Anthropological perspectives on popular culture

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON POPULAR CULTURE The following text has been prepared for the Wiley International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, due for publication in late 2017. The version beneath has been accepted as a final draft of the encyclopedia entry but not yet been copy-edited.

Title Popular culture, anthropological perspectives on

Your Name Heike Becker Affiliation University of the Western Cape Email Address [email protected]; [email protected] Word Count 4,849 Abstract Until recently anthropologists have been ambivalent about popular culture. Reasons for this were twofold, theoretically as much as politically. Over the past three decades, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly salient arena of contemporary anthropology. Johannes Fabian introduced the term ‘popular culture’ to anthropological inquiry, understood as contemporary cultural expressions by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist and traditional ‘tribal’ culture. Anthropological perspectives in popular culture studies emphasize an ethnographic approach and the sense-making of audiences. Currently there are three significant arenas of anthropological interest in popular culture: resistance, religion, and the politics of difference.

Main Text Until recently anthropologists have been ambivalent about popular culture. Reasons for this were twofold, theoretically as much as politically. Over the past three decades, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly salient interest of contemporary anthropology, currently most prominently in three arenas: resistance, religion, and the politics of difference.

In the reception of critical theory across the social sciences, the dominant voices of the ‘Frankfurt School’, most prominently Theodor Adorno dismissed popular culture as an instrument of economic and political control behind a permissive screen. Adorno expressed contempt of contemporary cultural forms; his lack of sympathy for an African-American experience that found a platform through jazz and popular song went as far as comparing jitterbugging to “St Vitus dances or the reflexes of mutilated animals” (Adorno 2001[1991]: 53). The notion of popular culture as capitalist ‘trash’ was connected to a crudely Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’, as much as the disdain of cheap entertainment for the masses, entertained by intellectuals of upper-middle class upbringing who had been raised in the appreciation of ‘pure’, official culture.

Anthropology for a long time “was blind to popular culture in Africa, in the right eye as much as the left” (Fabian 1998: 17). Theoretically, functionalist and structural-functionalist theories constrained ethnographic fieldwork. The culture contact paradigm implied the notion of authentic, ‘true’ African culture as traditional and rural, which was to be defended against the colonial onslaught of ‘Westernization’. In the right eye, this construction contributed to the construction of alterity, as much as colonial ‘native policies’, which served to control and where deemed necessary to withhold modernity. ‘Progressive’ anthropologists of modern and urban Africa, on the other hand, were reluctant to consider the ludic; their “ethos of scientific seriousness” (Fabian 1998: 8) excluded from social theory, concerned as it was with social change and identity, “the anarchic disrespect and the self-mockery that were cultivated by urban Africans.” Max Gluckman, then Director of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in today’s Zambia berated the social anthropologist and RLI researcher A. L. (“Bill”) Epstein when the latter developed an interest in dimensions of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt that went ostensibly beyond – or even against - the conventions of social anthropology. Epstein had increasingly become aware that there were aspects of urban life with its “own distinctive flavour” that escaped the conventional social anthropological approach, including, among others, religion, and the new language of the towns as a creative response to the urban environment, However, the paper he eventually wrote on this creative urban language and its usage was promptly dismissed by Gluckman as below standard and inappropriate for social anthropology (Epstein 1992: xv-xvi).

Popular culture: multiple roots Johannes Fabian (1978) has been credited for having introduced the term ‘popular culture’ to anthropological inquiry. In an essay, published in 1978, drawing on his long-term work in Shaba in the eastern Congo on religious movements, popular song and popular painting, he propositioned that popular culture was a useful concept because, “it suggests contemporary cultural expressions carried by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist and traditional ‘tribal’ culture” (Fabian 1978: 315), which he proposed as a broad working concept for the study of 20th century historical conditions characterized by mass communication, mass production, and mass participation. He considered popular culture as significant because it challenged

common beliefs in the superiority of ‘pure’ or ‘high’ culture, and the corresponding, opposite categorization of folklore. With respect to African historical processes particularly, Fabian argued that, emphazising phenomena occurring behind the back of established powers, the notion of popular culture, offered a useful conceptual approach to decolonization.

