Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda

Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda PDF Author: Linda Cimardi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250327
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Focusing on runyege, the main traditional performance genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda. Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender. Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http: //hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.

Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda

Performing Arts and Gender in Postcolonial Western Uganda PDF Author: Linda Cimardi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250327
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on runyege, the main traditional performance genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, this book explores the entanglement of traditional music, dance, and theater with gender and postcolonialism in Western Uganda. Drawing on archival research and extensive fieldwork in the regions of Bunyoro and Tooro, Linda Cimardi examines the connection between traditional performing arts and gender in western Uganda. The book focuses on runyege, the main genre of the Banyoro and Batooro people, exploring its different components of singing, instrument playing, dancing, and acting and identifying their complex relationships to gender models and expressions. Today mainly performed at Ugandan school festivals and by semiprofessional ensembles, repertoires like runyege adhere to stage conventions that have developed over several decades. Some of these conventions are powerful devices allowing the actors involved (performers, teachers, students, adjudicators, and audiences) to collectively shape an image of local culture grounded in a gender binary that is perceived as traditional. At the same time, stage conventions are exploited by some performers to negotiate their gender identities and expressions in unconventional ways, thus challenging hegemonic gender models. Moving between analysis of historical recordings, oral accounts, and present-day fieldwork data and experiences, the book engages in a comprehensive analysis of the postcolonial entanglement of arts and gender. Audio and video recordings presented in the book can be accessed on the book's companion website, http: //hdl.handle.net/1802/37373.

Women's Leadership in Music

Women's Leadership in Music PDF Author: Linda Cimardi
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 383946546X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Various modes of women's contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women's point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women's agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives - from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology - this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women's leadership.

Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland

Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland PDF Author: Ying Diao
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1648250742
Category : Gospel music
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
"Illuminates how voice, faith, and hearing become intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and mobility amid the rapidly transforming religious landscape of China's ethnic borderland. The twentieth-century expansion of Protestantism among the upland peoples in the China-Southeast Asia borderlands has catalyzed a profound sociocultural change in the region. In Faith by Aurality in China's Ethnic Borderland, Ying Diao finds important sonic evidence for this religious revolution in a rapidly transforming northwest Yunnan, presenting a compelling account of China's minority-Christian landscape and highlighting the importance of aurality in the peripheral peoples' response to Christianity and other modernizing projects. Diao documents a range of sounded religious practices by the Lisu, an indigenous yet historically migratory people, to examine how participatory music production, circulation, and consumption become integral to indigenous perception and experience of faith. Weaving together evidence from multisite fieldwork, archival records, and audiovisual media, Diao demonstrates nuanced understanding of people of faith at the margin, one centered on the sensual and material dimensions of religion and on the intertwining of local agency and external hegemonic forces. As the first full-length ethnographic account of China's Christian minorities on a transnational scale to be published in English, this book provides historical and contextual information that enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global Christianity, ethnicity, media, and mobility while showing how sound can be an ambivalent but fruitful avenue through which ways of faith are constructed and remain fluid in a context where discussions and practices of religion are constrained"--

Voyages in Postcolonial African Theatre Practice

Voyages in Postcolonial African Theatre Practice PDF Author: Charles Nwadigwe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527567850
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Voyages in Postcolonial African Theatre Practice goes beyond the predictable academic discursive trips on postcolonial drama and theatre practice. In 14 unique but interrelated essays, this volume dissects the critical issues that envelop the practice of theatre in postcolonial Africa and the African Diaspora, and how practitioners engage with the trends which arise. The volume departs from the conventional theoretical constructs of humanistic studies and focuses on concrete realities that interface and interfere with the professional practice of African theatre, a creative industry confined by the historical and dialectical motifs of the colonial experience. Topics such as secondary adaptations, theatre training and pedagogy, censorship and performance politics, applied theatre, cultural policy and tourism, scenography, festivals and oral tradition, dance internationalisation, popular music, text and the African film reflect the broad coverage and diversity of this volume on African postcolonial theatre practices, from text to performance, planning to production.

Baakisimba

Baakisimba PDF Author: Sylvia Antonia Nannyonga-Tamusuza
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135456593
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Originally a royal court dance, baakisimba asserted the authority of the king as the head of Baganda society. After the abolition of kingship in 1967, baakisimba dance began to be performed in other contexts, with women sometimes playing the accompanying drums-traditionally a man's role-and with men occasionally performing the dance.Sylivia Nannyonga-Tamusuza argues that the music and dance of the Baganda people are not simply reflective of culture; baakisimba participates in the construction of social relations, and helps determine how these relations shape the performing arts. Integrating a study of foregrounds the conceptualization of gender as a time-specific cultural phenomenon. Illuminating the complex relationship between baakisimba and Baganda culture, this path breaking volume bridges the gaps in previous scholarship that integrates music and dance in ethnomusicological scholarship.

Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre

Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre PDF Author: Osita Okagbue
Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 1912234580
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Contemporary Uganda and other East African states are connected by the experience of Idi Amin's tyranny, rapacious and murderous regime, and the latter second Uganda Peoples Congress government, that forced Ugandans to go into exile and initiate armed struggles from Kenya and Tanzania to oust his government. Because of these experiences of disappearances, torture, murder and war, issues of identity, politics and resistance are significant concerns for East African dramatists. Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre demonstrates the significant role of theatre in resisting tyranny and forging a post-colonial national identity. In its engaging analysis of an important period of theatre, the book explores key moments while considering the specific practice of individual artists and groups that provoke differing experiences and performance practices. Selected examples range from early post-colonial plays reflecting the resistance to the rise of tyranny, torture and dictatorships, to more recent works that address situations involving struggles for social justice and the cult personality in political leaders. Resistance and Politics in Contemporary East African Theatre offers a new vision of Ugandan theatre as a performative space, a site where new aesthetics, forms, multiple voices, and identities emerge.

Gender, Sexuality and Decolonization in Postcolonial Ghana

Gender, Sexuality and Decolonization in Postcolonial Ghana PDF Author: Charles Prempeh
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956553735
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Since the turn of the millennium, in Ghana and in other African countries, there has been a vociferous debate over the history and present condition of the family. The debate has largely fragmented the Ghanaian constituency into two nearly intransigent camps: those who think the indigenous family system should experience cultural osmosis to accommodate the seismic Western cultural revolutions and the overwhelming religious constituency who advocate the retention of conservative family system. This book is a contribution to the debate. Written by an African Studies academic, it seeks to use the resources of both the social sciences and religion to assess the merits of the various parties to the debate. The author believes in the legitimacy of the traditional family system as conditio sine qua non for preserving human civilization. Nevertheless, the goal of this book is not to further polarize the Ghanaian front, but build bridges, by inviting the various parties to the debate to walk the complex pathways of exercising compassion without compromising the values that support human flourishing. Charles Prempeh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana.

Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance

Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance PDF Author: Kene Igweonu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040019919
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 811

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance brings together the very latest international research on the performing arts across the continent and the diaspora into one expansive and wide-ranging collection. The book offers readers a compelling journey through the different ideas, people and practices that have shaped African theatre and performance, from pre-colonial and colonial times, right through to the 20th and early 21st centuries. Resolutely Pan-African and inter- national in its coverage, the book draws on the expertise of a wide range of Africanist scholars, and also showcases the voices of performers and theatre practitioners working on the cutting-edge of African theatre and performance practice. Contributors aim to answer some of the big questions about the content (nature, form) and context (processes, practice) of theatre, whilst also painting a pluralistic and complex picture of the diversity of cultural, political and artistic exigencies across the continent. Covering a broad range of themes including postcolonialism, transnationalism, interculturalism, Afropolitanism, development and the diaspora, the handbook concludes by projecting possible future directions for African theatre and performance as we continue to advance into the 21st century and beyond. This ground-breaking new handbook will be essential reading for students and researchers studying theatre and performance practices across Africa and the diaspora. Kene Igweonu is Professor of Creative Education at University of the Arts London, where he is also Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of London College of Communication. An interdisciplinary researcher, Professor Igweonu has extensive experience of senior academic leadership in immersive and interactive practices and performance practice. His practice research and publication interests are in storytelling, theatre, and performance in Africa and its Diaspora, as well as the Feldenkrais Method in health, wellbeing, and performance training. A champion for arts and creative industries, Professor Igweonu is Chair of DramaHE, Council Member for Creative UK, and until August 2023, President of the African Theatre Association.

Postcolonial Imbusa

Postcolonial Imbusa PDF Author: Mutale Mulenga Kaunda
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666926256
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Using decolonial and postcolonial nego-feminism, Postcolonial Imbusa: Bemba Women's Agency, and Indigenous Cultural Systems examines the daily lives of Bemba women and how imbusa has defined the behaviors and relations between women and men at home, church, and work.

Javanese Gamelan and the West

Javanese Gamelan and the West PDF Author: Sumarsam
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580464459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Javanese Gamelan and the West studies the meaning, forms, and traditions of the Javanese performing arts as they developed and changed through their contact with Western culture. Authored by a gamelan performer, teacher, and scholar, the book traces the adaptations in gamelan art as a result of Western colonialism in nineteenth-century Java, showing how Western musical and dramatic practices were domesticated by Javanese performers creating hybrid Javanese-Western art forms, such as with the introduction of brass bands in gendhing mares court music and West Javanese tanjidor, and Western theatrical idioms in contemporary wayang puppet plays. The book also examines the presentation of Javanese gamelan to the West, detailing performances in World's Fairs and American academia and considering its influence on Western performing arts and musical and performance studies. The end result is a comprehensive treatment of the formation of modern Javanese gamelan and a fascinating look at how an art form dramatizes changes and developments in a culture. Sumarsam is a University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and numerous articles in English and Indonesian. As a gamelan musician and a keen amateur dhalang (puppeteer) of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the US, Australia, Europe, and Asia.