Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda
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A01=Linda Cimardi
Author_Linda Cimardi
Batooro
Bunyoro
Category=AVA
Category=JBSL
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender models
hegemonic gender models
local culture
postcolonialism
runyege
Tooro
Ugandan performing arts
Ugandan school festivals
Product details
- ISBN 9781648250729
- Weight: 666g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Focusing on runyege, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda.
Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender.
Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http://hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.
LINDA CIMARDI is Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project "Black Musics in the (Former) Yugoslav Region" based at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg (Germany)
