Harriet D. Lyons

Television in contemporary urban life: Benin City, Nigeria

During 1983 and 1984 the author and her husband conducted a study of the impact of the mass media on the daily lives of the inhabitants of Benin City, Nigeria. The investigators studied television, radio, the press, and popular literature, employing a mixture of ethnographic and sociological methodologies, though a heavy stress on television was dictated by informants’ preferences for that medium, itself a finding of the study. This author was especially interested in the effects of mass communications on family life, and this paper concerns a rapid privatization of life in Benin, which has accompanied the penetration of television into the local mass market. Informants drew connections between television and significant changes in domestic life, including more private living patterns and changes in the structure of domestic authority. These changes were also reflected in a significant amount of media content. Increased urban privacy had important methodological consequences for the researchers, which are...

Presences and Absences in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism

Edward Saids Culture and Imperialism (1993) might be described as an extended scrutiny of the literary representation of colonial history. In the first part of the book, Said argues that the colonial project depended for its success as much upon art as upon gunboats. In the latter part of the book, he examines some of the ways in which resistance has been recorded in counterpoint to colonial and neo-colonial motifs. Some of the more prominently featured names in both sections come as no surprise. Conrad, Kipling, Forster, Camus, Fanon, C6saire, and Tagore would astonish us if they were absent, though Saids encounter with all of them is more complicated than one might expect. With regard to Conrad and Kipling, for example, Said locates in their work submerged texts of resistance, pointing out irreversible turns toward the end of empire, though neither author is yet willing to acknowledge the possible rightness of that path. In Camus, despite that authors disillusion with the French cause in Algeria, Said senses an unwillingness to confront Arabs as people, rather than foils. In Fanon, Said finds a plea not only for Third World nationalism but for a global egalitarianism and magnanimity, which he sees as a necessary completion to the nationalist endeavour. All this signals a work of unusual intricacy, and the reader is not disappointed in that regard. For my part, the inclusions, exclusions, and emphases of the book constitute its real novelty, though I am not equally happy with all of Saids decisions. Said announces his strategy for the first segment of the book by including a detailed treatment of Jane Austen, certainly not a writer whose presence is de rigeur in a work on the literature of imperialism. In the second part, he includes an extended assessment of William Butler Yeats as a writer of resis-