GENDER, IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE: UNDERSTANDING SWAHILI CULTURAL REALITIES THROUGH SONGS

This book analyzes the intersection between gender and identity within popular performance of the Swahili people of Mombasa. Juxtaposing cultural norms with everyday practices, Ntarangwi explores how gender and identity are practiced, constructed, mobilized, and contested through popular musical expressions known as taarab.

By carefully examining the revelation and reconstitution of masculinities and femininities within these expressions, Ntarangwi raises questions of critical importance to the study of gender and identity and convincingly argues that while gender may be an important means of forming social identities, it can also be used to analyze various social-cultural realities and practices of a people. It can also reshape conceptual categories and intellectual theories of everyday experiences.

Weaving a creative tapestry of contemporary life in an African urban community, this book brings together theoretical trends in anthropology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, and gender studies.

“The importance of taarab in the study of Swahili identity and literary genres has long been ignored. In this book, Mwenda Ntarangwi offers a brilliant, thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary analysis of both the content and context of taarab. He addresses some of the key issues left out by earlier scholarship, including the question of how women’s participation in the public performance of taarab engenders a transgression of established social and cultural boundaries. This study offers a comprehensive, theoretically grounded analysis that will be of interest to scholars of various fields of African scholarship.”