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Performing the Nation : Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania - Kelly Askew

Performing the Nation

Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania

By: Kelly Askew

Hardcover | 28 July 2002 | Edition Number 1

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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.
Industry Reviews

"Askew has given us a richly detailed and engaging study of cultural politics in Tanzania during its transition from socialism to multipartyism. . . . A thought-provoking study of how culture in a postcolonial state is produced, contested, and appropriated. Askew is at her best when she analyzes the multilayered and often contradictory policies of a bureaucracy seeking simultaneously to promote both socialist values and African cultural authenticity."

--Thomas Burgess "International Journal of African Historical Studies"
"One of the best ethnomusicological monographs to emerge in recent years. From the very design of the study to the smallest articulated detail, it stands as a testament to the power of expressive culture as an object of anthropological inquiry. . . . Performing the Nation is not only a fine work of ethnomusicology but a weighty contribution to the ethnographic study of the nation-state."--Andrew Eisebnberg "Current Musicology"

You Can Find This Book In

Non-FictionSociety & CultureSocial Issues & ProcessesSocial Discrimination & InequalitySocial GroupsEthnic StudiesArts & EntertainmentDance & Other Performing ArtsOther Performing ArtsMusicMusic Styles & GenresTraditional & Classical Non-Western Music
Sociology & AnthropologyAnthropologyReference, Information & Interdisciplinary SubjectsInterdisciplinary StudiesRegional StudiesTheory of Music & MusicologyCultural StudiesPopular CultureMiscellaneous ItemsGeneral Issues in Art

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