northern Nigeria, for example, was colonised by the British in 1903, and achieved independence in 1960. A history of over a thousand years is divided into the period pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial which centres less than sixty years of British rule at the heart of Hausa experience. Even while criticising the role of the West in postcolonial Nigerian life, theorists of cultural imperialism and postcolonialism often view Nigerian reality largely in terms of its relation to the West, with the resulting irony of reaffirming cultural imperialism at the same moment as critiquing it. It is as if the periphery could not have an experience independent of its relation to metropolitan centres. Shohat and Stam criticise this contemporary insistence on resistance for producing an 'inverted European narcissism' positing a monolithic West as the source of all evil in the world, and which 'reduces non-Western life to a pathological response to Western domination' (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 3). The widespread popularity of Indian films in Nigeria necessitates a revision of conceptions of global cultural flows that privilege the centrality of the West and refuse to recognise the common historical process of centres and peripheries engaged in contemporary cultural production.
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