Paper short abstract:

The interactive digital platform TikTok has unprecedentedly increased the visibility of African popular products within and beyond the continent. Focusing on the vibrant Kenyan digital space, the paper interrogates users' performative engagement with film and music produced elsewhere in Africa.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries, Africa has had to contend with the strong influence of external cultures that gives little room for intra-continental cultural interaction. However, the current boom of interactive digital platforms in Africa has turned the tide by enhancing unprecedented transcultural exchange among people within the continent. In particular, the video-sharing platform TikTok has significantly increased the visibility of African popular products within and beyond the borders of the continent with far-reaching consequences for the cultural industry. This paper understands digital products as works in progress with users involved in some sort of collaborative co-composition with the original artist(s). With a decisive focus on the vibrant Kenyan digital space, the paper seeks to interrogate how users performatively engage with film and music produced in other cultural contexts in Africa in ways that resonate with their local settings. In the process, attention will be paid to the transformative potentials of user agency, the viability of synchronous meaning-making from disparate cultures, and the extent to which cultural exchange occurs in TikTok performances. The paper examines popular Kenyan performance cultures with a view to locating the contemporary digital trends within pre-existing local traditions and practices. To achieve this, prominence is given to spontaneous acts not commissioned by the original artists nor associated companies in order to characterise the true dynamics of ordinary performances by users. The concept of “distributed creativity” (Literat & Glaveanu, 2018) will be employed in the theoretical and contextual sense-making of the collaborative artistry of Kenyan TikTok users.