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Focusing on the 1920s publications of the Mozambican intellectual C. Kamba Simango (1890–1966), this article explores the transformations of a single story across the pages of amateur ethnomusicology (Natalie Curtis's Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent, 1920), African American children's literature (Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Brownies' Book, 1921), and professional anthropology (Franz Boas's Journal of American Folklore, 1922). In each instance, Simango's name and individual identity is crucial to the presentation of the text, yet the emphasis on the name does not necessarily indicate authorship, which instead emerges more strongly through the interaction of institutional norms, racial prestige, and genre expectations. The transnational author is thus formed through both genre and biography. Revising the formulations of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, I propose a performative notion of authorship that can reflect both the literary paradigm that desires individual expressivity and the ethnographic one that seeks collective culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ken Saro-Wiwa has attracted both popular and scholarly recognition as a significant Nigerian writer and activist. Despite this interest, the television programme Basi and Company that he wrote and directed from 1985 to 1990 has received scant attention, often being dismissed as a frivolous side project unworthy of inclusion in Saro-Wiwa’s oeuvre. This article challenges such neglect, arguing that the show is an essential part of the work of one of the 20th century’s most important public intellectuals. Basi and Company represents a complex re-imagining of the traditional West African trickster figures, such as Kuru the tortoise and the Yoruba mythological deity of Eshu, as a means of engaging with contemporary life under a brutal regime in the post-oil boom period in Nigeria. Its 150 episodes, watched routinely by over 30 million Nigerians, subtly critiqued modern Nigeria and its government, and it deserves a place alongside Saro-Wiwa’s other politically engaged works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of management and organizational history have focused on work and organization as an activity that is paid-for and which takes place outside the home, thus rendering invisible much of what has been women’s works of organization in the past.This article seeks to challenge that by presenting an account of a ritual undertaken by women in medieval France. A reading of the cultural symbolism of the ritual allows a glimpse into the material conditions of their lives and of the organizing for which they were responsible.The ritual allowed them to have a sense of control over lives which were precarious and where women were marginalized and excluded from the official rituals of the Church. The use of ritual, liminality, resistance by groups marginal to the focus of power and activities of sense-making and rationalization are all evident in this tale — and all subjects of ongoing debate and conversation between scholars of organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, a new trend has developed in French cinema. Surprisingly and interestingly, since the late 1980s-early 1990s, the number of films shot in the provinces (which I refer to as 'provincial films') has increased. The representation of the provinces has thus gained momentum and has attracted attention from film professionals, critics and the public alike. There may be several explanations for the statistical increase of provincial films, and I examine a few in the first section of this essay. The second part focuses on Sandrine Veysset's Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël?/Will it Snow for Christmas? (1996). Veysset's first feature film is emblematic of the trend of 1990s provincial films in that it is set in the provinces and made possible by the financial involvement of Paris-based production companies. In this section, I focus principally on the ways that the film both uses and transcends its location through its reliance on the folk tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]