Fabian’s proposition and the broad conceptualisation he offered drew on multiple roots. The term ‘popular culture’ as a reference point to “the masses” was coined in the 19th century; Pestalozzi used it in 1818 already in his address to the British public in an effort to secure support for schools for ‘the people’. The popular retained the connotations of ‘low class’ and associated poor education; popular culture correspondingly was regarded as unofficial cultural forms in contrast to the ‘official’ culture associated with high levels of education. The class connection became far less prominent in recent European and North American usage, where the understanding of popular culture transmuted into that of ‘popculture’, the societal mainstream with the emergence of electronic mass media in the mid-20th century.

Cultural studies However, alongside this trajectory of the notion, and particularly influential in emerging anthropological perspectives, popular culture has been deemed a potential site of resistance. Walter Benjamin, in contrast to Adorno, imagined a radicalised mass culture, drawing on his intense engagement with Bertolt Brecht and his work. In ‘The Work of Art in the Era of Technical Reproduction’ Benjamin noted particularly Charlie Chaplin’s movies as an example of progressive mass culture (Benjamin 2013 [1936]: 55). Anthropological perspectives have been much influenced further by neo-Gramscian thinking, which found expression in the second half of the 20th century with the emergence of cultural studies; noteworthy is Stuart Hall’s perception of popular culture as a site of struggle because this is where ‘the people’ are constituted. The model of British cultural studies had evolved from a culturalist tradition within the ‘New Left’, prominently associated with the works of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. The new field was institutionalised in 1964 with the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. With its emphasis thematically placed on ephemeral subcultures and critical engagement of the national and international political environment, and methodologically close attention paid to ethnography and audience activity, this intellectual school came to resonate strongly with the emerging anthropological perspectives on popular culture.

In southern Africa: urban anthropology Within Anthropology, the emergence of interest in popular cultural forms was closely intertwined with the development of urban studies in Southern Africa. In South Africa urban anthropological

research began as early as the mid-1930s. It was during the 1950s, however, that urban anthropology in Southern Africa came into its own. While the theoretical interest of these studies remained in line with the structural-functionalist paradigm focused on sociological notions of social change through social relations, these anthropologists found that urban residents were often keen to speak about their everyday cultural practices and materiality. The published studies inevitably included urban popular cultural practices and performance, ranging from new forms of language and humour to sports clubs and jive music, which, as the authors of one of the influential South African urban anthropology studies concluded, indicated that “something new is growing in towns” (Wilson and Mafeje 1963: 181). It was the urban studies conducted on the Zambian Copperbelt by researchers affiliated to the RLI, however, that placed increasing attention on matters of consumption, style, and performance, recognising the novelty of urban African cultural practices. Among the Copperbelt studies, J. Clyde Mitchell’s Kalela Dance (Mitchell 1956) is of particular interest. In this wellknown essay, the author, in his own words, “attempted an analysis of certain aspects of the system of social relationships among Africans in the towns of Northern Rhodesia” (Mitchell 1956: vii) through the study of a popular ‘tribal’ dance performed on Sundays in urban spaces by teams of young male dancers, who were otherwise employed in low-ranking occupations in the mines. In line with the contemporary dominant discourse in British social anthropology, Mitchell pronounced sociological analysis as his primary aim. Yet, even though neither Mitchell nor any of his colleagues used the term ‘popular culture’; the Kalela dance can be read as an early example of an anthropological study of popular culture, including the close-up ethnography, the detailed descriptions of the dance competitions, the attempt of tracing the origin of the dances, the appearance of the dancers, the carefully recorded and transcribed lyrics of the songs, all demonstrate the emergence of an approach, which was treading on new ground at the time. In bringing to the fore public events, occasions of performance, and ‘street styles’, Mitchell demonstrated the new urban popular cultural forms of the Copperbelt miners, which were part of an urban modernity that emerged across the wider African continent in the aftermath of the second world war. The post-war African modernity was marked by the expectations of modernity, which embraced a distinctive cultural repertoire, including items such as radios, movies, telephones, cars, fashionable clothes, and cigarettes; it was also the socio-cultural context of the political aspirations of anti-colonial struggles and the nationalist project. The urban Copperbelt attracted also independent anthropologists with unusual interests. In 1953 and 1954, the American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker conducted fieldwork on the significance of leisure in social change on the Copperbelt. Powdermaker, who had previously published the first, and possibly still the only, ethnographic study of the Hollywood film industry, notably incorporated innovative perspectives on media reception and audience research, specifically observations of Copperbelt residents ‘listening to the radio’ and ‘going to the movies’. Her ethnographic study of movie audiences remains particularly interesting for the

