Overview

Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of ""Tanzanian National Culture"" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

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9780226029801

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Reviews

Askew's training as an anthropologist, her years of residence in . . . Tanga and her accomplishments as a skilled taarab performer in her own right combine to make her uniquely quialified as a guide to these complex interpersonal dynamics, and her accounts of them are engrossing. -- Askew s training as an anthropologist, her years of residence in . . . Tanga an Jonathan Glassman

An engaging ethnographic account and historical analysis of Tanzanian cultural policy with respect to Swahili musical performance. Drawing on over a decade of work that included archival research, extensive interviews and first-hand performance experience, it is an impressive book that retains the intimacy of a personal memoir. . . . This work will be of significant use to scholars of performance studies, African area studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and culture studies. It is sure to raise the bar for the study of the relationship between musical and political expression in general and in East Africa in particular. -- Ethnomusicology Frank Gunderson

Applying performance theory to her study of nation-building, Askew explores the ways in which music and dance have played a part in constructing a national culture and identity in Tanzania. An ambitious book, Askew's thoughtful and richly detailed ethnography traces the relationship between music, politics, and economic change from the colonial period to the present. . . . An engaging and thought-provoking work which will have considerable appeal for readers in African studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and comparative politics. --Katherine Snyder Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Author Information

Kelly Askew is assistant professor of anthropology and of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan. She is the coeditor of The Anthropology of Media: A Reader and associate producer of the four-part documentary series Rhythms from Africa.

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