Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa

Mai Palmberg

 

Synopsis

The musics of Africa play a particularly important role in expressing and forming identities. This book brings together African and Nordic scholars from both musicology and other disciplines in an attempt to analyse various aspects of the complex playing with volatile identities in music in Africa today. Taken together the papers put new light on the assumed or real dichotomies between countryside and city, collective and individual, tradition and modernity, authentic and alien.

Review

... there is much in this volume that is unique and it represents a major contribution to the burgeoning field of African urban music studies. - Richard M. Shain, The International Journal of African Historical Studies

Author

Mai Palmberg is a political scientist from Finland, and worked at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala. She was coordinator of a research and network project "Cultural Images in and of Africa" and conducted and edited interviews for "The State of the Arts in Zimbabwe.