Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Heike Becker
(University of the Western Cape)
Dorothea Schulz (University of Münster)
Send message to Convenors
- Location:
- C4.06
- Start time:
- 27 June, 2013 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel will explore modes of mobilizing culture through a focus on performance. We ask how categories of social, cultural and religious difference in contemporary African societies are created, reproduced, contested and mediated through performance and the materiality of cultural forms.
Long Abstract:
From the unprecedented revival of cultural and religious identities across post-apartheid South Africa to the threats posed by Islamist groups in parts of West Africa, Africa currently experiences a resurgence of politics of difference. Such politics appear to have in common the ability to produce and sustain identities. The preoccupation with identity and politics of difference has often been associated with the revival of political liberalism and the rise of neoliberalism after the end of the cold war. Our contention is that in order to comprehend what makes people feel difference, and its flipside similarity, to be true, authentic and real we also need new directions in the study of the making and unmaking of cultural and religious difference on the everyday level. We propose to explore modes of mobilizing culture through a focus on performance. We ask how categories of social, cultural and religious difference in contemporary African societies are created, reproduced, contested, reconfigured and mediated through performance and the materiality of cultural forms. More specifically, how do performances, understood broadly as symbolic enactments through people as well as mediating objects such as creative texts, art, film, photography, or architecture, facilitate sensorial and embodied experience of difference on the one hand, or sharing and unmaking of difference on the other? Furthermore, how are aesthetic, sensorial and embodied styles implied in contestations over religious, national, gendered, racialised, ethnicised embodied identities? We invite paper proposals on aesthetics, politics and difference from Southern, East and West Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Heike Becker (University of the Western Cape)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks into the visual and musical aspects of the ‘hip-hopera’ Afrikaaps. It analyses how visual and sonic aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, and how they are employed in attempts at authenticating a recently asserted linguistic and cultural ‘identity’.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks into the visual and sonic aspects of the 'hip-hopera' Afrikaaps. Afrikaaps was produced in 2010 by a group of musicians and spoken-word artists from Cape Town and the rural Western Cape Province of South Africa. The show premiered at an annual Afrikaans cultural festival; it then had a three week-run at a theatre, located in a predominantly white, English-speaking part of Cape Town. The documentary by Cape Town film maker Dylan Valley (2011) follows this group of local artists creating the stage production as they trace the roots of Afrikaans to KhoiSan and slaves in the Cape. The show and the film aim to 'reclaim and liberate Afrikaans from its reputation as the language of the oppressor, taking it back for all who speak it.' (Valley 2011) The paper presents an analysis of how visual and sonic aesthetics converge in the performed production of history, and how they are employed in attempts at authenticating a recently asserted linguistic and cultural 'identity'. Special attention is given on the one hand, to the formats of visual and musical presentation employed in the production, and on the other, to how a group of young Capetonians assume pride in the particular local historical and linguistic perspective in their everyday lives.
Matthias Krings (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on three White musicians who perform African popular music. While their embodied difference has an exotic appeal, their linguistic ability signifies sameness. I argue that their un/doing of difference accounts for their popularity with African audiences.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I propose to discuss the work of three White musicians who appropriate African popular culture to differing degrees: Mzungu Kichaa ('The crazy white man'), a young man of Danish ancestry who grew up in East Africa, performs Tanzanian Bongo Flava music and raps in Kiswahili; the White Nigerian, a Nigeria-born Lebanese whose tag-line reads: 'arrogantly Nigerian', and who builds his career as both musician and comedian on his ability to speak Hausa and Pidgin English like a Nigerian; and finally Ees a.k.a Nam-boy, a German-Namibian who performs 'Nam-Flava',a Namibian version of South African Kwaito music. What sets their performances apart from the tradition of racist minstrelsy is not only the fact that these performers address African audiences but also the pastiche-like nature of their works. I read their performances as deliberate plays with both difference and sameness. While their embodied difference makes them stick out from the masses of fellow musicians in Africa, their linguistic ability of speaking an African language like a native speaker signifies just the opposite: sameness. Thus, they thrive on the un/doing of difference and I argue that it is exactly this feature that accounts for their popularity. Paying special attention to technologies of mediation is important here as I argue that their popularity is very much linked to visibility and thus to the emergence of digital visual media and the recent rise of the video clip in African music cultures.
Katrien Pype (KU Leuven University)
Paper short abstract:
Popular TV music shows in Kinshasa depicting elderly people performing cha cha, merengue, bolero, rumba and other international dance styles on Congolese rumba music dating from the late colonial and early postcolonial period are analysed along the lines of intergenerational opposition.
