Karin Barber Research Articles

Music As Extended Agency: On Notation And Entextualization IN Improvised Music

ABSTRACT This article presents results from fieldwork with two groups of improvisers using different forms of notation in their creative practice. Such practices raise fundamental questions about the relation of notation to performance. Drawing on theories of entextualization in linguistic anthropology, I argue that, contrary to many arguments for a performative understanding of music, performance is partly about creating something that has an identifiable existence, transcending space and time. The notations and compositional systems used by improvisers are a means of achieving this entextualization of their musical utterances. One of the main findings of my fieldwork was that improvisers frequently speak of acting ‘in service of the music’, a phrase commonly associated with composition-centred musical discourse. Drawing on the work of Karin Barber and Alfred Gell, I argue that this idea represents a process of entextualization that is not a negation of performers’ creative agency, but an extension of it.

Fálétí’s Philosophical Sensibility

Fálétí’s Philosophical Sensibility

Verbal art beyond categorization: inductive and aesthetic approaches to Remmy Ongala’s songs

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the textual aesthetics of the Congolese-born (later Tanzanian naturalized) Swahili singer-songwriter Remmy Ongala. In the first part, I argue that a textual approach is also important for songs. The theoretical discussion is mainly based on the studies by Karin Barber (“Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 1–78, “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (1995): 3–30, “Quotation in the Constitution of Yorùbá Oral Texts.” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 2 (1999): 17–41, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which offer a fundamental perspective on these issues. On this basis, I propose a more literary perspective, related to the ideas of the father of aesthetics Baumgarten (1714–1762), the American writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) and the Swahili writer Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020). Since Ongala belongs to different textual traditions, Congolese and Tanzanian, I use texts from these traditions for a comparative analysis of style and thought. On the Congolese side the comparison is based on elements of oral literature, like folk tale and song, both in relation to the proverb Kipendacho roho hula nyama bichi (A soul in love eats raw meat), while on the Tanzanian side the comparison is based on Swahili literature of that time.

Cultivating a Community of Viewers in Africa: Meta-cinematic Elements in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Major Films

Critical discussion of Abderrahmane Sissako's major films, Life on Earth (1998), Waiting for Happiness (2002), Bamako (2006), and Timbuktu (2014), explores issues related to spectatorship, live performance, and intertextuality. In particular, this essay looks at how this filmmaker frames spectatorship within his film narratives to bring the process of image-making up for reconsideration. These self-reflexive moments are examined in relation to film as an art form, issues of genre, and the history of cinema. The essay also looks at how live performances are embedded alongside scenarios of audiovisual spectatorship to draw our attention to the formation of audiences in different African settings, and to suggest an analogy between live and recorded performances. Some attention is also given to intertextuality and how Sissako references classic films by Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambety to cultivate an awareness of film history in his viewers. By drawing on and developing insights from contributions by Karin Barber, Tsitsi Jaji, and Akin Adesokan the essay seeks to define the importance of these meta-cinematic elements in the film narratives of one of the most impactful filmmakers of his generation.

African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”

