Residential - Introduction to African Popular Culture

This course introduces students to defining trends, movements, and practices in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture in Africa. Focusing on the lives, interventions, and innovative practices of key figures in music, television, fashion, dance, and publishing, we examine the socio-political and the historical in relation to broader aesthetic and stylistic links to the rest of the world. These popular culture trends are discussed in the larger context of colonial and postcolonial class formation, the afterlives of cold war cultural diplomacy, access to education and accumulation of socio-political capital, the emergence of new conceptions of self and nationhood in relation to the global, new modes of cultural circulation, and the new lives of rediscovered archives. Figures such as Fela Kuti, Ousmane Sembene, Fela Sowande, J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, Miriam Makeba, Duro Olowu, Charley Boy, Dele Momodu, and William Onyeabor are discussed alongside new figures, with a focus on lines of influence, self-fashioning, and the interface between the socio-political and the commercial.