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2021 (2)

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Book
Infinite repertoire : on dance and urban possibility in postsocialist Guinea
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ISBN: 9780226762845 022676284X 9780226781020 022678102X Year: 2021 Publisher: Chicago The University of Chicago Press

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Abstract

"In this energetic ethnography, anthropologist Adrienne J. Cohen traces the socialist political history that undergirds the practice of stage dance, or "ballet" in Guinea and the rise of private troupes in postsocialist Conakry. Guinean ballet goes hand in hand with state power, as the socialist state demands loyalty, but also depends on the sincerity and spontaneity of artists' performances to win the hearts and minds of spectators. Cohen shows how, decades after the death of dictator Sékou Touré, ballet continues to command the attention of Guinean youth as an experience of both loss and liberation for practitioners. Young artists perform and comment on a postsocialist urban lifeworld through improvisational dance and semiotic framing. By concentrating on a playful emerging urban lexicon of dance moves and practices and the heated intergenerational debates they spark, we see how dancers navigate-through embodied and verbal discourse-major social and economic transformations in post-revolutionary Conakry. Infinite Repertoire expands our understanding of the connection between aesthetics, affect, magic, and politics in Guinea, even as it complicates any simple dichotomy between authoritarianism and creative freedom"--


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Youth and Popular Culture in Africa

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"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or 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. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, 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"--

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