Youth and Popular Culture in Africa: Media, Music, and Politics

This edited collection explores the vibrant cultural production and political activism of youth in Africa today, focusing on the links between youth and African popular culture. Essays cover a variety of cultural representations created by African youth, examining the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. The volume explores why these textual practices matter as social facts, interpretive acts, and symbols of cultural activism.

Format: Hardback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 15 October 2021
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Youth in Africa are expressing their vibrant cultural production and political activism through a diverse range of art forms, including art, music, theater, and online media. This edited collection specifically highlights the connections between youth and African popular culture. Contributions from esteemed scholars delve into the cultural expressions created and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa, encompassing a wide array of visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual representations. These essays explore the lives and societies of African youth, as well as their broader impact on both the local and global communities. The volume examines the diverse range of music, art, and media produced by African youth, exploring the conditions and contexts in which they create such work and the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts. Furthermore, the essays explore the significance of these textual practices as social facts, interpretive acts, and symbols of the cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world. In this globalized cultural economy, young people in Africa are actively engaged in struggles over the meanings that shape political-economic and social systems, utilizing their artistic expressions as powerful tools for social change.

Weight: 728g
Dimension: 159 x 236 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781648250248