LAUSR

Laura Fair’s Reel Pleasures offers a rewarding journey through the vibrant history of the Tanzanian cinema industry across the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. Previously, in Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (OhioUniversity Press, 2002), Fair delved into the intersections of leisure, politics, and Zanzibari identity formation. In Reel Pleasures, she casts a broader geographical net but retains a firm focus on popular culture and pastimes as a window into Tanzanian world-making, particularly in relation to gender, youth identity, socialism, and modernity. Fair’s analysis deftly weaves together the economic, cultural, and political factors that both culminated in and sustained “one of the richest African and Asian moviegoing cultures on the continent” by the late 1950s (4) before it succumbed to the forces of structural adjustment and neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s. She draws upon extensive ethnographic and archival research, interweaving vivid recollections of cinema-going shared in oral interviews with fine-grained analyses of ticket sales, colonial legislation, the impact of entertainment taxes, and global distribution practices. Her multifaceted methodology and insightful analysis culminate in a textured understanding of “the city’s cinematic beating heart” (11), where codes of urban citizenship and cosmopolitan identities were collectively forged. Fair explores the cultures of entrepreneurship and spectatorship that kept the cinematic heart beating. In Chapters One and Two, she introduces the reader to the tireless “cinematic capitalists” (16) who sought to provide a top-notch film-going experience as well as an unprecedented selection of global films. Fair traces the entrepreneurs’ navigations of regional and transnational networks of global film supply, changing technologies, colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies, and international politics. She explains how Tanzanian Asian cinema owners and managers integrated themselves into the social fabric of the neighborhoods where the cinemas were located; she