Paper short abstract:

This paper critically addresses the questions of ownership and patronage of performance poetry spaces in Dar es Salaam. Focusing on self-funding and crowdfunding, it explores their roles and impact in the conceiving and (re)shaping of performance spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically addresses the questions of ownership and patronage of performance poetry spaces in Dar es Salaam. Highlighting the question of funding, it focuses on what I will call 'internal funding', to refer to two specific funding forms: self-funding and crowdfunding. Drawing on fieldwork in poetry and performance in Dar es Salaam, this paper explores the role and impact of internal funding on performance spaces. The paper demonstrates that the featured funding forms highlight artistic agency by allowing artists to position themselves as activists for artistic freedom by creating spaces that resist foreign intrusion. Either funded by the artists themselves or by the direct audience, such spaces actively disrupt and reshape social as well as artistic boundaries by repositioning the literary scene as a form of engagement between audience and artists. Through this communal network, the line between artist, audience, patron and client becomes blurred. In addition, crowdfunding as a form of funding occurs both physically and digitally, thus creating networks that traverses across worlds.

The paper addresses the following questions. How are performance poetry events (re)shaped by the funding within which they are conceived? How do artists navigate the double role of artist and funder and what impact does this have on their sense of self in these spaces? How do questions of ownership and patronage play out in these spaces and what meanings emerge from them? ?