Queens of Afrobeat


Book Description

In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music--a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms--are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's activist music. Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s. Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.




Queens of Afrobeat


Book Description

In Queens of Afrobeat, the women of Afrobeat music—a unique blend of jazz, soul, highlife, and West African rhythms—are finally given the recognition they deserve. This extensive study takes a multifaceted view of the storied lives of the women behind Fela Kuti's activist music. Dotun Ayobade's wide-ranging research pulls from interviews with surviving queens, ethnographic narratives, the exploration of newspaper archives, and close readings of album covers, photographs, and promotional materials to help us see and understand the women who surrounded Fela Kuti on stage and in everyday life. Not only were these artists crucial performers and backup singers for Kuti's most important compositions, they also played key roles in his activism and campaigns of social protest against the Nigerian government in the 1970s. Drawing on previously untapped material, Queens of Afrobeat weaves together an intricate narrative of women's participation in popular music. The stories of these remarkable women transform and uniquely personalize our understanding of the politics and performance of one of the major modern musical traditions in Africa.




Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora


Book Description

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: gendering knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora -- PART I (Re- )writing gender in African and African Diaspora history -- 1 The Bantu Matrilineal Belt: reframing African women's history -- 2 REMAPping the African Diaspora: place, gender and negotiation in Arabian slavery -- 3 Communicating feminist ethics in the age of New Media in Africa -- PART II Gender, migration and identity -- 4 Transnational feminist solidarity, Black German women and the politics of belonging -- 5 Beyond disability: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and female heroism in Manu Herbstein's Ama -- 6 Reverse migration of Africans in the Diaspora: foregrounding a woman's quest for her roots in Tess Akaeke Onwueme's Legacies -- PART III Gender, subjection and power -- 7 Queens in flight: Fela Kuti's Afrobeat Queens and the performance of "Black" feminist Diasporas -- 8 Women and tfu in Wimbum Community, Cameroon -- 9 Women's agency and peacebuilding in Nigeria's Jos crises -- 10 Contesting the notions of "thugs and welfare queens": combating Black derision and death -- 11 Culture of silence and gender development in Nigeria -- 12 Emasculation, social humiliation and psychological castration in Irene's More than Dancing -- Index




Global Popular Music


Book Description

Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 2, Transnational Discourses of Global Popular Music Studies, covers the geographical areas of North America: United States and Canada; Central America, Caribbean, and South America/Latin America; Europe; Africa and Middle East; Asia; and areas of Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Islands. It provides over twenty-four hundred annotated bibliographic entries covering discourses of extensive research that extend beyond the borders of the United States and includes annotated entries to books, book series, book chapters, edited volumes, special documentaries and programming, scholarly journal essays, and other resources that focus on the creative and artistic flows of global popular music.




Fela Anikulapo-Kuti


Book Description

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the Afrobeat music maestro whose life and time provide the lens through which we can outline the postcolonial trajectory of the Nigerian state as well as the dynamics of most other African states. Through the Afrobeat music, Fela did not only challenge consecutive governments in Nigeria, but his rebellious Afrobeat lyrics facilitate a philosophical subtext that enriches the more intellectual Afrocentric discourses. Afrobeat and the philosophy of blackism that Fela enunciated place him right beside Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and all the others who champion a black and African mode of being in the world. This book traces the emergence of Fela on the music scene, the cultural and political backgrounds that made Afrobeat possible, and the philosophical elements that not only contributed to the formation of Fela's blackism, but what constitutes Fela's philosophical sensibility too.




A New Narrative for Africa


Book Description

This book examines the perception of Africa in the global system, tracing Africa’s transition from a "problem" to be solved into an agent with a rising voice in the world. Mixing Afro-optimism with heavy doses of Afro-reality and Afro-responsibility, this book calls for a new political narrative about Africa that captures the multi-disciplinary dimensions of Africa’s “transition” and critically examining its ramifications. The author discusses the origins of the “Problem” perception held about Africa and explains how things are turning around and how the continent is now becoming a voice to be heard rather than a problem to be solved. He then goes on to interrogate some of the key manifestations of this new “voice” and identifies how the world is responding to the new “voice” of Africa before finally examining some of the contradictions that have been embedded in the transition. The book is strategically multi-disciplinary - emphasizing key disciplines of African studies in different chapters - for example: anthropology, ethnography, and philosophy in Chapter 1; history, in Chapter 2; economics, in Chapter 3; politics, in Chapter 4; arts, literature, and aesthetics, in Chapter 5; religion, in Chapter 6; and globalization, in Chapter 7. Through this, A New Narrative for Africa explores and analyses several of the various strands of the African studies discipline, examining the transformation of African on the global stage over the course of its history. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of interest across African Studies, Global Affairs, Politics, Economics, and Development studies.




Fela


Book Description

This collection is one of two publications in the Fela Project.




CMJ New Music Report


Book Description

CMJ New Music Report is the primary source for exclusive charts of non-commercial and college radio airplay and independent and trend-forward retail sales. CMJ's trade publication, compiles playlists for college and non-commercial stations; often a prelude to larger success.




CMJ New Music Report


Book Description

CMJ New Music Report is the primary source for exclusive charts of non-commercial and college radio airplay and independent and trend-forward retail sales. CMJ's trade publication, compiles playlists for college and non-commercial stations; often a prelude to larger success.




Black President


Book Description

Published to accompany an exhibition of the same title held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 10 July - 28 September 2003, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 17 April - 4 July 2004 and the Barbican Art Galleries, London, 9 September - 24 October 2004.