Reel Pleasures

Laura Fair author of Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 and Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad. She teaches at Michigan State University.

"Fair's superb social history of cinema in Tanzania is rich with keen insights into urban life in East Africa throughout the twentieth century.…[Her] impressive versatility means she is equally at ease discussing midcentury international film distribution networks as she is explaining the local appeal of obscure Indian movies." (Foreign Affairs) "Reel Pleasures serves as a powerful reminder that African pastimes are not only sources of pleasure and profit, but they also enrich and expand cultural imaginations and transnational affinities … Fair's book enriches and expands the fields of African cultural history, urban popular culture, and the expressive arts." (African Studies Review) "Fair masterfully integrates the diverse and complicated elements that define a comprehensive examination of film: economic and business history, political history, and the histories of social change, media, and popular culture. A landmark work in both history and film studies." "Tanzania had more cinemas and a more cosmopolitan cinematic experience than the whole of French West Africa. With a long urban culture exposed to influences from across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, its people saw Indian, Egyptian and western films that cut across racial and gender divides from as early as the 1920s. Laura Fair's new book is a fascinating and perceptive study of urban popular culture in Tanzania." "Through copious interviews, Laura Fair recounts the experiences of Tanzanian audiences who flocked to the cinema in greater numbers than anywhere else in East Africa and what it was they loved about the films they saw. She tracks the business of cinema for the entrepreneurs who ran them and how film screenings differed dramatically across the nation. The result is that Reel Pleasures is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the history of cinema we have in African studies."