Popular Culture and Democracy in Some Southern Contexts: An Introduction

Abstract

The essays in the present issue originate in papers that were presented first at a series of two workshops on 'Popular Culture and Democracy', organized by a research programme on 'Livelihood, Identity and Organisation in Situations of Instability' based at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen and International Development Studies at Roskilde University. The first workshop was held at Tongaat in KwaZulu-Natal in November 1998 and the second, for presentation of revised versions of selected papers, in Copenhagen in September 1999. The workshops brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines - ranging from history and the social sciences to cultural geography, literary criticism, musicology, drama, theatre practice and poetry. The title of the workshops, and of this issue of essays, brings into conjunction two terms that are not commonly seen together. Their relationship is a complex one, and one of the purposes of the workshop was to give substance and meaning to this relationship, and to show that each term can be better understood in the light of the other. The final papers, presented here, embody these aims: * to focus on the role of popular cultural articulations and genres in societies where instability and violent upheaval have made political institutions fragile or undemocratic, and have led political debate to seek more indirect forms of expression. * to debate the function of culture in situations of transition where civil society organizations are seeking to find new balances of democratic interaction with the local state. * to examine popular cultural institutions as means of expression for groups of people who are disadvantaged in their access to political influence. * to address the potentials of particular forms of popular culture in providing structures of organization and self-identification in situations which have been destabilized by displacement, migration and violent conflict, and to discuss the understandings of democracy given voice in different varieties of popular cultural expression. The 28 scholars who attended the first workshop came from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, Guatemala, Peru and Denmark. Reflecting this diversity, the present issue breaks new ground in the broad comparative perspective it provides. It is true that southern countries like Kenya (and, even further afield, India and Latin America) are not normally considered to be the subject of 'southern African studies'. The papers persuasively