Explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism
of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and
online media.
This edited collection focuses on the links between youth and African
popular culture. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars
explore popular culture produced and consumed by young people in
contemporary Africa. Essays cover a variety of cultural
representations--visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social,
and virtual--created by African youth, mostly about their lives and
their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the
larger public and shared locally and globally. The volume examines the
range of music, art, and media African youth produce, under what
conditions or contexts they produce such work, and the aesthetic
dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Essays further explore
why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive
acts, and as symbols of the cultural activism of young people in a
rapidly changing world--a world where the global cultural economy is the
prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come
to shape political-economic and social systems.