Youth and Popular Culture in Africa

Explores the range of vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, as expressed through art, music, theater, and online media. This edited collection focuses on the links between youth and African popular culture. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars explore popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. Essays cover a variety of cultural representations--visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual--created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public and shared locally and globally. The volume examines the range of music, art, and media African youth produce, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, and the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Essays further explore why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as symbols of the cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world—a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems.