Rhodes University: Hosted Journals
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Gospel music videos in the counter-memory of post-nation identity in Kenya
Get PDFMost countries in Africa are distinguished by the various culture groups enclosed within their geographical borders, and in how their governments have sought toestablish cohesion and unity in that diversity. Further distinctions are achieved in the ways populations have been integrated into the wider region and global world while still maintaining a unique local character. The arts (music, fine art, sculpture, architecture, drama, verbal arts), religion, language, and the mass media have been the principal fields where ideologies of unity and integration of plural cultural worlds, andlocalism in the global market or globalism in the locl market are played out. Music videos, one of the fastest growing entertainment and industrial products in Africa, are a principal contemporary terrain for the negotiation of distinctive identity
Sounds of development? race, authenticity, and tradition among Dagara female musicians in Northwestern Ghana
Get PDFI\u27d like to begin by sharing a story from my field research among the Dagara people in the upper west region of Ghana, west Africa, on the border of Burkina Faso. My research project is about the ways Dagara women act and are prevented from acting, the ways they speak and how they are silenced. I ask: Who is listening to them and who is not? What are their current desires, goals, and needs, and how are they working towards them? How are their actions racialized, gendered, sexualized, and contained within concepts of ethnicity and authenticity? In what ways and for what purposes do people construct ideological boundaries around insider and outsider, African and Western, black and white, male and female? How do these boundaries both confirm identity and limit movement? By asking these questions I intend to reveal how Dagara women define themselves both relationally and individually, and how they demonstrate through their bodies and voices that, as Adrienne Rich wrote, "silence is
not the same as absence” (Rich 1978: 16-20). The themes that emerge in this story point to questions about how Dagara women become gendered, racialized subjects, and how they critique the systems they live within. Embedded within this story are examples of the African female body as a site of both regulation and resistance
