Readings in African Popular Culture - Softcover

Barber, Karin

3.75

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780852552360: Readings in African Popular Culture

Softcover

ISBN 10: 085255236X ISBN 13: 9780852552360

Publisher: James Currey, 1997

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'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

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Review:

...likely to become the main source book for African culture studies during the next decade... the enormous value of Readings in African Popular Culture in bringing together such a heterogeneous selection of nuanced, well-researched, thought-provoking articles from the emerging field of African Cultural Studies. - David Kerr in AFRICAN THEATRE
... a critical testament of African popular culture. I strongly recommend it to readers and libraries.- Tanure Ojaide in AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW
... extraordinarily rich collection full of informative detail and excellent interpretative analysis. There is not a single piece that fails to fascinate; my own favourites include Olatunde Bayo Lawuyi on 'The World of the Yoruba Taxi Driver', Achille Mbembe on Cameroonian cartoons, and Alec J.C. Pongweni on 'The Chimurenga Songs of the Zimbabwean War of Revolution'. Broader contextualising essays include Barber's own scholarly Introduction and Johannes Fabian's 1978 essay 'Popular Culture in Africa'. The volume both reprints pieces that have previously been published (mainly in journals) and offers pieces specially commissioned for this publication. The bibliographical information brought together is worth the price of the volume alone.- Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies in the University of Leeds, in LEEDS AFRICAN STUDIES BULLETIN
... (one of) a rich diet of delicious scholarship on contemporary African culture... - Graham Furniss in AFRICAN AFFAIRS
Readings in African Popular Culture is an important and welcome contribution to a field where standard textbooks are hard to find... Much in the volume points to the fact that although popular culture studies may still be in its formative stage as a field, it has already over the years, generated work of great insight and mature scholarship. ... an impressive collection of inspiring and thought-provoking essays. - Francis B. Nyamnjoh in MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

About the Author:

Karin Barber is Senior Lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies, the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on Yoruba oral literature, religion, and popular culture and worked and traveled with a Yoruba theatre group in the early 1980s. Barber is author of Yoruba Dun un So: A Beginners Course in Yoruba (Part I), I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town, and Yoruba Popular Theatre: Three Plays by the Oyin Adejobi Company, and editor (with P. F. de Moraes Farias) of Discourse and Its Disguises: The Interpretation of African Oral Texts and Self-Assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa.

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