ABSTRACT
This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber’s ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts and texts, contributors ask how African popular cultures contribute to the formation of an episteme. With chapters on theater, Nollywood films, blogging, and music and sports discourses, as well as on popular art forms, urban and youth cultures, and gender and sexuality, the book highlights the dynamism and complexity of contemporary popular cultures in sub-Saharan Africa.
Focusing on the streets of Africa, especially city streets where different cultures and cultural personalities meet, the book asks how the category of "the people" is identified and interpreted by African culture-producers, politicians, religious leaders, and by "the people" themselves. The book offers a nuanced, strongly historicized perspective in which African popular cultures are regarded as vehicles through which we can document ordinary people’s vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|42 pages
Theoretical Overviews
chapter 2|20 pages
On Creativity in African Urban Life
chapter 3|20 pages
"Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition"
part II|105 pages
Gender and Sexuality in African Popular Cultures
chapter 4|24 pages
Sex and Relationship Education of the Streets
chapter 7|23 pages
"Better Ghana [Agenda]"?
part III|45 pages
The Place of Humor
chapter 10|23 pages
Literary Insurgence in the Kenyan Urban Space
part IV|73 pages
Popular Discourses of the Streets
chapter 11|23 pages
Music for Troubled Times
part V|17 pages
Coda