EASTERN AFRICAN POPULAR SONGS Verbal Art in States of Transformation
ISBN: 9781592218561
$34.95
Aaron Rosenberg's study constitutes a provocative reassessment of the relationship between African songs and the literatures of Eastern Africa. The focus of the book is a detailed analysis of language, form, and theme as they apply to a wide spectrum of verbal art in the region. Toward this end literary and musical works throughout Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, and the Comoros Islands, among others, are comparatively examined. A consideration of these broad corpuses is necessary in order to determine and describe the salient ways in which such forms of creative expression are deployed as devices which reflect and radically transform prevailing and means of identity formation in and across communities in the region. The investigation deals with songs, poetry, novels, plays and short fiction in a variety of contexts and the manners in which people and populations whose lives extend across various "borders," whether these be ethnic, national, or class derived, develop "supercultural" sense of self. These are identities, themselves fluid, which allow them to shape and adapt to the rapidly changing environments in which they function from day to day. Thus songs and other types of verbal art are shown to be acting in tandem with as well as upon a grand spectrum of sociocultural realities which they describe and explain to their listeners.