MUSIC 7315

Music in Urban Africa

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This course traces the ideological legacy of colonialism in the modernizing projects of African nation states and explores how African populations have at times appropriated, negotiated, and resisted this legacy through musical performance. Focusing on the postcolonial African city as a space of musical innovation and contestation, it critically examines the relationship between popular culture and historic and ongoing processes of urbanization. How has music in Africa provided a unique position of individual and communal articulation with (post)colonialism, nationalism, crisis, and global representation? How has music worked to empower or disempower certain populations, and what are the implications of its use in the interest of politics? How do frameworks such as cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism expand or limit our understandings of popular musical cultures in Africa? Participants in the seminar will engage music not only from a lyrical perspective but also as a complex of aural signs that index tradition, globality, ethnicity, race, nation, and gender and that are constituted in the social relationships between performers and audiences.

When Offered Spring.

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