A History of African Popular Culture
Title | A History of African Popular Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Karin Barber |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 213 |
Release | 2018-01-11 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1107016894 |
A journey through the history of African popular culture from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Popular Culture in Africa
Title | Popular Culture in Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Stephanie Newell |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 346 |
Release | 2013-11-12 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1135068941 |
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.
Youth and Popular Culture in Africa
Title | Youth and Popular Culture in Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Ugor |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
Total Pages | 419 |
Release | 2021 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1648250246 |
"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--
Africans and the Politics of Popular Culture
Title | Africans and the Politics of Popular Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Toyin Falola |
Publisher | University Rochester Press |
Total Pages | 350 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1580463312 |
Explores the instrumentalization of various aspects of popular culture in Africa.
Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa
Title | Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Walid El Hamamsy |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 285 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0415509726 |
This book explores the current historical moment through works of popular culture produced in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa region, Turkey, and Iran. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and other issues in film, cartoons, talk shows, music, dance, blogs, graphic novels, fiction, fashion, and advertisements.
African Youth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture
Title | African Youth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Vivian Yenika-Agbaw |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 268 |
Release | 2014-01-21 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1134623933 |
This book explores how African youth are depicted in contemporary literature and popular culture, and discusses the different ways by which they attempt to construct personal and cultural identities through popular culture and social media outlets. The contributors approach the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, looking at images in children’s and adolescent literature from Africa, and the African diaspora, from Nollywood and Hollywood movies, from popular magazines, and from youth cultures encountered directly through field experiences. The findings reveal that there are many stereotypes about Africa, African youth and black cultures, and that African youth are aware of these. Since they juggle multiple identities shaped by their ethnicities, race and religion, it is often a challenge for them to define themselves. As they also share a global youth culture that transcends these cultural markers, some take advantage of media outlets to voice their concerns and participate in political struggles. Others simply use these to promote their personal interests. Contributors ponder the challenges involved in constructing unique identities, offering ideas on how African youth are doing so successfully or not in different parts of the continent and the African diaspora, and thus offer new possibilities for youth studies.
Readings in African Popular Culture
Title | Readings in African Popular Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Karin Barber |
Publisher | James Currey |
Total Pages | 204 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN |
'Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music and visual art all thrive.' - Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House This collection of essays examines the way in which African popular culture has moved centre stage since the early 1980s. The emphasis is on the verbal rather than the visual, and topics covered include the oral tradition, and women in popular culture. KARIN BARBER is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana University Press