Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries - in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate - are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

Grace A Musila teaches African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is editor of Wangari Maathai's Registers of Freedom (2020); author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015); and co-editor of Rethinking Eastern African Intellectual Landscapes (2012, with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga).

Thirteen Ways of Reading African Popular Culture 1. Ethiopian Imprints: Reading and Writing Ethiopia in 1930s South Africa 2. Local Authors, Ephemeral Texts: Anglo-Scribes and Anglo-Literates in Early West African Newspapers 3. Varieties of Romance in Contemporary Popular Togolese Literature 4. Against 'African Popular Literature', or: The Weeping Woman 5. Gendering the Popular: Making a Case for FEMRITE in Uganda and Beyond 6. Scandals, Controversies and African Literary Prizes: Between Intertextuality and Plagiarism 7. TED Talks, Blogging, and Celebrity: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Popular Imagination 8. Flash Fiction Ghana and Popular Culture: An Overview 9. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Methods of Speculation in African Popular Culture 10. Literature in the Great Lakes Region: Between Resistance and Resilience 11. Funding Popular Culture in Tanzania: Crowdfunding, Self-Funding and the Live Performance as Fundraiser 12. Nigerian Film Audiences on the Internet: Influences, Preferences and Contentions 13. "Don't Tell Me You Want to Marry a White Man!": The Encounter with Euro-American Characters and Settings in African Commercial Cinema 14. Popular Culture and the Women Fandom of English Premier League Football in Eldoret, Kenya 15. Modelling Success: Women and Self-Making in Kenyan Digital Spaces 16. Recognizing LGBTQ+ Faces beyond the Mauritian Nation-State 17. Coding the City: Mapping Eco-Systems and Zones of Opportunity in Kinshasa's Emerging Tech Scene 18. Matters of Kwaito and Why Kwaito Matters 19. Meaning and Multiplicity: Complexity and Play in Tanzanian Hip Hop 20. Politics and the Music Video in Nigeria 21. The Police is Your Friend: Instagram Comedy and the Defamiliarization of the Postcolonial State 22. "Di one Wey Dey Pain me Pass...!": Social Satire, Caricature and Mimicry in the Comic Act of AY 23. #ObinimStickerChallenge: Visual Mediations of Suspicion in Religious Prosumer Parody Media in Contemporary Ghana