ABSTRACT
In Manthia Diawara’s (2005) We Won’t Budge, he posits that it is ‘erroneous’ to believe that you can ‘leave one culture and walk into another without contaminating it or being contaminated by it’ (p. 131). One place where this is best seen is in contemporary youth cultures across Africa. African youth create, in varied imaginative ways, cultures that mirror both their local and international social, political and economic influences and linkages. For instance, Jamaican and Caribbean reggae music has brought to youth culture in Africa patois, fashion and dreadlocks. Similarly, African youth adopted, reinvented and popularized the American gangster rap culture with its attendant baggy jeans, bling jewellery, base-ball caps and larger than life t-shirts. African youth are, one can argue, symptomatic of the multi-directionality of Appadurai’s (2011, p. 285) conceptualization of global culture through scapes, ‘fluid, irregular shapes’ of global culture. In other words, youth culture in Africa intersects with global cultural flows, and thus their cultural artefacts bear the marks of these influences. This chapter addresses the conjuncture between media globalization, African youth cultures and new identity politics especially in the context of a neoliberal era.
