AFRO3578: Contemporary Sub-Saharan African Popular Art Forms

This course explores popular art practices and representations – mediated through the lens of television, radio, popular cinema, sequential art, and the internet – as the everyday expressions of modern African identities. As sites where the tensions, frictions, collisions and notably, the productive creativities of the local and the global are circulated, negotiated and contested, African popular cultures provide insights into a unique and increasingly crucial facet of contemporary African artistic practice as critical intervention. The course is designed on the premise that Africans of all social strata and lifestyles are strategic and deliberate consumers of popular cultural forms, generated within local cultures as signifiers of larger social, political, and economic processes. In light of prevailing studies which sometimes end up naively celebrating agency and resistance, AFRO 3578 underscores the role of popular cultures as public/private sites of power's ideological and material (re-) production, contestation, or transformation. It considers creative practices as sites of both resistance and accommodation; of creative adaptation, innovation, and resilience. Through our discussion of communication technologies and their role in transmitting artistic and political ideas beyond the confines of dominant discourses and established institutions, we will evaluate the interface of technology and sociocultural shifts.

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