Leisure in Urban Africa

Leisure in Urban Africa
Author: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Publisher: Africa World Press
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2003
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 9781592210626

Bringing together often unconnected modes of analysis, research and debate on leisure in African studies, an interdisciplinary team of scholars reflects on the complex conceptions, creation and consumption of leisure in African cities from the nineteenth century to the present, drawing intriguing comparisons with leisure studies in Western Europe and North America. Covering leisure activities from football to music and dance to films and television in cities from Cairo to Cape Town, this book opens a new chapter in African cultural studies.

Victoria Falls and Colonial Imagination in British Southern Africa

Victoria Falls and Colonial Imagination in British Southern Africa
Author: Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137596937

This is the first full- length historical analysis of Victoria Falls. The text offers a critical examination of Victoria Falls providing new insight into the British Southern African project and reveals how Victoria Falls became one of the first modern African tourist destinations. This book makes a case for a critical reading of Victoria Falls as much more than a localized natural wonder. Europeans with multiple and often competing agendas, as well as African leaders and laborers were brought into contact with one another at Victoria Falls. Their visions of the past and hopes for the future shared Victoria Falls as a common point of inspiration. The value these parties placed on the Falls extended far beyond its location on the Zambezi and had broad implications for the British Empire in Southern and Central Africa.

Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation

Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation
Author: Michael J. Gennaro
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0429668554

Sports in African History, Politics, and Identity Formation explores how sports can render a key to unlocking complex social, political, economic, and gendered relations across Africa and the Diaspora. Sports hold significant value and have an intricate relationship with many components of African societies throughout history. For many Africans, sports are a way of life, a site of cultural heroes, a way out of poverty and social mobility, and a site for leisurely play. This book focuses on the many ways in which sports uniquely reflect changing cultural trends at diverse levels of African societies. The contributors detail various sports, such as football, cricket, ping pong, and rugby, across the continent to show how sports lay at the heart of the discourse of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and ideas of progress. Bringing together the newest and most innovative scholarship on African sports, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Africa, African history, culture and society, and sports history and politics.

Making Identity on the Swahili Coast

Making Identity on the Swahili Coast
Author: Steven Fabian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2019-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108492045

A re-examination of the historical development of urban identity and community along the Swahili Coast.

Mapping Leisure

Mapping Leisure
Author: Ishwar Modi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9811036322

This volume addresses the rich and varied thoughts, concepts, approaches and leisure practices in sixteen countries of three continents---Australia, Asia and Africa. The chapters showcase the diversity in the forms and ways in which the idea and practice of leisure have developed across space and time. However, the common thread through the chapters is that concepts and practices of leisure are found all over the world, from pre-historic settlements to the present-day consumer societies. Seemingly, being at leisure is a capacity of the human species present at birth and which develops in a variety of individual and societal contexts. Even in situations where leisure gets little official recognition as being an aspect of life---such as under colonial rule or in extremely work-centric societies---it needs to be contextually understood. This is a welcome addition to the literature on leisure studies from a global and comparative perspective.

African City Textualities

African City Textualities
Author: Ranka Primorac
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317990331

The stereotype of Africa as a predominantly 'natural' space ignores the existence of vibrant and cosmopolitan urban environments on the continent. Far from merely embodying backwardness and lack, African cities are sites of complex and diverse cultural productions which participate in modernity and its dynamics of global flows and exchanges. This volume merges the concerns of urban, literary and cultural studies by focusing on the flows and exchanges of texts and textual elements. By analysing how texts such as popular and canonical fiction, popular music, self-help pamphlets, graffiti, films, journalistic writing, rumours and urban legends engage with the problems of citizenship, self-organisation and survival, the collection shows that despite all the problems of Africa, its cities continue to engender forward-looking creativity and hope. The texts collected here belong to several different genres themselves, and they are authored by both distinguished and younger scholars, based in and outside of Africa. The volume explores the textualities emerging from the cities of Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Above all, it calls for an end to disabling hierarchical categorisations of both texts and cities. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Sports and Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia

Sports and Modernity in Late Imperial Ethiopia
Author: Katrin Bromber
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847012922

This first academic study of the history of modern sports in Ethiopia during the imperial rule of the 20th century argues that modern sports offers new possibilities to explore the meanings of modernity in Africa. Providing an in-depth analysis of the role of sports in modern educational institutions, volunteer organizations, and urbanization processes, the author shows how agents, ideas and practices linked societal improvement and bodily improvement.

Highlife Saturday Night

Highlife Saturday Night
Author: Nate Plageman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253007259

Highlife Saturday Night captures the vibrancy of Saturday nights in Ghana—when musicians took to the stage and dancers took to the floor—in this penetrating look at musical leisure during a time of social, political, and cultural change. Framing dance band "highlife" music as a central medium through which Ghanaians negotiated gendered and generational social relations, Nate Plageman shows how popular music was central to the rhythm of daily life in a West African nation. He traces the history of highlife in urban Ghana during much of the 20th century and documents a range of figures that fueled the music's emergence, evolution, and explosive popularity. This book is generously enhanced by audiovisual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website.

Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa

Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa
Author: Andrea L. Stanton
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 1977
Release: 2012
Genre: Culture
ISBN: 141298176X

In our age of globalization and multiculturalism, it has never been more important to understand and appreciate all cultures across the world. The four volumes take a step forward in this endeavour by presenting concise information on those regions least well-known to students across Europe: the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The volumes convey what daily life is like for people in these selected regions. Entries will aid readers in understanding the importance of cultural sociology, to appreciate the effects of cultural forces around the world, and to learn the history of countries and cultures within these important regions. Key Features -Topics are explored within historical context, in three broad historical periods: prehistory to 1250, 1250 to 1920 and 1920 to the present. -One volume each is devoted to the regions of the Middle East and Africa and then one volume to East and Southeast Asia and a final volume to West, Central and South Asia. The volumes include extensive use of photographs and maps to explain cultural and geographic content. -Each volume has its own volume editor with expertise in that particular region. Key Themes Arts, Culture and Science People, Society and Dynasties Religion and Law Family and Daily Life Conflicts and Wars Politics and Government Health and Education Economy, Trade and Industry National Geography and History.

Youth and Popular Culture in Africa

Youth and Popular Culture in Africa
Author: Paul Ugor
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2021
Genre: History
ISBN: 1648250246

"The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--