African Film Festivals in Africa:Curating "African Audiences" for "African Films" Lindiwe Dovey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure B. An audience member overlooks the FESPACO ceremony. Courtesy of FESPACO. [End Page 12] The First Film Festivals in Africa: "Educating" the "African Audience" No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg.1 If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals.2 Although certain prestigious film festivals (Cannes, in particular) operate mostly as closed, industry events focused on the glamor and business of filmmaking, most of the thousands of film festivals around the world see their main beneficiaries as both filmmakers and audiences.3 In fact, "the curator Neil Young has questioned whether Cannes, which excludes the public from most of its screenings, qualifies as a festival at all" on this basis.4 As a field of study, film festivals offer an ideal opportunity to observe films playing out in public contexts, with live audiences and discussions. The contested meanings of films in these settings challenge the dominant hermeneutic practice of close film analysis as it takes place in professional settings, such as universities and newspapers, where the contexts of a film's screening are rarely taken into account in the critic's judgement of the film. There is particular potential for research on the (dis)sensus communis surrounding African-made films in this respect, given that festivals are among the few public arenas in which such films are screened. Along with the exhibition of Nollywood movies at thousands of video halls across the continent, festivals are among the public spaces awaiting more in-depth research.5 Although there are exceptions, the organizers of many film festivals in Africa put great emphasis on the central value of audiences to their festivals' worth and meaning. As I will show, many Africans have been motivated to found and run their festivals by the structural and institutional barriers to a certain kind of film being accessible to Africa-based audiences, and many curators of these festivals find ways of actually incorporating audience perspectives into their curatorial principles. The kinds of spectators [End Page 13] cultivated by many African curators are a world away from what Shweta Kishore, for example, describes of audience experiences at the first Ladakh International Film Festival in India in 2012: Audiences were restricted to the established position of "viewer," which allowed the consumption of film but excluded contributions to structural aspects of the festival. Opportunities for intervention, such as post-film discussions, interactions with filmmakers, and festival structures that included audience feedback were missing—especially significant given that LIFF was the first film festival in the entire region.6 As Witz explains, if no audience spontaneity is fostered by a festival, there will be little chance of festive excitement. Rather, the festival will assume a unidirectional pedagogical tone. As will become evident in the next few chapters of this book, where film festival directors and curators within Africa have not incorporated audience tastes and desires into their conceptualization of their festivals, audiences have frequently stepped up to claim this power and sense of authorship and ownership over the festivals. It is thus not only the festival organizers who determine whether a festival's culture is participatory or not. As Karin Barber's foundational work on popular culture and audiences in Africa has shown, there are especially porous boundaries between production and reception in many African contexts.7 Ways of thinking about audiences in Africa have come a long way since colonial times. A significant body of scholarship on the practices of colonial film units and missionaries who used film in Africa has revealed the extent to which "the African audience" was constructed by such groups as a homogenous and non-individuated mass to be feared and policed.8 While they did not call themselves film festivals, the mobile film screenings held in different parts of the continent by film units and missionaries from the early 1900s onwards satisfy my definition of a film festival, in that they brought together huge, live audiences at specific...

“In the Hunter's Footsteps: Chérif Keïta—Griot, Scholar, Teacher”

"In the Hunter's Footsteps:Chérif Keïta—Griot, Scholar, Teacher" Joseph Hellweg (bio) KEYWORDS Chérif Keïta, Massa Makan Diabaté, Mande, hermeneutics, multi-modality, orality, dozos, Manding MOTS-CLÉS Chérif Keïta, Massa Makan Diabaté, Mandé, herméneutique, multimodalité, oralité, dozos, mandingue Re-Encountering Chérif In October of 2010, standing outside a conference center (Point Sud) in Bamako, Mali, with other participants, I heard a familiar voice from across the grounds. It was full of joy and intensity. I knew it well. Sure enough, I saw Chérif Keïta speaking to a group of students he had brought from Carleton College to Bamako. It was no surprise to find him introducing them to life in Mali. He had once done the same for me—though from far away and through books—in Northfield, Minnesota, two and a half decades before. Not surprisingly, Chérif's friendship, mentoring, and scholarship have proven as important to me since graduating from Carleton in 1988 as when I was studying there. I cannot conceive of my life or research without him. His boundless generosity, brilliance, and enthusiasm have repeatedly inspired me and given me hope.1 I therefore begin this tribute to Chérif by explaining what his scholarship means to me as an anthropologist and scholar of religion, as well as its broader significance to anyone interested in Mande Studies. For me, though, learning from Chérif began with his introductory course on African Francophone [End Page 181] literature. But his influence extended far beyond Carleton, as I discovered during my first research stay in Côte d'Ivoire. Even now his presence deepens my understanding of my ethnographic research, and his writing on Mande aesthetics has paved the way for my own future work. I am therefore deeply grateful to belong to a network of scholars who trace their interest in West Africa to Chérif, and I am pleased to share this testimony to Chérif's wisdom and collegiality. Keïta: Griot? Chérif's innovative scholarship places the field of Mande Studies at the heart of the contemporary humanities and social sciences. Outstanding among his many publications, two of his books, Massa Makan Diabaté : Un griot mandingue à la rencontre de l'écriture (1995a) and Outcast to Ambassador: The Musical Odyssey of Salif Keïta (2011; see also Keïta 2001, 2009a), highlight the contributions of Malian Manding performance to the study of textual interpretation and world music. In Chérif's (1995a) study of the writing of Massa Makan Diabaté, he develops a literary hermeneutic grounded in African orature. In doing so, he complements the work of scholars such as Paul Connerton (1989), Ruth Finnegan (2007), and Karin Barber (2000, 2007) who question sharp distinctions between orality and literacy such as those made by Jack Goody (1977, 2010) and Walter Ong (1982). For Finnegan, even unwritten verbal production in Africa—or elsewhere—far from being purely "oral," is "multi-modal," relying on "sonic patternings, visual gestures, facial expressions, interactions with audience and in many cases singing and sometimes dancing or dance-evoking movements," in addition to spoken words (Finnegan 2007: 51). Writing, for Finnegan, is just another "mode" of communication among many, lying along a vast continuum of embodied and material manifestations that verbal creativity may take. The genius of Chérif's approach to the work of Massa Makan Diabaté lies in Cherif's use of the supposedly "oral" aesthetics of Mande griots—jaliw or jeliw in the Bamanankan of Mali—as a hermeneutic with which to interpret Diabaté's writing. Chérif grounds his analytical frame, beyond both orality and literacy, in the dynamics of Mande social life, in which griots play definitive roles (Keïta 1995a: 9-10, 37-38). According to Chérif, Diabaté's writing amounts to more than a transcription, translation, or literary projection of Mande praise songs, or fasa. Rather, it became Diabaté's way of doing a griot's work—jaliya. "Massa Makan Diabaté saw in writing, first and foremost, a way to make a distinct place for himself . . . in the shining line of his fathers and place of origin" (Keïta 1995a: 55...