discussion of anthropological perspectives on popular culture, although she, too, did not yet use the term (Powdermaker 1962). Despite their overtly sociological aims, Southern African urban studies came under a harsh critique for their emphasis on urban everyday life and popular culture. In unforgiving assessments they were dismissed as trivial; accused f having ignored the effects of colonialism. This critique needs to be understood from the southern African region’s peculiar historical experience; however, it should also be understood in relation to the influential 1970s revival of structural approaches in many academies in the ‘West’, where scholars turned to Marxist perspectives of a political economy approach and were not much inclined to acknowledge the importance of local meanings, knowledge, and popular cultural forms.

A historical approach to the ethnography of popular culture Significantly, the first study of African popular cultural forms, which explicitly referred to ‘popular culture’ was published not by an anthropologist but by a historian, Terence Ranger (1975). Ranger, too, felt compelled to defend his study of Beni dance in Tanzania during the 20th century with an explicit response to the 1970s criticism. Ranger insisted that studies of popular culture were relevant, and especially valuable for comprehending the experience and attitudes of the ‘masses’ and for giving expression to those who did not have access to and control over other, more formal means of articulating their desires where institutions such as universities, the media, the theatre, and of course political pronouncements were in firm control of what could be publicly communicated; thus, informal cultural forms were crucial in order to see evidence of real experience and real response. (Ranger 1975: 3) Rather than belittling popular cultural forms as ‘escapist’, scholars interested in resistance and protest in colonial and postcolonial Africa should take the informal and festive serious.

Seminal texts in anthropological popular culture studies Fabian (1978) While Johannes Fabian (1978) introduced the term ‘popular culture’ to anthropological inquiry, he was not the first to conduct research on popular cultural forms. In his discussion of long-term ethnographic research of religious movements, popular music and popular painting in urban Shaba, on the Congolese side of the Copperbelt, Fabian (1978: 315) maintained that in African countries such as Zaire (as the Congo was then known), popular culture comprised distinctive expressions of life experience, which were those of the urban masses; eventually accepted by the entire population”. Fabian argued that popular culture studies could move anthropological theory beyond earlier functionalist and structural-functionalist anthropological concepts such as ‘culture contact’. The

concept of popular culture rather than the classical anthropological focus on ‘culture’ would allow to identify process, “the emergence of culture in space and time”. Thus it becomes possible to examine contemporary culture not as made up by ‘reactions’ to the “onslaught of Westernization” (Fabian 1978: 317). Instead, popular culture emphasized the creativity and creolization of popular cultural expression.

Barber 1987 Fabian had used the terms ‘popular culture’ and ‘popular arts’ interchangeably. His conceptualisation encompassed a broad range of popular cultural expressions, including popular music, popular painting, or drama; he also included religious doctrine in his analysis, and referred to other forms such as sports clubs, boy scouts, and the like.

The perhaps most single influential essay on popular culture in Africa eschewed Fabian’s broad label. A decade after his attempt of conceptualising popular culture, Karin Barber (1987) observed a very recent upsurge in the interest in popular arts. Her extended overview restricted the subject however to ‘popular art forms’, which included popular song, dance, theatre, fiction literature and film, but explicitly excluded topics such as religious doctrine, or sports. Barber’s conceptual discussion aimed at developing a ‘model’ for understanding the significance of popular arts for comprehending contemporary African societies. She observed that popular arts in Africa had most often been defined by what they are not – belonging neither to the layer of the ‘traditional’, nor belonging to that of new, ‘elite’ cultural forms. New forms of African cultural expression should be validated instead of, as many anthropologists had done hitherto, being dismissed as mere reactions to colonialism and Westernization. Barber demonstrated that popular art was a new kind of art created by a new emergent urban class. The emphasis on urban Africans as an emergent class resonated with a turn in anthropology, which reconceptualised modernity, to embrace the multiplicity of modernities, thereby challenging the hegemony of the Western-enlightenment derived model. Barber’s suggestion was particularly significant because it called for a thorough theorization of modern social life in Africa, especially the city as a social space and experience. This emphasis on the modernity of urban Africa complemented Barber’s notion of African historicity, implicit in ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, more explicitly developed in her later writings (Barber 1997). Her argument should therefore be understood also with regard to the role of popular arts as the aesthetic dimension of popular protest and resistance in colonial and postcolonial situations. Barber highlights popular culture’s inscription with the history of political and cultural struggles. Barber pointed out the invisibility and inaudibility of ordinary people in most of Africa, where “the populist rhetoric of political elites” had become ever further removed from the desires of ‘the people’, “as the temporary unanimity produced by the struggle for independence recedes into

