Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania
- ISBN-10
- 0226029816
- ISBN-13
- 9780226029818
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 417
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2002-07-28
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Author
- Kelly Askew
Description
Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
By William Edwin DayBlue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
-
New Deal Art in Alabama: The Murals, Sculptures and Other Works, and Their Creators
By Anita Price Davis, Jimmy S. EmersonPeter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
-
The World of Bob Timberlake
By Bob TimberlakeOffers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesTHE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
-
John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss
By Karen Corsano, Daniel WillimanAdelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesThis is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
-
Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History
By Karen LangThrough careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
-
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity
By Karen B. SternGibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
-
Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960
By Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn Museum of ArtExamines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
-
Typography: A Very Short Introduction
By Paul Luna... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...