Chinua Achebe’sThere was a Countryand the digital publics of African literature

AbstractA growing body of critical works on the digital expressions of African literature confirms the importance of digital literary studies in Africa. Examples of this growing scholarship include those of Shola Adenekan (2012) and Stephanie Santana (2018). Adenekan’s work focuses on ‘the Internetting of African literature’, while Santana's essay uses digital fiction from South Africa to offer a brilliant treatment of the connections between national spaces and digital networks. Several questions emerge, though, in considering how digital technologies reformulate the form, function, and audience of African literature. How are we, for instance, to understand the role of digital publics? What kind of ideological terrains emerge in online literary representations? What mediations do digital technologies bring to the changing forms and publics of contemporary writing in Africa? How does the ontology of the digital reconfigure the behaviour of the audience in the interpretation of literary meaning and how might previous scholarship such as those of Karin Barber’s on publics and audiences be read in the context of digitality? This article aims to answer these questions by examining some articulations of reader agency to Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country on digital avenues such as Facebook. Aside from an exploration of the intersection of digital culture and African literary forms, I hope to use online responses to Achebe’s memoir to track the trajectories of the new publics of African literature, showing how the ethnopolitics that greeted the publication of Achebe’s wartime narrative explicates the nature of digital publics

A History of African Popular Culture, by Karin Barber

A History of African Popular Culture, by Karin Barber

Contemporary Zimbabwean popular music in the context of adversities

Contemporary Zimbabwean popular and urban genres of music namely, urban grooves and its variant Zimdancehall emerged and continue to exist at a time Zimbabwe is grappling with socio-economic and political adversities. The music is part of crucial artistic forms and dissent, hence for the ordinary Zimbabweans, it plays a significant role, detailing their experiences and survival strategies and influencing their patterns of entertainment and daily cultural practises. This article which is informed by popular culture theorists such as Karin Barber (1987) and John Fiske (1989) makes a textual analysis of Winky D's (2015) songs "Disappear", "Copyrights" and "Survivor" to examine the power of the songs in exploring the survival strategies employed by ordinary Zimbabweans in dealing with their experiences. The paper examines how the music is a source of power that fosters a response resonating with a postcolonial urban youth cultural activism seeking to empower the ordinary Zimbabweans to autonomously transcend their adversities and take control of their destinies in a country where the ruling elite are failing to improve the nation's socio-economic conditions.

When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto

Reviewed by: When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 by Saheed Aderinto Oluwakemi A. Adesina When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit sexuality, nationalism, and politics in colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 By Saheed Aderinto. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015. In his 241-page book, Saheed Aderinto looks at the historical significance of illicit sexuality and the structures put in place by the British colonial administration in Lagos, Nigeria to control the obnoxious practice. This book is an important contribution to Sexuality Studies and the colonial history of Nigeria. This work, the first full book dedicated to researching sexuality in colonial Nigeria, is centred on sex, sexuality, sexual politics, class conflicts, urbanisation, and gender. When Sex Threatened the State analyses Nigerian responses to British sexuality laws and the contradictory ways in which the British and African reformers advocated for the regulation and/or prohibition of prostitution. Aderinto builds on earlier works of scholars like Luise White's The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in colonial Nairobi, George Mosse's pioneering study on Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe and Phillipa Levine's Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing venereal disease in the British Empire. The book is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. In the introduction, the author incisively engages with the issues of prostitution and corruption. The introduction examines sexual politics, the criminal justice system as it affects prostitution, and girl trafficking. Aderinto carefully details the historical evolution of Lagos—the environment under which prostitution flourished. The author asserts that corruption was devised by officers of the Nigeria Police force, officers of the Colony Welfare Office (CWO) and sex workers as an escape route from the severity of criminal justice system, thus affirming the notion that corruption is a postcolonial problem is ahistorical "given the spate of corruption during the 1940s." (3). In the second chapter, he "unveils" the gendered narrative of prostitution that elicited concerns from the colonial government and the nationalists. Aderinto provides compelling arguments that established the link between prostitution and juvenile delinquency, exemplified by the boma and jaguda boys, as a "mutually constitutive and symbiotic" relation (69). The author emphasizes the relevance of newspaper articles as a veritable source for the writing of colonial history while citing the story of the Lagos prostitute Segilola: Eleyinju ege, whose story was published as a novel and serialised in Akede Eko (Lagos Herald) in 1930 and which provided the author with a vivid image of the social life in colonial Lagos (53). This novel has recently been edited, translated and introduced by Karin Barber.1 Most important in this chapter is his emphasis on "adult prostitution" as distinct from "child prostitution" (72). It is interesting to note that the colonial experiences in Lagos are replicated elsewhere on the continent. Whilst Aderinto documents the incidence of child prostitution in colonial Lagos (120–21), Luise White also highlights the prevalence of juvenile prostitution in colonial Nairobi.2 The third chapter of the book illustrates the "moral degeneration" of society as "criminally minded adults" introduced underage girls to prostitution. This development drove new interventionist initiatives from the colonial state, with the establishment of the Colonial Welfare Office (CWO) (74) and child prostitution laws. However, the claim by the author that "the age of consent in Nigeria was thirteen, meaning that an individual legally ceased to be a child at this age" (75) needs further clarification because there is no reference to any document to corroborate this assertion. The questions this raises are: Given the fact that Nigeria is a multi-ethnic society, is this age of consent applicable to all ethnic groups? In what areas of life is this age of consent employed? Also, is this age of consent gendered? Chapter Four deals with the concomitant of "illicit sexuality": the "sexual scourge," that is, venereal diseases, and how they permeated society and the measures proffered to stem the tide of the menace. This issue was salient in the age (before the late 1940s) when the army, a strong colonial institution, discouraged marriage and expected soldiers not to have strong family ties or responsibilities that could militate...

