Papers by Lindsey Green-Simms
In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Afric... more In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty ...
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies
A Companion to African Cinema
Postcolonial Automobility
Chapter 3 turns to Francophone cinema, discussing in detail Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierr... more Chapter 3 turns to Francophone cinema, discussing in detail Ousmane Sembene’s Xala and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart. While media scholars like Kristin Ross have often focused on the shared qualities of film and cars—such as movement, image, standardization, mechanization, and displacement—this chapter discusses how African Francophone films reconfigure the link between the moving image and the moving vehicle by disallowing the automobile to represent a continuous, rational forward movement.
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2020
In 2005 Jude Dibia published the ground-breaking novel Walking with Shadows, the first West Afric... more In 2005 Jude Dibia published the ground-breaking novel Walking with Shadows, the first West African novel to feature a gay protagonist. Dibia’s widely acclaimed book tells the story of Adrian Ebele...
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2020
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2021
<p>Chapter 2 focuses on the tragedy of motorcar accidents through a close reading of Nobel ... more <p>Chapter 2 focuses on the tragedy of motorcar accidents through a close reading of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's 1965 post-independence play <italic>The Road</italic> about Nigerian lorry drivers living on the urban periphery<italic>. </italic>This chapter reads the road as a Bakhtinian chronotope – a space-time matrix – that includes various lived times of postcoloniality. </p>
Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, 2019
T he idea for Postcolonial Automobility began amid conversations about globalization, mobility, a... more T he idea for Postcolonial Automobility began amid conversations about globalization, mobility, and postcoloniality at the University of Minnesota in the early 2000s when I was a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Discussions in seminars with Timothy Brennan, Charles Sugnet, John Mowitt, and Cesare Casarino shaped the initial questions in this project, and these faculty members, along with Shaden Tageldin, provided invaluable intellectual guidance and support. I am also grateful for feedback from fellow Minnesota graduate students Stephen Groening, Alicia Gibson, and Andrew Opitz. At Duke University Ranjana Khanna, Negar Mottahedeh, and Charles Piot and faculty and graduate students in the women's studies department provided thoughtful comments that helped to guide my revisions. At American University, I am deeply grateful to my colleagues Richard Sha, David Pike, Despina Kakoudaki, and Erik Dussere for their insightful and constructive notes on more recent iterations. This book also owes a huge debt to Africanist colleagues who provided vital feedback on chapters at various stages throughout my writing process:
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2018
If I had one hope for Postcolonial Automobility it was that the book would prove generative, that... more If I had one hope for Postcolonial Automobility it was that the book would prove generative, that it would be of interest not only to scholars working on automobility and transportation but that it would also prove useful to scholars thinking about infrastructure, material objects, energy politics, and mobility more broadly. It was therefore with great pleasure that I took in the responses to my book by Ato Quayson, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Kenneth Harrow, and Carmela Garritano, and I would be remiss not to thank Carli Coetzee for organizing the roundtable that we all participated in at the 2018 African Literature Association Annual Meeting. The scholars responding to my book have all been quite influential to my intellectual formulation, and I have very much appreciated the ways that they have taken some of the ideas in Postcolonial Automobility and pushed and pulled them in new directions. I have found this both fascinating and humbling, and I am grateful for their thoughts and for the opportunity to say a few brief things in response. One of the main challenges I faced when writing this book was the question of disciplinarity. Early on in the writing process, it was suggested to me that in order to make the disciplinary home of my book more clear, I might reframe the book as an ethnographic project about cars and drivers or even perhaps as a book about African cinema. Luckily, the University of Minnesota Press understood and appreciated that what was central to the book was a focus on cars and their forms of mobility/immobility as well as a focus on different modes of cultural production in West Africa. And luckily, they found manuscript reviewers who would help me to articulate why aesthetic materials were so central to a project that was primarily concerned with West African car culture, about something that exists independently of any literary or cinematic object. Nevertheless, it does not surprise me that there is some debate as to what is the primary concern of Postcolonial Automobility. For instance, Adejunmobi, whose own work focuses on media networks and popular and material culture, states that Postcolonial Automobility is more 'a cultural study of car culture in West African creative works, than a literary study of car culture in West African texts' (2018, 1). However, Harrow, whose most recent work has reevaluated the modes by which we analyze African cinematic texts, suggests that my book is 'not a book about cars, but about how to read cultural representations in Africa today' (2018, 4). Because the book addresses both the object and the text, it makes sense that one might have different interpretations of my emphasis. And while these different readings are more than welcome, Harrow has asked me to reckon a bit more with the question
Postcolonial Automobility, 2017
Chapter 4 examines the popular and low-budget Nollywood video films where the private luxury car ... more Chapter 4 examines the popular and low-budget Nollywood video films where the private luxury car is both a highly coveted object, typically seen driving down paved roads in posh neighborhoods, and a sign of wealth that is often acquired through criminality, witchcraft, magic, or fraud.
Research in African Literatures, 2016
ABSTRACT:This paper examines the treatment of homosexuality in 21st-century Nigerian literature a... more ABSTRACT:This paper examines the treatment of homosexuality in 21st-century Nigerian literature and discusses how the Nigerian literary community critiques discourses of homophobia and explores the everyday fears, desires, pleasures, and anxieties of those who experience same-sex attraction. It argues that 21st-century Nigerian writing can be seen as what Raymond Williams calls “emergent” because it resists the dominant discourses in ways not previously done before and tells diverse stories about same-sex desire that are neither monothematic nor moralistic. This article demonstrates how the work of authors such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Jude Dibia as well as writing published on the Internet in the wake of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act tells queer stories about everyday life and love and the intersecting struggles queer African subjects must face.
Transition an International Review, 2012
Though everyone is quick to deny it, gay-themed movies constitute a popular genre in "Nollyw... more Though everyone is quick to deny it, gay-themed movies constitute a popular genre in "Nollywood," Nigeria's vibrant film industry. Lindsey Green-Simms and Unoma Azuah consider the attitudes the genre conveys about real-life homosexuality.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010
... No Danger No Delay: Wole Soyinka and the perils of the road Lindsey Green-Simms* ... One oc... more ... No Danger No Delay: Wole Soyinka and the perils of the road Lindsey Green-Simms* ... One occurred during the annual Driver's Festival of Ogun, when Kotonu ran over Murano, a palm-wine tapper who was masked as a god. ...
Journal of African Cinemas, 2012
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Papers by Lindsey Green-Simms