Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture

Foreword by Karin Barber

Thirteen Ways of Reading African Popular Culture

1. Ethiopian Imprints: Reading and Writing Ethiopia in 1930s South Africa

Corinne Sandwith

2. Local Authors, Ephemeral Texts: Anglo-Scribes and Anglo-Literates in West African Newspapers

Stephanie Newell

3. Varieties of Romance in Contemporary Popular Togolese Literature

Susanne Gerhmann

4. Against ‘African Popular Literature’, or: The Weeping Woman

Ranka Primorac

5. Gendering the Popular: Making a Case for FEMRITE in Uganda and Beyond

Lynda Gichanda Spencer and Erik Falk

6. Scandals, Controversies and African Literary Prizes: Between Intertextuality and Plagiarism

Doseline Kiguru

7. TED Talks, Blogging, and Celebrity: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Popular Imagination

Steve Almquist

8. Flash Fiction Ghana and Popular Culture: An Overview

Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang

9. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Methods of Speculation in African Popular Culture

Nedine Moonsamy

10. Literature in the Great Lakes Region: Between Resistance and Resilience

Maëline Le Lay

11. Funding Popular Culture in Tanzania: Crowdfunding, Self-Funding and the Live Performance as Fundraiser

Nikitta Dede Adjirakor

12. Nigerian Film Audiences on the Internet: Influences, Preferences and Contentions

Añulika Agina

13. "Don’t Tell Me You Want to Marry a White Man!": The Encounter with Euro-American Characters and Settings in African Commercial Cinema

Alessandro Jedlowski

14. Popular Culture and the Women Fandom of English Premier League Football in Eldoret, Kenya

Solomon Waliaula

15. Modelling Success: Women and Self-Making in Kenyan Digital Spaces

Dina Ligaga

16. Recognizing LGBTQ+ Faces beyond the Mauritian Nation-State

Ryan Poinsamy

17. Coding the City: Mapping Eco-Systems and Zones of Opportunity in Kinshasa’s Emerging Tech Scene

Katrien Pype

18. Matters of Kwaito and Why Kwaito Matters

Rangoato Hlasane and Bhekizizwe Peterson

19. Meaning and Multiplicity: Complexity and Play in Tanzanian Hip Hop

David Kerr

20. Politics and the Music Video in Nigeria

Femi Eromosele

21. The Police is Your Friend: Instagram Comedy and the Defamiliarization of the Postcolonial State

James Yékú

22. "Di one Wey Dey Pain me Pass…!": Social Satire, Caricature and Mimicry in the Comic Act of AY

Rotimi Fasan

23. #ObinimStickerChallenge: Visual Mediations of Suspicion in Religious Prosumer Parody Media in Contemporary Ghana

Biography

Grace A Musila teaches African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is editor of Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom (2020); author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (2015); and co-editor of Rethinking Eastern African Intellectual Landscapes (2012, with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga).

"Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, which brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries, is an important contribution to the burgeoning discipline of popular culture in Africa. Published in 2022, Grace Musila’s edited tome is a valuable demonstration of the important ways this subfield seeks to bring newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music, and digital genres into a productive dialogue with each other." - Nick Mdika Tembo, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies