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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:A political economy of lifestyle and aesthetics: Yorùbá artists produce and transform popular culture
Author:Klein, DebraISNI
Year:2012
Periodical:Research in African Literatures (ISSN 0034-5210)
Volume:43
Issue:4
Pages:128-146
Language:English
Geographic term:Nigeria
Subjects:Yoruba
popular culture
folk drama
cinema
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v043/43.4.klein.pdf
Abstract:This article celebrates and pays tribute to the work of Karin Barber by joining analyses of the history of political and economic conditions with analyses of the relationship between people's lifestyles and aesthetic forms of production. The author analyses a Yorùbá alárìnjó (traditional singing, dancing, drumming, and masquerade) performance and the recent Yorùbá film 'Arugbá' by Túndé Kelani to illustrate the interconnections between 'lifestyle' and aesthetics, applying Bourdieu's concept of 'taste'. She concludes that a local performing troupe produced an aesthetics of liminality that emerged from its immersion in local and global markets of the 1990s, while the Kelani film produces an aesthetics of ambivalence, exploring relationships between traditional and modern cultural politics in the early 2000s. Grounded in long-term fieldwork in southwestern Nigeria, the article illustrates Barber's insight that cultural preservation requires innovation and argues further that popular culture is an important part of this process. Bibliogr., notes, sum. [Journal abstract]
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