Full Description
Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda offers fascinating insight into the lived experiences of young people in Rwanda through ethnographic analysis of the ambiguities and ambivalences that have accompanied the country's rapid post-genocide development. Andrea Mariko Grant considers how Pentecostalism and popular music offer urban young people ways to craft themselves and their futures; to imagine alternative ways to 'be' Rwandan and inhabit the city in the post-genocide era. Exploring the idiom of the heart - and efforts to transform it - this book offers a richly nuanced perspective of urban young people's everyday lives, their aspirations and disappointments, at a political moment of both great promise and great constraint. Rather than insist on a resistance-dominance binary, Grant foregrounds the possibilities of agency available to young people, their ability to make 'noise', even when it may lead to devastating consequences.
Contents
Introduction: Transforming hearts; 1. Of hearts, visions, and Pentecostal subjects; 2. Who are the 'true' sons of God? Ubwenge and Pentecostal ethics; 3. Leaving a legacy: Pentecostal women and timework; 4. Rwanda Shima Imana: the politics of thanksgiving; 5. Pentecostal sounds and voice; 6. Singing from the heart: Music after 1994; 7. Singing life: Hip hop in the city; 8. The making of a 'superstar'; Conclusion: Mihigo and the politics of humanity; Works Cited; Index.
