Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2023.2169664
Anne W. Gulick
investigates contemporary
调查当代
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2132473
Alfdaniels Mabingo
ABSTRACT Since its creation in the South Bronx in the 1970s, breakdance has proliferated worldwide. In the last three decades, urban youth in Uganda have reconfigured breakdance aesthetics to reflect their creative visions and imagination and in response to the local material conditions in Kampala city. This article examines how the youth have reconfigured, localised, and re-interpreted breakdance aesthetics. I analyse the ways in which breakdancers have anchored their practices in their local social, cultural, political, and artistic conditions and experiences. Building on the stories of the youth, the analysis identifies media as a catalyst in shaping the breakdancers’ kinaesthetic re-imagination, redefinition, appropriation, and adaptation of breakdance. The discussion documents how the youth have constructed breakdance communities of practice, by engaging in performances that embody and manifest their range of experience, including their struggles, realities of deprivation and alienation, but also their sense of connection, their forms of political advocacy and their creativity. The discussion demonstrates how breakdance can be seen as the embodiment of an agenda that gives agency to the youth, and forms of agency that are situated in local realities.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2132474
Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed
ABSTRACT Tuti Island is a river island located at the junction of the Blue and the White Nile in Greater Khartoum, the capital region of the Sudan. Through the process of documenting their genealogies, some of inhabitants of Tuti Island have constructed a historical narrative about the origins and early settlement of the island and of the Maḥas extended families who live there. For many of the Maḥas of Tuti, documenting their genealogies is a way of overcoming their fear about the island losing its uniqueness, because of urban master plans through which the island is envisioned as a waterfront development. By attaching their families’ histories to the island, they hope to assert their sense of belonging. Moreover, some of the island’s genealogists have traced their genealogical lines as far back as the time before their ancestors migrated from northern Sudan and ended up on Tuti island. The social alienation Maḥas Tuti are experiencing plays a vital role in driving people to attach their genealogies and family histories to Qāmī, the “original” land of the Maḥas of Tuti island and construct an imagined homeland.
{"title":"“Tuti is Losing its Uniqueness”: Genealogy Documentation of the Maḥas of Tuti Island and the (De)Construction of Belonging","authors":"Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed","doi":"10.1080/13696815.2022.2132474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2022.2132474","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Tuti Island is a river island located at the junction of the Blue and the White Nile in Greater Khartoum, the capital region of the Sudan. Through the process of documenting their genealogies, some of inhabitants of Tuti Island have constructed a historical narrative about the origins and early settlement of the island and of the Maḥas extended families who live there. For many of the Maḥas of Tuti, documenting their genealogies is a way of overcoming their fear about the island losing its uniqueness, because of urban master plans through which the island is envisioned as a waterfront development. By attaching their families’ histories to the island, they hope to assert their sense of belonging. Moreover, some of the island’s genealogists have traced their genealogical lines as far back as the time before their ancestors migrated from northern Sudan and ended up on Tuti island. The social alienation Maḥas Tuti are experiencing plays a vital role in driving people to attach their genealogies and family histories to Qāmī, the “original” land of the Maḥas of Tuti island and construct an imagined homeland.","PeriodicalId":45196,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"438 - 455"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46194752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2135494
Yong Zhang, Yiwen Xia
ABSTRACT In the 1970s, Hong Kong kung fu films were distributed across Africa and reached large audiences. Although the spread of Hong Kong films in Africa has received some scholarly attention worldwide, the African reception of Chinese films in the post-Mao era has rarely been analysed. Based on archival research and the collation of historical data and materials, this article discusses the background and advancement of the new Chinese socialist martial arts films across Africa and uses the acclaimed film Wudang as a case study to explore the spread of Chinese socialist martial arts films. This article argues that Mainland Chinese films’ imitation of Hong Kong films was a strategic choice made in the context of the Economic Reform and Opening Up policies, in response to Africans’ changing attitudes toward socialist ideology. The research contributes to the understanding of the historical exchanges between China and Africa in the post-Mao era, as well as to the topic of cooperation in the Global South today.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2106949
C. Rono
ABSTRACT Since the production of the earliest Kalenjin traditional albums in the 1920s, the community’s traditional songs have evolved and transformed. This article traces this historical process by considering how these songs developed from folk songs performed during Kambaget (sports competitions) and from the earliest compositions of Bekyibei arap Mosonik, Kipchamba arap Tapotuk and their contemporaries, to the modern-day Kalenjin popular hits. The article documents the earliest recordings of Kalenjin music tracks as well as the bands, and traces the legacies of Kipchamba’s Koilong’et Band from the artists of 1940s and those of the later decades through to the younger generations of the 1990s, 2000s and today. This is done in order to determine the zones of contact as well as departures from prototypical and popular Kalenjin traditional songs. Taking the 1990s liberation of the airwaves as focus, this essay analyses the extraordinary variety and complexity of “The Oldies” and compares these to contemporary artistic products that have recycled aspects of this historical canon.