Paper long abstract:
Since the mid-2000s, television music shows such as Bana Leo ("The Children of Leo[poldville]") and Sentiment Lipopo ("The feeling of Lipopo") have become extremely popular in Kinshasa ("Leopoldville" as the city was called during colonial times, or affectionately "Lipopo"). Recorded in local nightclubs, the shows depict old people performing cha cha, merengue, bolero, rumba and other international dance styles on Congolese rumba music dating from the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Broadcast in prime time on Thursday and Friday evenings, and re-diffused during the weekends, these programs attract large audiences, among young and old.
Although explicitly oriented towards the past, these shows provoke comparisons between the "old" and current local music scenes, in particular regarding rhythm, dance forms and lyrics, and incite debates about the place and value of "youth" and "elderly" in the city. The shows' hosts and performers denounce the influence of foreign music styles (hip hop, zouk, coupé décalé) on present-day rumba production, and attempt to establish a space in which "good" and "real Kinois" music can be enjoyed, and where pride and decency can be expressed and performed.
Nostalgia is a recurrent theme both in the broadcasts and in the discourses about these shows. It manifests a stringent critique on Kinshasa's contemporary dominant popular culture, which is orchestrated by youth. Elderly rebuke the hegemonic dance scene because of its perceived obscenity and lack of creativity. In this paper, I situate these TV shows within intergenerational tensions as these are played out in contemporary urban Africa.
Cassis Kilian (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Paper short abstract:
The paper questions whether actors from Africa can be regarded as anthropologists focusing on affective and bodily aspects of globalization often overlooked at universities. The aim is to explore performing art as a sensorial method of investigating the making and unmaking of differences.
Paper long abstract:
When Hal Foster wrote "The Artist as Ethnographer" in 1995, he focused on the differentiation between the self and the other, but he had the visual art in mind. African actors also use sophisticated techniques to reveal and transgress the borders Foster discusses, so it is fruitful to analyse the heuristic potential of performing art as well. Du to the fact that problematic aspects of globalization were noticeable very early in Africa, actors have been dealing with these phenomena since the rise of African film in 1960. They act the roles of Senegalese tirailleurs, cowboys, 419-fraudsters, prostitutes, bankers or migrants. They stage their bodies as "last locus in the perspectival set" of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes that constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls the "Modernity at Large". This allows them to explore the paradoxical cultural flows mentioned by the Indian anthropologist and to investigate affective and bodily dimensions of globalization overlooked by Appadurai. They provide not only ethnographic material as the title of Foster's article implies. By showing in films in a specific mode the un/making of differences they observed in reality, they depict theories of what they represent. The paper proposes a change of perspective: It presents actors such as Makhourédia Guèye, Zalika Souley, Nkem Owoh, Emile Abossolo M'bo and Aïssa Maïga as anthropologists of a globalized world and questions epistemological hierarchies.
Wendy Willems (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
The music gala emerged as a new genre on the state-owned broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in the early 2000s. This paper discusses the complex and ambivalent ways in which this performative space was characterised by both co-optation and resistance.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 2000s, an intensification of a politics of difference could be witnessed in Zimbabwe. In the context of an economic and political crisis, a range of binary oppositions such as black/white, indigene/stranger, rural/urban and patriot/sell-out were invoked by the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), to distinguish true, authentic from fake, inauthentic Zimbabweans. Popular culture became a crucial battleground for identity politics, a space where demarcations between loyal and disloyal Zimbabweans were constantly created, enacted, performed and contested. This paper focuses on the performative event of the music gala which emerged as a new genre on the state-owned broadcaster Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) in the early 2000s as part of government's cultural nationalist project of the Third Chimurenga. Given that the urban electorate overwhelmingly supported the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the gala was introduced in an attempt to interpellate young, urban Zimbabweans as loyal supporters of the ruling party. The galas became a platform not only of government-sponsored musicians part of the Third Chimurenga music album series but efforts were also made to incorporate performers part of the 'urban grooves' genre and musicians critical of the ZANU-PF government. The paper discusses the complex and ambivalent ways in which the music gala manifested itself as a performative space characterised by both co-optation and resistance. It argues for a more dialogic understanding of politics and performance so as to grasp the increasing convergence between formal politics and popular culture at various levels.
Dorothea Schulz (University of Münster)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses so-called “cultural programs” that broadcast “local” musical genres on rural radio stations in Mali’s southwest to reflect on the relevance of these radio stations to constructions of community and belonging, and thus to the constitution of a particular political subjectivity.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses so-called "cultural programs" that broadcast what are considered "local" musical genres on rural radio stations in Mali's southwest to reflect on the relevance of these radio stations to constructions of community and belonging, and thus to the constitution of a particular political subjectivity. Taking as a key metaphor the notion of "resonance", the paper examines the role of local radio stations in making local music into "musical heritage", by mediating feelings of local particularity and attachment. In the contemporary context of a "resurgence of the local", invigorated by decentralization politics, musicians who perform "local" musical heritage in Mali's rural southwest draw new strength and symbolic appeal from the existence of local radio stations. Listeners in southwestern Mali, by engaging with programs that feature "local tradition" and music, come to view themselves as citizens of a "multi-composite" national community. Their media engagements can be considered as particular moments of nation-building, moments in which national community, as well as other community constructions, are made - and contested - through everyday practice. Probing the process of aesthetic appreciation by which listeners recognize broadcast jeli music as "their own tradition", the paper offers reflections of a broader relevance about the affective power of mass-mediated aesthetic forms and about their capacity to generate attachment and collective identification.
