Popular Culture in Africa The Episteme of the Everyday [Hardcover]

This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barbers 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 peoples vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.

Foreword by Karin Barber 1. Introduction: Popular Culture in Africa: the Episteme of the Everyday Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome I. Theoretical overviews 2.On Creativity in African Urban Life: African Cities as Sites of Creativity and Emancipation Till F?rster 3.Our Tradition is a Very Modern Tradition: From Cultural Tradition to Popular Culture in South Western Nigeria Will Rea II. Gender & Sexuality in African Popular Cultures 4.Sex and Relationship Education of the Streets: Advice on Love, Sex, and Relationships in Popular Swahili Newspaper Columns and Pamphlets in Tanzania Uta Reuster-Jahn 5. The Other Womans Ml“ç