the past.” She lauded Ranger’s work for having been instrumental in an analytical shift “to see history and politics from the other side of the African social tapestry” (Barber 1987: 3-4). Popular art forms are vital for this shift because they talk about what the people themselves think is important. While Barber emphasised the sociological and political dimensions of popular arts, she stressed that the popular arts should not be analysed solely as constellations of social, political and economic relationships. As expressive acts their most important attribute is the power to communicate. Analyses thus needed to study their conjoint sociological and aesthetic dimensions through methods, which draw on both the social sciences and aesthetic criticism (Barber 1987: 5).

Towards an ethnography of audiences Both Fabian and Barber argued that popular art forms do not merely reflect pre-existing consciousness: “They are themselves important means through which consciousness is articulated and communicative” (Barber 1987: 4). This notion is linked to Barber’s most innovative and enduring proposition, which was the importance she allocated to the role of audiences in making sense of popular arts in historically and socially specific situations. She suggested that, instead of simply hermeneutically analysing the message of popular cultural forms, it may be better to regard meaning as being negotiated between artists and audiences (Barber 1987: 53). In the process the audience was as important as the artist. She developed this point further in 1997 with a collection of essays on audiences in Africa, where she argued that it was critical to study audiences since the meaning of a performance or text was constituted neither by the performer or ‘speaker’ nor by the ‘hearer’; instead, “it inhabits the zone between them” (Barber 1997: 356-357). The audience’s interpretation thus is critical in order better to understand ‘what people think’. Barber explores the different ways of convening and of experiencing reception, whether collectively or in dispersal; she demonstrates how audiences are deeply connected with the nature of the social life of the age and place. Audiences, like performances and cultural ‘texts’, are a historical product. As these are historically and culturally specific, they need to be empirically investigated. The shift to a focus on the audiences of popular cultural expressions presented a significant advancement for anthropological studies of popular culture for two reasons: on the one hand here Barber points out the critical need for historicity while, on the other, she emphasises the centrality of ethnography. In popular culture studies as a profoundly interdisciplinary field, anthropological perspectives have become distinctive in providing a uniquely ethnographic perspective. The ethnographic turn in popular culture studies has provided empirically thorough in-depth participant observation; without deep ethnography, audience activity often remains speculatively deduced.