Afro-superheroes: prepossessing the future

In ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, published in 1987, Karin Barber made passing reference to the syncretic use made of Marvel Comic superheroes alongside figures from Twi folktales, in comics produced in Accra and Kumasi in the 1970s (1987). In these comics, Marvel superheroes and folklore figures, she wrote, have in common their special powers, and a past that stretches beyond the lives of everyday Ghanaians. In the explosion of these figures into the lives of ordinary people, their special powers offer political transformation and access to an otherworldly (sometimes, but not always, ancestrally supported) ability to change this world. The increasing visibility of African superheroes (or what Adilifu Nama has termed so memorably ‘Super Blacks’, 2011) might look, from a certain point of view, like evidence of the increasing infiltration of transnational consumerism into youth cultural forms in African contexts. The papers in this collection on Afro-superheroes argue the opposite: Afro-superheroes, the authors show in their analysis of their often arresting material, are embedded in contemporary political and social contexts and provide us with ways of understanding the emergent present.

‘Wetin dey happen?’: Wazobia, popular arts, and nationhood

Emerging mass culture in the popular arts, signposting Nigeria's entry into the postcolonial phase, has helped in creating a site of linguistic identity at variance from the one imposed by British rule. Such a reconstitution of the colonial/indigenous subject/psyche via the ‘vernacular’ medium of popular arts, which Karin Barber views as a hybridized cultural domain, is sometimes an unconscious, often a decanonical and, to follow Victor Turner, liminal phenomenon that displaces English as the language of ‘high’ culture and civilization, providing in the alternative a metissage of languages including English, Nigerian Pidgin English, and the so-called vernaculars whose ultimate outcome could be positive for the overall development of society. Framed within cultural studies and postcolonial theory, this article explores the nexus between nationhood and national identity implicit in the efflorescence of indigenous languages and dialects in contemporary popular music in Nigeria.

Narrating Creative Process

See, Vishwakarma and his sons worked together on creating the universe, said Nakulbhai, a smile bright on his face as he started in on one of the many stories he tells about the Hindu god of artisans and his descendants. After this, Vishwakarma was given gifts as payment. Each of his sons went to him and he gave each one a bowl of rice. They were disappointed. They thought, 'We did so much work, the universe is so beautiful. And this bowl of rice is all we've received from our father.'In October 2013, when I heard this story, Nakulbhai was in his eighties. A slender man with alert eyes and a warm smile who habitually wears a short-sleeved white cotton kurta, Nakulbhai is from a community of hereditary carpenters who call themselves the Kutchi Gujar Sutars, carpenters from Kutch in India's far west. Like many other artisan groups across South Asia, Gujar Sutars claim descent from the Hindu deity Vishwakarma, or Universe maker, and tell stories about him-their divine forefather-and also about his sons, his daughters, and talented craftsmen in more recent historical times. In such stories, the relationship between crafting the world and crafting words becomes a set of mutually reflecting mirrors, cascading images down ever-extending corridors of association through mythological, historical, and present times. While this essay is based in South Asia, it resonates with Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay The Storyteller, which refers at several junctures to European artisans and craftsmen as transmitters of stories: through the movements of itinerant labor and when assembled together in workshops (85, 93, 101). I find a big star in the margins of my own faded copy of Illuminations, where Benjamin asks, the relationship of the storyteller to this material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way (108). I also follow the lead of scholars like Karin Barber, Lewis Hyde, Stuart McLean, and David Shulman, who examine the cultural theorizations of creativity expressed within oral and literary texts. In this essay I ask: how might stories invoking a divine craftsman and his descendants comment on the refashioning of experience through creative efforts? Such narratives, I argue, offer insights into shifting associations between deities and hereditary caste occupations in India, while also commenting on the pleasures and dangers of creativity.Before I proceed further, I want to briefly clarify my own relation to such stories about the deity Vishwakarma and his descendants. I grew up hearing them occasionally told by my father's relatives, particularly elderly ones. I first wrote these stories down as a college student for the pleasure of the imaginative horizons opened out by stories and the connection to tellers nurtured by close listening. Often the stories were evoked by my presence as a diasporic, half-American relative, and since they were told in English or in Gujarati-inflected Hindi for my benefit, for a long time I thought I would first have to learn the Kutchi dialect and spend a year or more in a Kutch village to say anything academically acceptable about them. I did, though, draw on a handful of such myths and legends in a family memoir, My Family and Other Saints (2007). I have gradually understood that the very fact that such stories are also told in English among families who have for at least two generations lived in cosmopolitan settings like Mumbai, is itself interesting for thinking about transformations in narratives, identities, and imaginative engagements with the pleasures and dangers of creativity.Several other anthropologists, including Mary Catherine Bateson, Ruth Behar, Benjamin Orlove, Alisse Waterston, and Sasha Welland have also set a frame of anthropological interest around their family stories. These stories about Vishwakarma, his sons, and his daughters, extend the realm of family stories beyond immediate human relations and historical memory to intriguing assertions Narrating Creative Process of mythic and cosmological connections. …

