Download or read book Popular Music Ethnicity and Politics in the Kenya of the 1990s written by T. Michael Mboya and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Okatch Biggy was the single most dominant benga artiste of the 1990s. Over that decade, benga was the most important genre of popular music in Kenya. What is it about the music of Okatch Biggy that made it attractive to his target audience, the Luo of the 1990s? Is there something about the Luo of the 1990s that predisposed them to this music? In the course of answering these—and related—questions, this volume analyzes Okatch Biggy’s songs as works of art, that is, by identifying the aesthetic and rhetorical conventions that are deployed in the songs, and explores the central messages that the music transmits. It shows the significance of the meanings in Okatch Biggy’s music for the Luo of the 1990s by situating it in the historical context from which it emerged. Literary instruments of analysis and contextualizing material gathered from various knowledge archives are deployed in the production of the textual meaning of the popular music of Okatch Biggy, which is used here as a lens through which to understand the relationship between politics and ethnicity in the Kenya of the 1990s.The book’s carefully demonstrated argument is that, in both the form and the content of his music, Okatch Biggy undertook a comprehensive culturalist-nationalist project of Luo definition that was persuasive to his primary audience in the highly ethnicized political context in which he became successful. This is a timely study given the current renewed scholarly interest in African popular music that has come on the back of the rise of leisure studies and the reinvigoration of popular culture studies.
Download or read book The Politics of Everyday Life in Gikuyu Popular Musice of Kenya 1990 2000 written by wa Mutonya, Maina and published by Twaweza Communications. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While probing the politics of everyday in Gikuyu popular music, the main thrust of this book is to unpack the representation of daily struggles through music. Depending mainly on the lyrics of the songs, the study also combines both the textual and the contextual analysis of the music. Music here is studied both as a text, and as an aspect of popular culture. The decade 1990-2000 in Kenya provides two contrasting political developments, which directly impacted on the ordinary Kenyan; firstly, the extremes of the country's one-party rule were at the peak until when multi-party democracy was re-introduced. This ushered in a new era, but with antecedents in one-party rule, where service delivery was below par and economic mismanagement, corruption, assassinations and detentions continued unabated. It is in this contrasting environment that popular arts proliferated as a way of countering the repressed freedom of expression. This book, therefore, looks at how the Gikuyu musicians reacted and responded to these social and political realities in their songs. Music is discussed as an essential site for creation, re-creation and negotiation of the various forms of identities.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Kenya written by Michael Mwenda Kithinji and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kenya has a rich and complex history. Due to the vast discoveries of prehistoric archaeological remains, Kenya is one of the few places in the world with the largest and most complete record of human’s cultural development. Furthermore, the country’s strategic location astride the Indian Ocean and the East African littoral attracted numerous foreigners such as the Arabs, Persians, Portuguese, Americans, British, Chinese, French, and Germans. Additionally, immigrants from throughout Africa and beyond have settled in Kenya to escape conflict or political persecution, while others wanted an opportunity to begin a new life. As a result of being a gateway to the world, the country traditionally has been one of the most important business, cultural, diplomatic, and political centers in Africa. Still, Kenya, like many other countries throughout the world, has been plagued by an increasing array of complex economic, political, and social challenges. Historical Dictionary of Kenya, Fourth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Kenya.
Download or read book Songs and Politics in Eastern Africa written by Kimani Njogu and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2007 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together essays on songs and politics in the region of Eastern Africa and beyond. The theme that cuts across the contributions is that songs are, in addition to their aesthetic appeal, vital tools for exploring how political and social events are shaped and understood by citizens. Urbanization, commercialization and globalization contributed to the vibrancy of East African popular music of the 1990s. It was a product of social processes inseparable from society, politics, and other critical issues of the day. The lyrics explored socials cosmology, world views, class and gender relations, interpretations of value systems, and other political, social and cultural practices, even as they entertained and provided momentary escape for audience members. Frustration, disenchantments, and emotional fatigue resulting from corrupt and dictatorial political systems that stifle the potential of citizens drove and still drive popular music in Eastern Africa as in most of Africa.
Download or read book African Media and the Digital Public Sphere written by O. Mudhai and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-05-25 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the claims that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are catalysts of democratic change in Africa. It takes optimist, pragmatist-realist and pessimist stances on various political actors and institutions, from government units and political parties to civil society organizations and minority groups.
Download or read book Kenya written by Charles Hornsby and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 976 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since independence from Great Britain in 1963, Kenya has survived five decades as a functioning nation-state, holding regular elections; its borders and political system intact and avoiding open war with its neighbours and military rule internally. It has been a favoured site for Western aid, trade, investment and tourism and has remained a close security partner for Western governments. However, Kenya's successive governments have failed to achieve adequate living conditions for most of its citizens; violence, corruption and tribalism have been ever-present, and its politics have failed to transcend its history. The decisions of the early years of independence and the acts of its leaders in the decades since have changed the country's path in unpredictable ways, but key themes of conflicts remain: over land, money, power, economic policy, national autonomy and the distribution of resources between classes and communities.While the country's political institutions have remained stable, the nation has changed, its population increasing nearly five-fold in five decades. But the economic and political elite's struggle for state resources and the exploitation of ethnicity for political purposes still threaten the country's existence. Today, Kenyans are arguing over many of the issues that divided them 50 years ago. The new constitution promulgated in 2010 provides an opportunity for national renewal, but it must confront a heavy legacy of history. This book reveals that history.
