Paper short abstract:

I will compare popular culture as practiced in a secondary city and in small towns in Tanzania, focusing on HipHop and film translation. To what extent does access to social media platforms blur the differences between popular culture production in metropoles, secondary cities and small towns.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will take a comparative perspective on popular culture as practiced by young people in a secondary city, Morogoro, and in the small towns Masasi and Nachingwea. More precisely, I will look at HipHop-related music and at film translation practices. Both phenomena are mainly associated with the metropolis Dar es Salaam and most research on these practices has focused on Tanzania's biggest urban centre. I have written several papers on the basis of my fieldwork in these towns, first and foremost on Morogoro which I conceive of as "secondary city" as in my view in the Tanzanian context it is not useful to apply the concept of secondary city only to Mwanza, the second largest urban agglomeration.

I would thus start by discussing briefly the concept of secondary city and its usefulness in the Tanzanian context from a perspective on popular culture production. Further, I want to re-examine my corpus by looking specifically at the similarities and differences in terms of popular culture production in those secondary and small towns which differ significantly in terms of size, location and infrastructure. Finally, my data from conventional fieldwork will be complemented by audiovisual sources which are available online via YouTube and other social media networks. I will discuss how increased access to them affects the opportunities and the visibility of artists in these places and raise the question to what extent these actually blur the differences between popular culture production in metropoles, secondary cities and small towns.