Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania [Paperback]

For young men in urban Tanzania, barbershops are sites of the struggle to earn a living amid economic crisis. With names like Brooklyn Barber House and Boyz II Men, these workplaces are also nodes in an explosion of popular culture that appropriates images drawn from the global circulation of hip hop music, fashion, and celebrity. Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops grapples with the implications of globalization and neoliberalism for urban youth in Africa today, exploring urban Tanzanians' complex, new ways of understanding their place in the world.

Brad Weiss is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. He is author of The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption and Commoditization in Everyday Practice and Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvests: Globalizing Coffee in Colonial Northwest Tanganyika and editor of Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age.

Contents<\>
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Popular Practices and Neoliberal Dilemmas in Arusha

1. Themes and Theories: Popular Culture in Africa and Elsewhere
2. Enacting the Invincible: Youthful Performance in Town
Portraits 1: Bad Boyz Barbers
3. Thug Realism: Inhabiting Spaces of Masculine Fantasy
Portraits 2: Aspiration
4. The Barber in Pain: Consciousness, Affliction, and Alterity
Portraits 3: Uncertain Prospects
5. Gender (In)Visible: Contests of Style
6. Learning from Your Surroundings: Watching Television and Social Participation
7. Chronic Mobb Asks a Blessing: Apocalyptic Hip Hop and the Global Crisis

Conclusion

Notes
References
Index

. . . an important ethnography for interpreting the intersection of youth, masculinity, and popular culture. . . . Street Dreams provides a useful means to understand globalization and neoliberalism, particularly as it affects young men in Africas informal economies.Vol. 52.3 Dec. 2009Brad Weiss's ethnography makes a valualsŠ