Rethinking the "Informal" and Mainstreaming African Popular Arts and Entertainment

Abstract

Abstract

In this project, we engage with a variety of entertainment forms such as stand-up comedy, hip hop music, spoken-word poetry and musicalized histories and biographies as popular entertainment 'forms' that are reshaping the cultural economies of African urban centres. Though the appeal of these forms cut across social and literacy strata, often drawing a huge congregation of consumers at performance sites, they are often categorised as ‘popular arts’, a term of informality that obscures their capacities and promotes a reluctance of the academy to engage with them as repositories of social knowledge. Forms perceived and categorised as ‘informal’ can have significant decolonising imports for a new understanding of the African entertainment economy. They can also enrich the methodological and theoretical reviews entailed in the ACC project of reconfiguring African Studies. We therefore propose to collate, characterise and archive these resources to enable access to them as a first step in the effort to rein them in for widespread scholarly engagements and subsequent inclusion in African studies curricula.