Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

<p>This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions contexts consumers producers platforms and the material affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres methods mediums questions and encounters that preoccupy producers consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts.</p><p>Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns televised English Premier League football speculative arts romance fiction comedy cinema music and digital genres the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production circulation consumption remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and inevitably the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms which variously enable and undermine world-making. </p><p>An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture society and media.</p>