'I am like a movie star in my street': photographic self-creation in postcolonial Kenya

bibliographic database
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Book chapter

Title:	'I am like a movie star in my street': photographic self-creation in postcolonial Kenya
Author:	Behrend, Heike
Book title:	Postcolonial subjectivities in Africa
Year:	2002
Pages:	44-62
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Kenya
Subjects:	urban youth urban life photography
Abstract:	This chapter deals with popular photography and postcolonial subjectivities in Kenya. For Kenyan urban youth, there is a radically 'desired other', the African American from the ghetto with his fashion, body poses, slang, and hip hop music. The author shows, on the basis of the example of 18-year old Peter Mwasunguchi from Mombasa, how the medium of photography is used as a technique for self-creation by urban Kenyan youth. She examines the ways in which Peter and his friends enter into social exchange around images of themselves as 'the desired other'. Stylized after the African American, their images obliterate the friends' own ethnic differences and thus represent them renewed as autonomous individuals. Bibliogr., notes. [ASC Leiden abstract]