Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics
ISBN: 9781800102095
Platform/Publisher: Cambridge Core / Boydell & Brewer
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited

Explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and online media.

This edited collection focuses on the links between youth and African popular culture. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars explore popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. Essays cover a variety of cultural 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. The volume examines the range of music, art, and media African youth produce, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, and the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Essays further explore why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as symbols of the 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.

PAUL UGOR is associate professor of English at Illinois State University.Ndiaye Bamba :

BAMBA NDIAYE is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Music Department at Cornell University. His research interests focus on historical and contemporary social movements in the Black Atlantic, Pan-Africanism, critical race theory, Black popular cultures and digital humanities. He is the author of several peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. His current research projects include Black Social Movement and Digital Technology, " Mbas Mi : Fighting COVID-19 Through Music in Senegal", and "#Justice for Breonna Taylor: Race, Class, Gender and The Rise of Primo-Protesters". Dr. Ndiaye is also the creator and host of The Africanist , an academic podcast which investigates historical and contemporary sociopolitical issues in Africa and the African DiasporasKerr David :

DAVID KERR is Honorary Research Fellow, Department African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham and Research Associate, University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Stowaways on the Indian Ocean: Migration, Memory and Masculinity (2021), and a contributor to Young People and Popular Culture in Africa (University of Rochester Press, 2021). He is editing a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies on 'Quotidian Archives: Popular Culture, Meaning-Making and Everyday Life in Eastern Africa' (forthcoming, 2021). His articles have been published in the Journal of African Media Studies, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, among others.