Audience reception of the Benin language video film in Nollywood

This article inquires into the Benin-speaking audience's reception of Benin video films in order to show their status as part of a micro-national film culture in Nollywood. It holds that, apart from films of English expression, Nollywood films have been made in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Nupe, Benin, among other indigenous languages. The article argues that, although studies on Nollywood are increasing by the day, very few of these studies deal with questions of audience – and fewer still with audience reception. It uses the reception model developed by Susan Bennett, and builds on Karin Barber's insights into African performance and performative contexts. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to interrogate the Benin-speaking audience's perception of Benin video films. It affirms that a majority of Benin viewers is enamoured of the Benin video because in it they find a portrayal of their culture. In particular, the use of iconic-cultural materials such as the artefacts, festivals, the language and mores of the people are perceived by the sampled audience as a projection of Benin culture. The study concludes that Benin video film has emerged as a viable variant of Nollywood owing to a large Benin-speaking audience and a production of about 400 movies.Iruemwin na keghi nota kaen vbene emwan ya mien oren yi ighe iku usaaro mien oghe Edo ne a mien ere na rhiere maan zee vbe ukpo ne ne iran na zee, zee vbe o kpa vbe usuen emwan no mwen arree o ghe ikueta vbe Noliwudu. O roo we, Noliwudu mwen ikueta nibun vbe avbe uru evbo Iyoroba, Hausa, Igbo Nukpe, Edo kevbe ovbehe nibun. Ne iruewmwin rri ere maan we iruemwin nibun maan ire guan kaen avbe ota oghe ebu nidamweneho, ra na dolo tae, ibuzeghe emwan o re rue kaen vbene ebu emwan ya mien yi ighe ikueta na ru ladian, aghe rre mien we irue emwin Noliwudu wa muan ayo muan ayo. O ke ighi lo iruemwin a mien yi ze vbe ne Suzan Bennetti ya rhan oto ere vbenen o na ya ta vbene emwan Afrika ya kue ere he, zee vbe ne imwina oghe Kari Baba rhan eren. Ne iruemwin lo ode ughughan oghe vbene ovee ewae seere kevbe vbene orue ekpataki seere ya no ebu emwan ne ze Edo ota ekpae avbe ikueta nearu ladian vbe uru Edo. O keghi se agbada vbe unu tae we ivbie Edo nibun rue emwen ikueta oghe Edo rhunmwunda we o keghi rhieremaan ighe arree oghe Edo. Ne agha lo emwin arree, avbe idugie kevbe unu evbomwan na ze keghi ere ne ebu emwan iso wa rhan obo mien ze vbe a ton mu o ghe arre Edo. Ne iruemwin keghi tae vbe ufomwen oren we ikueta na ru ladian vbe uru Edo keghi usuen okpa kpataki oghe Noliwudu rhunmwunda ebu emwan nibun ne o ze Edo kevbe ikueta no rhie iyi isen enen na ere ruladian.Okatemwen: Ikueta oghe Edo; Amienyi oghe ebumwan; Ikueta oghe arree; Noliwudu; Arree kevbe iwina irhokhegbe; Uvien usaaro mien ughughan

Addressivity and the Monument: <em>Memorials, Publics and the Yezidis of Armenia</em>

This article examines the relationship between monuments and publics, using Karin Barber’s model of how texts interact with publics, which draws on the Bakhtinian notion of addressivity. Two monuments associated with the Yezidi community, Armenia’s largest minority, are considered here. Both are of recent construction—one sacred, the shrine at Shamiram, and the other secular, the monument to Cahangir Agha, a hero of the battle of Sardarabad. These are set in the context of former Soviet and Armenian discourses; responses to them vary considerably between different constituencies. Barber’s approach highlights the monuments’ role in processes of convocation and interpellation which highlight the interplay of speech and nonverbal genres within discourses of memory in general.