Ala Alhourani (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
The ethnography specifically focuses on multi-language practices of Arabic, Somali, and Swahili spoken among Somali immigrants in Bellville.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores aesthetic formations of superdiversity through performances of Muslim-ness in the central business district (CBD) of Bellville, Cape Town. I will look specifically at the performance of an imagined Somali community, the related politics of authenticity and the materialization of cultural difference. In my initial fieldwork I found that Somali's embodied cultural style appears distinct - from other immigrants - through aesthetic performances of body, food, language, and images, all of which are evoked and realized through sensory experiences. The ethnography specifically focuses on multi-language practices of Arabic, Somali, and Swahili spoken among Somali immigrants in Bellville; the way they embody a symbolic enactment through their everyday performances of self-presentations, through mediating objects such as shop signs, and through stage performances at the mosque. Multi-language practices signify aesthetic formations of superdiversity, inasmuch as it implies a shifting of identities, hybridization, temporality, and blurred communitarian cultural boundaries. The Somali community in Bellville is a complex construction that shows a distinction between Somalis who come from Somaliland and Somalis of Ethiopian, and Kenyan nationality, and which through multi-language practices exercise contextual politics of inclusion and exclusion. The initial observation of this ethnography suggests that Somali community is unified through Somali language, and - a long with Muslims from other communities - through a sensorial attachment to aesthetic sound of Arabic language, mainly performed during religious rituals.
Julie Archambault (Concordia University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the subtle mediation of difference through household aesthetics to think of the way material cultural forms, in this case decorative plants, cultivate innocuous difference in Mozambique where successful postwar reconciliation has hinged on popular commitment to peace.
Paper long abstract:
In Inhambane, coconut tree ownership is closely tied to land access and constitutes a key feature of the local politics of difference that pits the Bitonga, the local inhabitants, against the Matswa, a neighbouring people who came to the city in the late 1980s in search of refuge from the armed conflict that was devastating the countryside at the time. More subtle, however, but also more telling of the ways in which material cultural forms produce and sustain identities is the way Bitonga use ornamental plants to perform their civilised, urban status and distance themselves from those who "come from the bush". Today, although they rarely intermarry, both groups cohabit in relative harmony, send their children to the same schools, drink in the same bars, do business together and live in similar houses. But only the Bitonga truly devote themselves to the growing of ornamental plants that give their yards distinct aesthetics. In this paper I examine how social and cultural differences are delicately mediated through the caring for and display of decorative plants which have become a key marker of civilised status, to think about the politics of difference in a context where successful postwar reconciliation has hinged on popular commitment to peace. Unlike other forms of performance like oratory skills and proficiency in Portuguese or sartorial elegance which are more explicit markers of difference, gardening preferences are no doubt innocuous and seemingly apolitical, but nonetheless powerful in that they shape sensorial and aesthetics experiences of difference.
Karel Arnaut (KULeuven)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses how the elusive ‘black’ neighbourhood of Matonge (in Brussels)is (re)produced through public performances and mediations.
Paper long abstract:
Today Matonge is so widely known as Brussels' black or Congolese neighbourhood that it is difficult to imagine that until 20 years ago, the name and the neighbourhood led a hidden existence among insiders. Allegedly, Matonge's public existence started off when in the early 1990s it became the hub of new migrants from Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe with very different educational and socio-economic backgrounds. These new urbanites' public activities - commercial, religious, social (including disruptive or illegal/criminal) - in themselves as well as the reactions they elicited from, among others, the media and the local authorities (ranging from city marketing agents to police officers) have been bolstering Matonge's public life ever since. The latter has granted Matonge a degree of distinctiveness and corporeality (most notably its 'blackness') which stands in stark contrast to the super-diverse, elusive, and fragmented character of its networks and infrastructures.
This work-in-progress paper explores the public life of Matonge (a) in a range of everyday as well as special performances of its inhabitants and shopkeepers, its tourists and regulars, its shopkeeper and hustlers, and (b) in a range of very divergent mediations: feature films and documentaries, TV and newspaper items, official documents and pamphlets. More specifically, the paper will focus on events in which performances and mediations are enmeshed. The paper presents historical, ethnographic and discourse analyses of how the elusive 'black' neighbourhood is (re)produced and ends by speculating about its hidden, invisible or secret life.