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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.
Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation. This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences. Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced--it is just as likely that the receiving culture wil...
How racism shapes urban spaces and how African Americans create vibrant communities that offer models for more equitable social arrangements.
From the Clash to Los Crudos, skinheads to afro-punks, the punk rock movement has been obsessed by race. And yet the connections have never been traced in a comprehensive way. White Riot is the definitive study of the subject, collecting first-person writing, lyrics, letters to zines, and analyses of punk history from across the globe. This book brings together writing from leading critics such as Greil Marcus and Dick Hebdige, personal reflections from punk pioneers such as Jimmy Pursey, Darryl Jenifer and Mimi Nguyen, and reports on punk scenes from Toronto to Jakarta.
Abundant prehistoric remains survive in the wide landscapes of Europe, but none are arguably as fascinating or awe-inspiring as the “megalithic” (after the Greek megas: great, and lithos: stone) monuments built by the people who lived here during the three hugely important periods of European prehistory known respectively as the Neolithic, the Copper Age, and the Bronze Age. These huge, prehistoric stone structures can still be found scattered in their thousands across Europe and provide a tentative but evocative link to their builders, and to Europe’s distant past. From the Mediterranean islands to the colder climes of Scandinavia, Exploring Megalithic Europe takes readers to many European countries, examining both famous and lesser-known megalithic monuments and looking at what insights these remarkable reminders of prehistoric life may provide into the ancient communities responsible for their construction.
From best-selling author David Morley, this book presents a set of interlinked essays which discuss and examine some of the key debates in the fields of media and cultural studies. Spanning the last decade, this fascinating and readable book is based on interdisciplinary work on the interface of media and cultural studies, cultural geography and anthropology. Clearly structured in five thematic sections, the book surveys the potential contribution of art-based discourses to the field and offers critical perspectives on the emergence of the ‘new media’ of our age. Including discussion on the status and future of media and cultural studies as disciplines, the significance of technology and new media, and raising questions about the place of the magical in the newly emerging forms of techno-modernity in which we live today, this is a media student must-read.
Just as people are shaped by the time and place they come from, so is music. Readers are invited to explore music that was born from Latin America and to trace its rise to a position of global popularity. They learn about the different instruments used in music styles such as Cuban and Caribbean and how this music influences the music of other cultures. Also featured is an extensive list of recommended Latin music albums, vibrant photographs of Latin music stars such as Gloria Estefan and Daddy Yankee, and annotated quotes from writers and musicians.
In the mid 1980s the Waterboys took a sudden turn away from their climb up the ladder of UK rock stardom and headed out to Ireland—and eventually the rural West of Ireland—to record the remarkable Fisherman’s Blues album. They drew together traditional Irish music; folk, gospel, and blues stylings; and a joyful sense of storied wonder. This tale of the rediscovery of an enchanted musical and lyrical kingdom serves as the framework for Richard Briggs to explore gospel re-enchantment, in dialogue with the worlds of myth and fairy. Drawing on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others, just as did the Waterboys themselves, Invisible Kingdom finds theological wisdom to the soundtrack of the rock band and the fiddle, in celebrating a life-giving Irish odyssey.
Global in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, Creolization as Cultural Creativity explores the expressive forms and performances that come into being when cultures encounter one another. Creolization is presented as a powerful marker of identity in the postcolonial creole societies of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the southwest Indian Ocean region, as well as a universal process that can occur anywhere cultures come into contact. An extraordinary number of cultures from Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the southern United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Réunion, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Suriname, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone are discussed in these essays. ...