REEL PLEASURES, cinema audiences and entrepreneurs in twentieth-century urban Tanzania

452pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Athens, 2018

Winner of the 2019 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize for best book in East African 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." Abdul Sheriff, author of Dhow Cultures and the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, commerce, and Islam 

“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.” Charles Ambler, author of Kenyan communities in the age of imperialism

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.