Full Description
This volume provides an overview of fundamental or 'grounding' themes in African Cultural Studies, including the articulation of African cultural studies, the issue of Africa's diaspora(s), African identity and identifications, and media studies in Africa and its relationship with cultural studies. The first of two volumes, the book predominantly pulls together a rich reservoir of previously published articles from Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, mapping a long history of the field that draws from a diverse range of origins and locations, especially from within Africa itself.
The first section of the book addresses how African cultural studies has been called for and explained, both as a comprehensive continental (and sometimes national) discourse and as being in conversation with established global cultural studies. The second section addresses the African diaspora and what might be termed diasporic African cultural studies. A third principal theme explored is how African identities and identifications are articulated in African cultural studies. On spatiality, the volume takes a stance on the exclusive continental versus continuity conception of Africa: the African diaspora is treated as contributory and its relationship to the continent as problematic, while taking up continental Africa as the principal location of African cultural studies. In terms of identity, Blackness is taken up as the dominant (but importantly, not exclusive) racial identity, and identification of African cultural studies and gender and social class are also addressed in novel ways. The book ends with an examination of the complex relationship between media studies and cultural studies.
This book will be a key resource for academics, researchers and advanced students of African cultural studies, media and cultural studies, African studies, history, politics, sociology, and social and cultural anthropology, while also being of interest to those seeking an introduction to the sub-field of African cultural studies.
Contents
An Introduction to African Cultural Studies 1. African Cultural Studies: An Overview 2. Negotiations, transitions and uncertainty principles: Critical Arts in the worlds of the post, Critical Arts 3. African cultural studies, cultural studies in Africa: How to make a useful difference 4.Would We Know African Cultural Studies If We Saw It? 5. Cultural studies in Africa: Positioning difference 6. Wild seed: Africa and its many diasporas 7. African intellectuals in the belly of the beast: Migration, identity and the politics of African intellectuals in the North 8. Ships that will never sail: the paradox of Rastafari Pan-Africanism 9. Communicating Pan-Africanism: Caribbean leadership and global impact 10. Just kidding? Humour, rhetoric and racial inference in newsletters of a San Francisco Bay Area South African group 11. Notes on the (Im)Possibility of articulating continental African identity 12. That rare and random tribe: Albino identity in South Africa 13. A politics of blood: The 'white tribe' of Africa and the recombinant nationalism of a colonizing indigene 14. Middle-class matters, or, how to keep whites whiter, colours brighter, and blacks beautiful 15. Reflections on Trans & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi) 16. Alter-egos: cultural and media studies 17. Capital or critique? When journalism education seeks to influence the field 18. Reuters and the South African press at the end of Empire 19. Broadcasting to the Portuguese Empire in Africa: Salazar's singular broadcasting policy 20. Paradigms in South African cinema research: Modernity, the New Africa Movement and Beyond
