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 music, art, and media productions African youth produce, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general 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. |