A01=Kelly Askew
Author_Kelly Askew
Category=ATX
Category=AVLA
Category=GTM
Category=JHM
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780226029818
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jul 2002
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 state formation and interpersonal power dynamics.
Kelly Askew is assistant professor of anthropology and of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan. She is the coeditor of The Anthropology of Media: A Reader and associate producer of the four-part documentary series Rhythms from Africa.
