Remapping urban modernities

Julie Ward's death and the Kenyan grapevine

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2178397
AutoresGrace A Musila (0000-0003-1572-4477, University of the Witwatersrand, autor correspondente)
Ano2008
Volume44
Fascículo1
Páginas37-47
Data de publicação2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449850701820657
OpenAlexW2041442964
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas24

This article examines rumour as a type of urban text which interrogates the officially proclaimed rationality of the modern state. Drawing on reported rumours and allegations about the death of British tourist Julie Ward in Kenya in 1988, it reflects on rumour as a medium that contests the legitimacy of hegemonic "truths" produced through modern institutions in Africa. In their critique of the amenability of modern state institutions to manipulation, the rumours and allegations of the Julie Ward case deplore the failure of the Kenyan state to deliver the promised benefits of postcolonial modernity. At the same time, the rumours engage with certain aspects of this modernity, including modern science and the law, in ways that underscore the porosity of discursive boundaries between "modernity" and "tradition" and which signal the layered continuities between the two

Hegemony · Kenya · Legitimacy · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Sociology · State (computer science · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law