Stephanie Newell, "Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos" (Duke UP, 2019)

New Books in Sociology · Sep 24, 2020 · 47m

Stephanie Newell, Professor of English at Yale University, came to this project, which explores the concept of “dirt” and how this idea is used and applied to people and spaces, in a rather indirect way, having read the memoirs and journals of merchant traders – particularly the white British traders who were writing about their visits to many of the African colonies. In observing the ways in which these traders discussed the people they encountered in West Africa, Newell notes that the traders cast these encounters as, unsurprisingly, binary. Obviously, the traders also brought their racial…