17 Popular culture as Learning Event: Identity Making as a Performative Act in Africa and its Diasporas

Leitung: Hassan Ndzovu, Britta Frede

This panel invites to exploring various processes of learning, knowledge generation and its mediated transmission as a significant process in the formation of identity making in Africa and its Diasporas. We encourage contributions that address knowledge transmission embedded in popular culture, or displayed in popular events like festivals, clubs, competitions, or workshops. We are especially inviting contributions that look at intersections and layers of media practice, especially in poetry, music, film and art works. We do understand identity making in the field of popular culture as a performative act that mediates culture with or without the use of mass media and draws on established aesthetic forms by combining them in multiple ways, thus creating new forms and ways of representation of symbols of identity. We are especially interested in papers that focus on the nexus between the multiplicity of learning events and the formation of identity among different segments of communities in Africa and beyond, thus, highlighting the issues of gender, race, ethnicity, age and class in different settings of popular culture events.

The invited papers engage with the concept of medialities by engaging with media practice and the fusion of profane and religious symbols, thereby addressing one of the following questions: How does artistic performances contribute in the production and diffusion of knowledge among different communities in Africa? In which way does the mediating of symbols play into processes of identity making? How have the performances of arts perpetuated linguistic borrowing among speakers of local languages as evident in the music and film-video production in Africa? What dynamics does the entry of women in the public performances reveal in relation to the view of women’s bodies and voices in the public spaces among Africans?

Panelists:

• Simphiwe Rens, U of South Africa, Pretoria, SA (virtual)
• Alice Aterianus-Owanga, U Lausanne, Suisse (present in Bayreuth)
• Ala Alhourani, Dep. Study of Religions, U of Cape Town, SA (virtual)
• Abdourahmane Seck, U Gaston Berger, Saint-Louis, Sénégal (present at RU)
• Hassan Ndzovu (Moi U, Kenya) (present at RU)
• Britta Frede (U Bayreuth) (present in Bayreuth)

abstracts of contributions