The Popular Arts and Culture in the Texture of the Public Sphere in Africa

Authors

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Keywords:

Popular Arts, Culture, Public Sphere, Texture

Synopsis

This lecture plots the African experience in a projectory that rejects binarism and seeks to construct a unitary socio-psychological map of that experience, thereby positing what has been seen to be fragmented in past theorising as a functional whole. It refers to liberal theories of the public space and posits these with emerging continental thought to construct the notion of the ‘African not I’ as a psychological entity that functions in the mainstream to discount African experience. The lecture concludes by suggesting ways in which popular culture may be used in residual public spheres to bolster positive subjective consciousness.

 

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Author Biography

Tsitsi Dangarembga

is an accomplished writer, dramatist, theatre and film producer. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe and the Deutsche Filmund
Fernsehakademie Berlin, her short story The Letter won the SIDA Award in 1985 and her first novel Nervous Condition won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1989. Among the plays she has written and directed are She No Longer Weeps, The Lost of the Soil, and The Third One. She has also produced fourteen
films, most notable among which is Everyone’s Child, shown worldwide at various festivals, including the Dublin Film Festival. She has also won professional merit awards in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States of America. Since 1989, she has been engaged in delivering lectures, addresses and readings at various literary gatherings, academic conferences and film festivals.

References

Cheater, A., 1999, Power In the Post-Modern Era, in Cheater, A., ed., The Anthropology of Power, Routledge, London.

Calhoun, C., ‘Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere’, Public Culture, 14, 1.

Fanon, F., 1970, Black skin, White Masks, Paladin, St Albans.

Gourevitch, P., 2000, We wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Picador, Basingstoke.

Habermas, J., 1989, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Polity Press, London.

Mulvey, L., 1990, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975’, in Erens, P., ed., Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Indiana Univerity Press, Bloomington.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J., 2008, ‘Nativism and the Debate on African Public Sphere in Postcolonial Africa: Reflections on a Problematic ‘Reverse Discourse’’, Conference paper, CODESRIA, 12th General Assembly, Yaoundé.

Ngugi, w.T., 1987, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare.

Shohat, E. and Stamm, R., 1995, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, New York.

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Published

November 12, 2010

Series

CODESRIA Books
Copyright (c) 2010 CODESRIA Books Publication System

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