Music Performance And African Identities

Cutting across countries, genres, and time periods, this volume explores topics ranging from hip hop’s influence on Maasai identity in current day Tanzania to jazz in Bulawayo during the interwar years, using music to tell a larger story about the cultures and societies of Africa.

Cutting across countries, genres, and time periods, this volume explores topics ranging from hip hop’s influence on Maasai identity in current day Tanzania to jazz in Bulawayo during the interwar years, using music to tell a larger story about the cultures and societies of Africa.

Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional and contemporary Yorùbá genres of music.

"Due to significant political and social changes over the last decade in their countries and worldwide, many scholars in the Nordic nations and in Southern Africa have been researching on 'music and identity' - an area with a paucity of literature. It is our hope that this book will be beneficial to scholars interested in the field of music and identity. This volume is the result of the Swedish South African Research Network (SSARN) project, funded from 2004-2006 by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, under the theme 'Music and Identity'. SSARN was founded by Stig-Magnus Thorsén of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2002 when he invited Nordic and Southern African scholars to participate in a research group focusing broadly on the topic 'Music and Identity'"--Publisher's website.

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.

Ethnomusicology deals with the study of the music of the world. The field is interdisciplinary, and ethnomusicologists draw on theory and method from folklore, cultural anthropology, historical musicology, literature, cultural studies and media studies, among other disciplines. So when ethnomusicologists met at Makerere University's symposium on ethnomusicology in October 2011, the issues dealt with spanned a wide spectrum of concerns which can be grouped under three major categories: Institutions, culture and identity. African Musics in Context discusses the place of performing arts in Ugandan society, archiving music and music sources, performing archival music, performing health and religious issues in music, music and identity in East Africa as well music in motion, which tackles how identity shifts when people move from one place to another. All these are key aspects of our day-to-day lives, and they are the themes that colour the music we listen to. This book follows up on and extends work in an earlier volume (Nannyonga- Tamusuza and Solomon 2012) which included papers from the first symposium in the series. While this book focuses primarily on music and music research in Uganda, the chapters by the contributors from Tanzania, South Africa and Norway demonstrate the importance of scholarly and professional networks that connect the different countries of the African continent with each other and with the larger international scholarly community. If the published proceedings from the first symposium mentioned above represented a first in the history of ethnomusicological publishing in Uganda, this second book in the series shows that professionalised ethnomusicology in Uganda continues to gain ground and make contributions to music research in Uganda, Africa, and the global ethnomusicological community. The chapters collected here show that ethnomusicology in Uganda has a healthy institutional basis and promises to continue to make contributions that are relevant locally, regionally, and internationally.

Choreographies of African Identities traces interconnected interpretative frameworks around and about the National Ballet of Senegal. Using the metaphor of a dancing circle Castaldi's arguments cover the full spectrum of performance, from production to circulation and reception. Castaldi first situates the reader in a North American theater, focusing on the relationship between dancers and audiences as that between black performers and white spectators. She then examines the work of the National Ballet in relation to Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude ideology and cultural politics. Finally, the author addresses the circulation of dances in the streets, discotheques, and courtyards of Dakar, drawing attention to women dancers' occupation of the urban landscape.

There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recent political waves that have swept across North Africa and their implications to the study of twenty-first century Pan-African solidarity on the African continent. The ways in which African institutions are attracting and mobilizing returnees and Pan-Africanists with incentives as dual-citizenship for diasporans to support reforms in Africa offers a new alternative approach for exploring Pan-African ideology in the twenty-first century. Returnees are also using these incentives to gain economic and cultural advantage. The book will appeal to policy makers, government institutions, research libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from many different disciplines.