ABSTRACT
As an entry point to this discussion, this chapter finds significant John Street’s thesis about the relationship between politics and popular culture, particularly his argument that this relationship is not just about popular culture ‘reflecting’ or ‘causing’ political thoughts. Street contends that popular culture does not make people think and act in particular ways. Yet this is not to suggest popular culture has no political agency. Street merely cautions that posing the debate in a manner that ‘looks for cause and effect’ may not be useful, arguing that popular culture ‘neither manipulates nor mirrors us . . . [w]e are not compelled to imitate it, any more than it has to imitate us. Instead, we live through and with it’ (1997: 4). A number of scholars of popular culture typically characterize the relationship between politics and popular culture in terms of ‘cause and effect’. Achille Mbembe’s ambivalence towards certain forms of popular culture such as the use of laughter as a
means of ridiculing power being necessarily fatalistic is a case in point (1992a). This chapter does not discuss what popular culture ‘causes’. Instead, it teases out how the political, more appropriately how the ‘dramaturgy of power’, is enacted in sites of popular cultural production. The chapter argues that the public face of power in Kenya is ‘a performance’, ‘a drama’, in essence, a ‘dramaturgy of power’. This ‘per formance’ is perhaps best captured by Mbembe’s description of the postcolony as a ‘simulacrum’, which he defines as ‘a regime of unreality’ (1992a: 8). Within this per formance, this chapter is particularly interested in how certain forms of cultural pro duction, to paraphrase Street, shed their pleasures and become – through the uses to which they are put and through judgments made of them – forms of political prac tice (1997: 12). James Scott reminds us that popular culture makes public ‘hidden transcripts’, in which are written ‘the anger and reciprocal aggression denied by the presence of domination’ (1990: 19). Scott notes that the ‘hidden transcripts’ can be found in rumour, gossip, folktales, songs, rituals, codes and euphemism – a good part of the folk culture of subordinate groups (Scott 1990). Reflecting on the same argu ment, Street argues that such a culture ‘becomes part of a political struggle to estab lish a particular view of the world, one which challenges the conventions of the dominant common sense’ (1997: 12). But it is to be noted that the ‘hidden tran scripts’ are not just statements of suppressed emotions; they are a kind of action. Indeed, as Scott reminds us, it is important to think of the ‘hidden transcripts’ as a ‘condition of practical resistance rather than a substitute for it’ (1990: 191). This chapter, however, concedes that not all popular culture can be treated as forms of political resistance. Although interested in oppositional practices within popular cul tural forms as they are enacted in the news media, the chapter acknowledges this site as comprising multiple contradictory voices simultaneously occupied by both ruler and ruled. Since independence, Kenya has had a turbulent political history, now the subject of a rich corpus of literature (see Atieno Odhiambo 1987, 2002, 2004; Cheeseman and Branch 2008; Haugerud 1995; Throup and Hornsby 1998). This history reveals a predominantly anxious relationship between news media and the successive administrations. At independence, the news media was co opted into supporting Jomo Ken yatta’s ‘nation building project’, one invented by the government as unequivocal although part of the administration’s regime building strategy. Kenyatta argued that as a newly independent state, Kenya had various competing interests – ethnic, reli gious, political, racial – which, unless checked, would impede the country’s devel opment. By using state institutions and other instruments within the public and private sphere such as the media, Kenyatta ensured that opposition to his rule was delegitimized on the grounds that this was inconsistent with the needs of the young nation. Yet what Kenyatta created was a ‘coercive political superstructure’ (Hyden 2006) sustained through force but also through a regime of invented mythologies that constituted a very specific ‘ideology of order’ (Atieno Odhiambo 1987). The media became a part of Kenyatta’s political project, circulating and popularizing state mythologies under the guise of promoting national development.