KARIN BARBER, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics: oral and written cultures in Africa and beyond (New Departures in Anthropology, No. 5). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pb £19.99 – 978 0 52154 687 4). 2007, 280 pp.

KARIN BARBER, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics: oral and written cultures in Africa and beyond (New Departures in Anthropology, No. 5). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pb £19.99 – 978 0 52154 687 4). 2007, 280 pp.

Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures

This fine book about the significant cultures of nonmusical phonograph records in the half century after World War II discovers its central theoretical premise in chapter 3, in which Jacob Smith quotes the anthropologist Karin Barber, who insists that performances do not “just play to ready-made congregations” (p. 80). In fact, as Barber argues, performances “convene” audiences and “by their mode of address assign them a certain position from which to receive the address” (ibid.). Smith’s Spoken Word quite usefully invites us to consider the creation of various audiences that were convened by phonograph records, marketing efforts surrounding them, and popular and critical discourses of “value” in the second half of the twentieth century. Those audiences ranged from the children who were targeted by the Bubble Books series, suburban women to whom Caedmon Records marketed their (surprisingly) popular Dylan Thomas readings, and the young married couples that discovered sexology records that were recorded and promoted in the wake of the Masters and Johnson studies on human sexuality.

Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Popular Arts in Contemporary Africa

Measuring Time: Karin Barber and the Study of Popular Arts in Contemporary Africa

Digital as the New Popular in African Cinema? Case Studies from the Continent

This paper considers different forms of contemporary filmmaking on the African continent in order to show how Africa has embraced digital technology as a crucial factor toward more, and increasingly varied, forms of popular cinema. The case studies are chosen to show a variety of production, exhibition, and distribution methods utilizing digital technology. The focus of the paper is on popular cinema as a form of popular culture, as theorized by Karin Barber. We review Barber’s pioneering work on African popular culture and subsequent work by her and other scholars to determine and argue how the new forms of digital cinema discussed in this paper can be considered part of African popular culture.

Nollywood, Lagos, and the <em>Good-Time</em> Woman

kenneth Little’s less known but very incisive study, The Sociology of Urban Women’s Images in African Literature, provides a useful sociological guide to the study of women in popular Nollywood texts. it deals extensively with popular perceptions of women and the location of the discourses of their representations in African cities. While there is nothing theoretically earth-shaking about the way Little’s book describes this space of narrative articulation, i invoke Little’s study in my reading of women in Nollywood films for other reasons, the most obvious being my desire to show that the observations he made in the 1970s were as valid then as they are in 2012. my intention in this regard is to recontextualize Little’s premise to fit the context of Nollywood films. Constructing my reading of women as a historical continuum that begins with Little’s study in the 1970s allows me to shed light on the prevalence of the narrative marginality to which women are consigned in the urban African popular imagination, a narrative option to which Nollywood has so far subscribed in the three decades or so of its existence. i would suggest that this narrative option has remained part of Nollywood’s aesthetic diet because there is a carry-over of the aesthetic presence of women from the older art form of literature to the newer media-mediated images of Nollywood. this is the point that Adeleye-Fayemi makes eloquently in her essay “either One or the Other: Images of Women in Nigerian Television.” Nollywood filmmakers, many of whom came from television, did not abandon this preoccupation and the peculiar ways women are represented for and on television in Nigeria. the television audience, which Adeleye-Fayemi discusses in her essay, is no different from that for Nollywood. Like the television public that Adeleye-Fayemi studied, Nollywood’s public is “popular,” meaning that it is distinct from those that read the plays of Wole Soyinka or the novels of Chinua Achebe. karin Barber’s eloquent study of audience in Africa, “Preliminary Notes on the Audience in Africa,” offers valuable insight into understanding this group. She argues, for instance, that “the concept of the ‘public,’ then, as a new form of coming-together characteristic of the colonial era, is a powerful one, but one which must be carefully qualified and which can