Popular Music and Politics in Africa

Catalog description

This course explores the intersection of popular music and politics in Africa. In recent years, studies of African popular music have offered up some of the most revealing analyses of public culture and politics in postcolonial Africa. This course examines African popular music genres as resonant spaces where publics are produced and mobilized, where the symbolic girders of the postcolonial state are reinforced and/or attacked, and where cosmopolitanism confronts the conceits of nationhood. In addition to engaging with essential literature on the nation, popular culture, globalization, and postcoloniality in Africa, students will become familiar with the histories and contexts of African musical genres such as Nigerian Afrobeat, Swahili taarab, Zimbabwean chimurenga, South African mbaqanga, and the hip hop-derived genres that emerged across the continent at the turn of the twenty-first century.