Download or read book Africa Insight written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Music National Identity and the Politics of Location written by Vanessa Knights and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are national identities constructed and articulated through music? Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the nation state has consistently demonstrated a determination to seek out and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment, from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Zizek. Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic, amb
Download or read book The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya written by Angelique Haugerud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the major success story of a troubled continent,by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them. The analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields, and combining many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.'...a highly perceptive and interesting analysis, deconstruction is not too strong a term, of Kenya's politics....[A] well researched, documented and enlightening book' African Affairs
Download or read book The Fire at the Core Discourses on African Aesthetics Music Jurisprudence Ethno Politics Good Governance written by Malama Katulwende and published by Mondial. This book was released on 2011 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The works in this volume present aspects of Zambian aesthetics, art, law. politics, ethnicity, economics and history. Sometimes the articles are really Pan African in character and in that sense appeal to larger audiences."--Acknowledgements.
Download or read book Global Africans written by Toyin Falola and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Black," "African," "African descendant" and "of African heritage," are just some of the ways Africans and Africans in the diaspora (both old and new) describe themselves. This volume examines concepts of race, ethnicity, and identity as they are ascribed to people of colour around the world, examining different case studies of how the process of identity formation occurred and is changing. Contributors to this volume, selected from a wide range of academic and cultural backgrounds, explore issues that encourage a deeper understanding of race, ethnicity and identity. As our notions about what it means to be black or of African heritage change as a result of globalization, it is important to reassess how these issues are currently developing, and the origins from which these issues developed. Global Africans is an important and insightful book, useful to a wide range of students and scholars, particularly of African studies, sociology, diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.
Download or read book Pastimes and Politics written by Laura Fair and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decades of the twentieth century were years of dramatic change in Zanzibar, a time when the social, economic, and political lives of island residents were in incredible flux, framed by the abolition of slavery, the introduction of colonialism, and a tide of urban migration. Pastimes and Politics explores the era from the perspective of the urban poor, highlighting the numerous and varied ways that recently freed slaves and other immigrants to town struggled to improve their individual and collective lives and to create a sense of community within this new environment. In this study Laura Fair explores a range of cultural and social practices that gave expression to slaves’ ideas of emancipation, as well as how such ideas and practices were gendered. Pastimes and Politics examines the ways in which various cultural practices, including taarab music, dress, football, ethnicity, and sexuality, changed during the early twentieth century in relation to islanders’ changing social and political identities. Professor Fair argues that cultural changes were not merely reflections of social and political transformations. Rather, leisure and popular culture were critical practices through which the colonized and former slaves transformed themselves and the society in which they lived. Methodologically innovative and clearly written, Pastimes and Politics is accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It is a book that should find wide use in courses on African history, urbanization, popular culture, gender studies, or emancipation.
Download or read book Seeing Like a Citizen written by Kara Moskowitz and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world. Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.
Download or read book Our Turn to Eat written by Daniel Branch and published by Lit Verlag. This book was released on 2010 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the troubled process of nation-building in post-colonial Kenya. Despite the distinctive features of the Moi and Kenyatta regimes, contributors make the case that since the late colonial period continuity, and not change, has been the dominant theme in Kenyan political life. Through a range of methodological lenses and empirical material, the chapters highlight different aspects of this continuity: the strength of the provincial administration, the weakness of formal party structures, the central role of ethnicity in shaping political competition, the understanding of the state as a resource in itself, and the ultimately incompatible beliefs held by different communities regarding how power can be legitimately exercised. Taken together, the persistence of these factors over time helps to explain the failure of the nation-building project in Kenya, and the context within which disputed elections in late-2007 could lead to the collapse of political order and the deaths of over 1,000 Kenyans.
Download or read book Sounding the Cape written by Denis Martin and published by African Minds. This book was released on 2013 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several centuries Cape Town has accommodated a great variety of musical genres which have usually been associated with specific population groups living in and around the city. Musical styles and genres produced in Cape Town have therefore been assigned an "identity" which is first and foremost social. This volume tries to question the relationship established between musical styles and genres, and social - in this case pseudo-racial - identities. In Sounding the Cape, Denis-Constant Martin recomposes and examines through the theoretical prism of creolisation the history of music in Cape Town, deploying analytical tools borrowed from the most recent studies of identity configurations. He demonstrates that musical creation in the Mother City, and in South Africa, has always been nurtured by contacts, exchanges and innovations whatever the efforts made by racist powers to separate and divide people according to their origin. Musicians interviewed at the dawn of the 21st century confirm that mixture and blending characterise all Cape Town's musics. They also emphasise the importance of a rhythmic pattern particular to Cape Town, the ghoema beat, whose origins are obviously mixed. The study of music demonstrates that the history of Cape Town, and of South Africa as a whole, undeniably fostered creole societies. Yet, twenty years after the collapse of apartheid, these societies are still divided along lines that combine economic factors and "racial" categorisations. Martin concludes that, were music given a greater importance in educational and cultural policies, it could contribute to fighting these divisions and promote the notion of a nation that, in spite of the violence of racism and apartheid, has managed to invent a unique common culture.
Download or read book Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa written by Annemette Kirkegaard and published by Nordic Africa Institute. This book was released on 2002 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The musics of Africa play a particularly important role in expressing and forming identities. This book brings together African and Nordic scholars from both musicology and other disciplines in an attempt to analyse various aspects of the complex playing with volatile identities in music in Africa today. Taken together the papers put new light on the assumed or real dichotomies between countryside and city, collective and individual, tradition and modernity, authentic and alien. The papers are based on contributions for a conference organized by the research project “Cultural Images in and of Africa†of the Nordic Africa Institute together with the Sibelius Museum/Department of Musicology and the Centre for Continuing Education at Ã...bo Akademi University in Ã...bo (Turku), Finland in October 2000. The book includes a keynote speech by Christopher Waterman (UCLA), and an introduction by Annemette Kirkegaard, Copenhagen University. Southern, West and East Africa are represented in the studies, which cover a great variety of musics.
Download or read book Citizen and Subject written by Mahmood Mamdani and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.