From popular resistance to the aesthetics of protest Attention to popular culture implies the political, particularly in movements of popular resistance, whether in open revolt or subtler forms of everyday defiance. Ranger (1975), Fabian (1978), and Barber (1987) all had stressed the role played by popular cultural expressions in anticolonial struggles, as well as their significance for contestations in postcolonial situations. This was noted also by scholars from outside anthropology. While the index of Achille Mbembe’s noted On the Postcolony (2015 [2001]) does not include ‘popular culture’ or ‘culture’, the mockery he describes embraces the popular in multiple ways. In the new preface to this republished classic text, he emphasised “the value of Africa’s aesthetics” for resonances of that moment of “structural adjustment programmes, wars of predation, cruelty and stupidity parading as leadership, military coups and deferred social revolutions” (Mbembe 2015: xiii). Mbembe reflects on then new kinds of thinking emerging in the domain of aesthetics, music and literature in particular, which promised to break the analytical gridlock of the - then - dominant conceptual languages (development, state-society relations, civil society). Thinking across the political and the aesthetic, though, enables the language of the sensory experience of life that “communicates how ordinary people laugh and weep, work, play, pray, bless, love and curse, make a space to stand forth and walk, fall and die”. (Mbembe 2015: xvi) Mbembe’s point implies anthropological thought of popular culture as ‘weapons of the weak’, as James Scott (1985) had called his ethnographic attempt of rethinking peasant resistance in Latin America, listed in the bibliography of On the Postcolony. Under repressive regimes particularly, forms of popular cultural expression, become exceptionally significant, in resistant activism as much as anthropological analysis. In his famed study of South African black music and theatre, published in the final, particularly violent years of apartheid, David Coplan (1985, 1) described his work as “both a record of and a small contribution to the efforts of black South Africans to gain control of their national culture and to use it to regain control of their individual and national lives.” Music particularly served this role frequently, expressing the everyday forms of objection as well as the more overt political resistance. Recently anthropological scholarship has considered the resurgence of popular cultural forms in global protests in the 21st century, with special attention drawn to the ‘Arab Spring’ of the years 2010-2012. Pnina Werbner and co-editors of a collection on the political aesthetics of global protest demonstrated that the political aesthetics, evocative signs and participatory, embodied performance characteristic of the 21st century uprisings and protests went far beyond the usual deployment in protest movements of verbal texts, chants or visual placards and slogans. The recent movements were defined by the prominent articulation of images, songs, poetry, humour, satire and dramatic performances. While the carnivalesque and embodied performance of the recent global protests are remarkable, they go beyond spectacle. Together with the noted salience of social media, the popular cultural forms and aesthetics, through which the movements express their views are critical for transformative political processes of mobilisation (Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots 2014, 9-11).

Popular culture and religious movements A second significant field, in which anthropological perspectives on popular culture have become increasingly noted, is religion. Fabian’s 1978 essay had already considered as a form of popular cultural expression the doctrine of religious movements in Shaba along with song, and popular painting. His comparative analysis of these genres demonstrated their narrative structures and messages in form and function, which he discussed in the context of the historical-political situation, concrete settings and publics and the social referent, by which he understands the category or group of people for whom they are vehicles of expression (Fabian 1978: 323-327). Fabian pointed out the salience of religious movements as cultural expressions. More recently, the mediated cultural expressions of religious movements, particularly Pentecostalism and revivalist forms of Islam, have become a prominent theme in Anthropology. The ‘new’ religious movements have become intimately involved in articulating religious ideas in new media. The role played by the materiality, embodied messages and audiences of media technologies in and for new religious movements has become a significant theme. Anthropologies of Christianity and Islam particularly have paid close attention to popular cultural expressions and media, in studies of the religions’ continuities and transformations, their relation to modernity and bodily practices. (Schulz 2012; Meyer 2015) A particularly noteworthy aspect of the new pentecostalism is provided by digital media producers, which has been studied by anthropologists in different parts of Africa. Video movies in West Africa, and televised serials in Kinshasa offer visualizations of the realm of the ‘power of darkness’ and the casting out of evil spirits, as demonstrated by Birgit Meyer (2015) in her influential writings on Ghanaian video movies, and Katrien Pype (2012). Pype’s research in Kinshasa particularly connects the fascination with religion and the fictionalized visualizations of witchcraft and conversion to Pentecostal Christianity with the anthropology of the contemporary urban world. Her work exemplifies how the urban has resurged as a key theme in the context of the studies of mediated religion. Conversely, urban anthropologists have increasingly taken note of the religious as a salient, integral element of the urban in contexts across the world. The interdisciplinary Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City project, initiated by a collective of academics, artists and activists comprised discursive as well as aesthetic formats, looking at the social, the political and the mediation of urban everyday life and spiritual experience. (Becker et al 2014)

