| Lerninhalte |
What happens when cultures meet and what are the contours of such encounters? What points of view emerge and how are they articulated? Post-colonial Africa is a vibrant space, one that resists easy characterization. Aware of the temptation to think of Africa mostly as a broken space, the shards of a clash between tradition and modernity, or a tension between rural and urban, the course will use contemporary Kenya to think through some erstwhile questions in cultural studies—identity, power, materiality—and their articulation. What do the various creative expressive practices seen/ experienced/ fashioned out in Kenya –pop music and dance, folk dances and folktales, theatre, street art, radio and television discourses, popular books, cartoons, newspapers and magazines, obituaries, and social media among others—understood as constitutive of popular culture, tell us about states of being in contemporary Kenya? How do Kenyans engage with each other and the rest of the world? A study of Kenyan Popular Culture will be used to examine some key assumptions made in the study of cultures, especially about those that are conceptualized as ‘other’. |
