ABSTRACT

This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts.

Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making.

An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

chapter 1|27 pages

Ethiopian Imprints

Reading and Writing Ethiopia in 1930s South Africa 1

chapter 2|18 pages

Local Authors, Ephemeral Texts

Anglo-Scribes and Anglo-Literates in West African Newspapers

chapter 5|22 pages

Gendering the Popular

Making a Case for FEMRITE in Uganda and Beyond 1

chapter 6|20 pages

Scandals, Controversies and African Literary Prizes

Between Intertextuality and Plagiarism

chapter 7|16 pages

TED Talks, Blogging, and Celebrity

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Popular Imagination

chapter 9|20 pages

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Methods of Speculation in African Popular Culture

chapter 10|18 pages

Literature in the Great Lakes Region

Between Resistance and Resilience 1

chapter 11|15 pages

Funding Popular Culture in Tanzania

Crowdfunding, Self-Funding and the Live Performance as Fundraiser 1

chapter 12|23 pages

Nigerian Film Audiences on the Internet

Influences, Preferences and Contentions *

chapter 13|15 pages

“Don't Tell Me You Want to Marry a White Man!”

The Encounter with Euro-American Characters and Settings in African Commercial Cinema

chapter 15|17 pages

Modelling Success

Women and Self-Making in Kenyan Digital Spaces 1

chapter 17|23 pages

Coding the City

Mapping Eco-Systems and Zones of Opportunity in Kinshasa's Emerging Tech Scene

chapter 19|20 pages

Meaning and Multiplicity

Complexity and Play in Tanzanian Hip Hop

chapter 21|18 pages

The Police Is Your Friend

Instagram Comedy and the Defamiliarization of the Postcolonial State

chapter 22|18 pages

“Di one Wey Dey Pain me Pass …!”

Social Satire, Caricature and Mimicry in the Comic Act of AY

chapter 23|21 pages

#ObinimStickerChallenge

Visual Mediations of Suspicion in Religious Prosumer Parody Media in Contemporary Ghana