Popular culture and difference Popular culture has in recent years emerged, thirdly, as a significant element of anthropological studies of social and cultural difference. In a global socio-political climate marked by the resurgence of difference politics, comprising of the phenomenon of difference thinking and its corollary, identity politics, anthropologists have increasingly employed popular cultural expressions as a lens into the unprecedented revival of

cultural and religious identities. Recent research has investigated various religious and cultural repertoires and new technologies, which have been observed to mediate identities and categories of social, cultural, gender, and generational difference. South African studies of the late apartheid and post-apartheid eras have made suggestive contributions to the field. The role of popular culture, particularly music, in the making and unmaking of identities and difference became a key theme from the 1980s onwards in studies by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who engaged this theme from the background of the country’s history. In South Africa essentialist identity narratives have provided the underpinnings of colonialism, segregation, apartheid, and arguably also the contemporary dispensation. A number of studies in the anthropology of music addressed issues of ‘identity’ construction – and expression-, feelings of difference, and exclusion in the particular South African context. They demonstrated how black performance evolved in response to the growing economic and racial segmentation of South African society. The studies generally focused on musicians and listeners particularly those belonging to the marginal, mobile populations involved in labour migrancy, defined themselves through cultural expression and performance as ethnic subjects. (Becker 2012). A key role in the research on music, popular culture and society in South Africa has been played by David Coplan who conducted two years research of popular culture forms in the mid-1970s, primarily in and around Johannesburg and Soweto. Coplan subsequently became influential in the anthropology of popular culture, and of popular music in particular. His study (Coplan 2008 [1985]) was exceptional at the time of its original publication, since he analysed the transcultural social processes of creolization that shaped cultural expression in the urban spaces of Johannesburg, The topic of creolization has been more specifically dealt with by Denis-Constant Martin (2013) in relation to music in Cape Town. Building on his earlier ethnographic research on the Cape Town carnival, Martin analysed the part played by an array of musical genres, including prominently ‘Cape Jazz’ and rap in what he coins the dialectics of separation and interweaving in the processes of creolization. Rap, as a global phenomenon, has been studied by a growing number of anthropologists across the African continent particularly. Different genres of music and their impact on politics of difference and national, religious and ethnic identity have been discussed by anthropologists in a growing body of literature. Current popular culture perspectives in anthropological research focus particularly on performance and media, as exemplified in the multi-genre mediations of difference through encounters in popular cultural forms, which have been presented by Matthias Krings (2015). Krings discusses cultural difference and mimesis in genres across different periods and parts of the African continent. Employing the concept of appropriation, he demonstrates how African cultural producers mediate between contrasting life-worlds by translating and transmitting practices and symbolic elements from one to another cultural (and socio-political) setting. This perspective on popular culture in a globalizing world indicates future trajectories; the move beyond the hitherto dominant area studies approach in popular culture studies, is also suggested by other recent volumes, which have been discussed above (Becker et al 2014;

Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots 2014).

SEE ALSO: Popular music; Art, anthropology of; Modernity; Performance; Religion and media; Resistance; Urbanisation and urban environments References and Suggested Readings Adorno, Theodor W. 2001 [1991]. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. New York: Routledge. Barber, Karin. 1987. “Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review, Vol. 30 No. 3: 1-78. Barber, Karin. 1997. “Notes on Audiences in Africa.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 67, No. 3: 347-362. Becker, Heike. 2012. “Anthropology and the Study of Popular Culture: A Perspective from the Southern Tip of Africa.” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 43 No. 4: 17-37. Becker, Jochen, Katrin Klingan, Stephan Lanz, and Kathrin Wildner, eds. 2014. Global Prayers: Contemporary Manifestations of the Religious in the City. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers. Benjamin, Walter. 2010 [1936]. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Coplan, David B. 2008 [1985]. In Township Tonight! Three Centuries of Sputh African Black City Music and Theater. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Epstein, Arnold L. 1992. Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fabian, Johannes. “Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures. To the Memory of Placide Tempels (1906-1977).” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 48, No. 4: 315-334. Fabian, Johannes. 1998. Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press. Krings, Matthias. 2015. African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Martin, Denis-Constant. 2013. Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. Somerset West: African Minds.

Mbembe, Achille. 2015 [2001]. On the Postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, J. Clyde. 1956. The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press and the RhodesLivingstone Institute. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1962. Copper Town: Changing Africa. The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Pype, Katrien. 2012. The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa. New york and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ranger, Terence O. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schulz, Dorothea E. 2012. Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Werbner, Pnina, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, eds. 2014. The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, Monica, and Archie Mafeje. 1963. Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.