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Description
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Studio portrait of Abdullah Bin Alawi, also known as Prince Abudin, the son of a deposed Sultan of Nzwani Island, in the Comoros Archipelago, who had once represented his father as an ambassador to Mauritius. Though in reality no longer a prince, in early 1858 he managed to convince the British Political Resident in Aden and subsequently other administrators around the globe that they should grant him certain privileges and for almost a decade he travelled the world under various assumed names at the expense of the British Government. Alawi went to Karachi, Muscat, Zanzibar, Madras, Sri Lanka, Aden, Madagascar, Cape Town, Paris and in 1863 he finally made it to London and was last heard of in Cairo in 1866. Jeremy Prestholdt's uphold that the Abdullah Bin Alaw case " [...] reveals the efficacy of cross-cultural performances of similarity - a strategy of appeal that I call similitude - on the stage of global relation. It demonstrates how the strategic uses of imported symbols affected the producers of those symbols and ultimately their relation to Nzwanians. Nzwanians relied on similitude to affect relations with diverse foreigners, including Arab, French, and American visitors. But by exploring the extreme case of Nzwanian appropriations of Englishness, we can more clearly discern how the cultural appropriation of symbols in even seemingly marginal locales has affected patterns of global interrelation". Cit. Prestholdt, J. (2008). Domesticating the world: African consumerism and the genealogies of globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press., p. 13., Title from item. Date devised by Library staff., Main Heritage Compact General, HC.HP.25165, 2-D Graphic, Item-ID: i1553263x, BIB-ID: 1006689, Prestholdt, J. (2008). Domesticating the world: African consumerism and the genealogies of globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 13-17. |