摘要自从20世纪20年代卡伦津最早的传统专辑问世以来，社区的传统歌曲已经发生了演变和变革。本文通过考察这些歌曲是如何从Kambaget（体育比赛）期间表演的民歌，以及从Bekyibei arap Mosonik、Kipchamba arap Tapotuk及其同时代人的最早作品，到现代卡伦津流行歌曲，来追溯这一历史过程的。这篇文章记录了卡伦津音乐曲目和乐队的最早录音，并追溯了基普尚巴Koilong'et乐队从20世纪40年代和后来几十年的艺术家到20世纪90年代、21世纪初和今天的年轻一代的遗产。这样做是为了确定接触区域以及与典型和流行的卡伦津传统歌曲的不同。本文以20世纪90年代无线电波的解放为焦点，分析了《老年人》的非凡多样性和复杂性，并将其与当代艺术产品进行了比较，这些产品回收了这一历史经典的某些方面。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2130188
Tobias Warner
ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of the labor of the living dead through readings of recent Senegalese films, novels, comics, and music videos in Wolof and French. The undead have been resurgent in cultural production for decades but these are not your average zombies: they do not inspire collective dread nor are they directed by opaque, outside forces. In Senegal, the focus has more often been on the work of the undead. This enigmatic concept speaks to the pervasive and potentially fatal mismatch between discourses of entrepreneurial self-realization and the crushing limitations and dangers imposed on many by their present circumstances. In representations of undead labor, projects of normative self-improvement devour and outlive the selves they are meant to improve, generating affects of shame and powerlessness and sparking violence toward more marginalized lives. Alongside these dynamics, though, the figure of undead work also seems to contain a grain of counter-hegemonic imagination, even affording visions of alternatives to existing configurations of labor and humanity. Central to this phenomenon is a tendency to exploit the polysemy of the Wolof term liggéey, which means work in a conventional sense but which also refers in certain contexts to witchcraft or gendered labor.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2077706
Jiafang Li
ABSTRACT None of the multinational companies has ever released any film in Malawi – a so-called "fourth world” whose GDP per capita is fourth from the bottom in the world (as of 2018). However, global films are widely found there, including in remote areas. Based on detailed fieldwork materials collected in Malawi, this article discusses the topic of foreign film dubbing (pirating) and consumption in Malawi. After the discussion, this article provides examples of how a "fourth world”, which is excluded by global film networks, inserts itself back into that network again, and further stays connected to the globe.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2088483
Martina Kopf
In this special issue, we read discourses and practices of development in Africa through the lens of African literature and cultural imaginations. The issue brings together a group of scholars at universities in Africa and Europe, from the fields of literary studies, African studies, global history and social science. In their articles, they point out how development thought and practice can be theorised, contested and enriched through literary and cultural analysis. The thinking around “development” has occupied intellectuals, politicians, economists, journalists, activists and writers in Africa and the world for almost a century now – whether affirmatively in the sense of a reflection on what societies need to develop their potential and provide a good life for all; or, controversially, in the sense of a critique of the continued colonisation of national economies, populations, of life and environment through an uneven integration into globalised capitalism in the name of “development” and the inherent “coloniality of power” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). In all these considerations, one would think, cultural imaginaries play a decisive role. However, the opposite was and is often the case, as the agendas of governments, and of national and international organisations in the field of global development, have time and again shown. Indeed, in Africa in particular “culture” has often been constructed as an obstacle and as backward in the discourse on African development (see Odhiambo 2002). For the visionary activist and thinker WangarĩMaathai (2010), recognising this continued devaluation of cultural knowledge in postcolonial Kenya was tantamount to discovering culture as the “missing link”, which would allow us meaningfully to connect the struggle for economic rights and democratisation with the struggle for environmental protection in the Civic and Environmental Education seminars developed with impoverished peasants. What Maathai proposed was an understanding of ecological and economic development that starts from cultural self-knowledge – kwimenya in Gĩkũyũ – as the key to change (Maathai 2010, 170–171). Similarly, E. S. Atieno Odhiambo advocated a research practice “to demonstrate ways of raising cultural questions as a valid approach to critiquing development from above and conceptualizing development from below” (2002, 11). One way to explore how cultural questions can inform a decolonial critique of development is to engage literature, in agreement with Adebanwi (2014), as a privileged site of social thought in Africa, in productive dialogue with development research. For decades, writers, poets and thinkers in Africa and across the diaspora have witnessed the transformation of their worlds through ideologies and practices of directed change, conceived
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Pub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2075835
Veronica Barnsley
ABSTRACT In this article I explore the intersection of literature and development via the figure of the midwife. This approach is prompted by the recognition that, despite their importance, midwives often remain on the margins of both development and global health research, and literary analysis. Making midwives the centre of attention allows us to encounter the range of biomedical processes and practices that punctuate pregnancy and birth, the cultural imagery that shapes their meaning, and the sociopolitical structures that indicate what is possible in reframing maternal and infant health, and development discourses more widely, in decolonial terms. I present critical readings of autobiographical and fictional texts by African midwives who are also activists and writers, including Grace Ogot and Makhosasana Xaba. Bringing these perspectives into dialogue with humanitarian writing and Christie Watson’s midwifery-focused novel, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, allows tensions around the meanings and histories of “development” to surface via the diverse practices and beliefs that midwifery involves. I aim to demonstrate how the midwife has been and remains a uniquely placed agent for change, even when she doesn’t label herself as a development practitioner.
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Pub Date : 2022-04-20DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2022.2053505
J. Wachira
ABSTRACT Species loss is a feature of the development intentions of post-colonial countries like Kenya. Kenya like other postcolonial regimes has often linked wildlife conservation with development agendas. The value of wildlife to post-development aims is evident in the approach taken by state-backed conservation efforts as well as in the language used. Thus, wildlife designates a category of animals that are also capital for the tourism industry, state property and a national resource. However, this is complicated when an animal causes harm to some people leading to the animal being seen as a nuisance. In this article I engage with the agency of language in creating the “problem animal” phenomenon in the context of Kenya's post-independence development agenda. I make my case with a close reading of Ng’ang’a Mbugua’s novella Terrorists of the Aberdare (2009). I argue that literary scholarship’s attention to subjectivity and empathy enables new ways of imagining human-animal engagement.
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