(Re)Configuring the City: The Mapping of Places and People in Contemporary Kenyan Popular Song Texts

Nyairo, Joyce

doi:10.1057/9780230603349_4

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…5 Hip-hop culturea cluster of African American expressive forms (rap music, breakdancing and graffiti art) and associated stylistic and ideological commitments that emerged in America's post-industrial urban ghettos during the late-1970s and 1980shas proved highly flexible and highly mobile, having been adopted and adapted by young people, albeit variously and differentially, in diverse locales around the world (Alim 2009;Mitchell 2001). Its presence in Kenya is not surprising, given the foundation provided by Afro-diasporic cultural matrices that had previously taken hold among the country's urban youthnamely, African American soul and Jamaican reggae (Nyairo 2004). But its pervasiveness in the Kenyan public sphere is nonetheless remarkable.…”

Section: Hip-hop and Citizenship In Kenyamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The youth form 60 per cent of the total labour force but the majority are unemployed due to the country's high unemployment level' (Ministry of Youth Affairs, Kenya 2006: 1).5 I use the term 'mediascape' with Arjun Appadurai's definition in mindthat is, as both a media infrastructure and a set of 'characters, plots, and textual forms' that subjects use in imagining 'scripts' for their and others' lives(1996: 35). I would only add that mediascapes also provide soundtracksaffective grooves, tunes, refrains, anthems and associated lyrical contentfor these scripts(Nyairo 2007).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

Eisenberg¹

2017

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The Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must ‘represent the real’. The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on ‘cultural citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong’s (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast’s Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim- Swahili society (‘subjects of the Swahili coast’, as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as ‘Kenyan youth’ in the twenty-first century.

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Section: Hip-hop and Citizenship In Kenyamentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

Eisenberg¹

2017

Preprint

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“…Ultimately, these practices that are 'motion in motion' (Vigh 2009) since are enacted in a changing environment, are enrolled to keep safe both in the present and future, and are important in areas of significant social, socio-economic and cultural dynamism (Nyairo 2006;Wa Mungai 2013;Kimari 2020), and, also, where there are high levels of poverty, police surveillance and criminalisation, crime and sexual and gender-based violence (Swart 2012;Jones et al 2017;Kimari 2017). It is in these contexts of the other-a difference that is produced through structural violence and the attendant problematic tales that narrate into being othered subjects and their spacesthat kupenya and kujitoa tactics are most pronounced.…”

Section: Kujitoa and Kujifichamentioning

confidence: 99%

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

Kimari¹

2022

JBA

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How do grassroots activists in Kenya protect themselves from torture and related forms of violence when formal protection mechanisms are not guaranteed? In answering this question, this article details the diverse tactics activists use to keep safe while doing unsafe work. Informed by the concept of social navigation, I explore two broad Kiswahili emic terms that capture what I refer to as their tactical retreats and confrontations in the face of torture and violence: kujitoa and kupenya. By elaborating on these tactics to keep safe, key gaps and tensions in the implementation of formal protection mechanisms in Kenya are made evident, while also highlighting the importance of grassroots activism(s) as the first line of defense in the protection of communities at risk in Kenya.

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“…In their performances, urban youth -particularly urban hip-hop artists -privilege innovative forms that function to interrupt these attitudes. To echo Nyairo (2006), these youthful urban producers use popular music to recuperate local agency in order to interrogate present contingencies.…”

Section: Social Dynamics 373mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By framing the discourse of advice within the urban environment for city dwellers, the youth performers become active agents of a cultural memory that operates as guidance. As Joyce Nyairo (2006) would have it, this song appropriates the past in order to address present contingencies in urban Botswana. Evidently, these performances are significant sonic acts of African agency and recuperation, which mark the city.…”

Section: Social Dynamics 377mentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanised soundtracks: youth popular culture in the African city

Rapoo

2013

Social Dynamics

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This article interrogates the participation of youth in constructing and defining the African urban landscape. It seeks to examine youth popular culture and performance practices that combine indigenous sound aesthetics with enactments of cultural memory to construct the urban landscape of Botswana. Particularly, the article examines youth cultural and expressive forms such as hip-hop and Kwaito musical genres, popularised traditional music, and the satirical dramatic impersonations of radio personality Dignash Morapedi. These performances elaborate African syncretic formations that underscore the power of African popular culture to integrate, reinvigorate, and transform various social spaces and identities. Urban youths use these performance forms to demonstrate how innovative practices could be used to interrogate social realities such as unemployment, poverty, and HIV/AIDS. Using the notion of "urban noise," the article teases out a strategy of critique that articulates the various ways that the youth acoustically construct, produce, and navigate the African city.

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(Re)Configuring the City: The Mapping of Places and People in Contemporary Kenyan Popular Song Texts

Cited by 10 publications

References 10 publications

Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

To retreat or to confront? Grassroots activists navigating everyday torture in Kenya

Urbanised soundtracks: youth popular culture in the African city

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