Music of Africa
This page features a small selection of UConn library and external resources to support learning and research pertaining to Music of Africa. This list is meant to be exploratory and is not a comprehensive representation or list of the library's holdings.
For additional assistance, please contact Samuel Boss, at samuel.boss@uconn.edu.
From the UConn Library Collection
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Afropop!: an illustrated guide to contemporary African music by A concise introduction to the varied landscape of contemporary African music. Features leading artists and bands, musical styles, traditional/acoustic music, cross-cultural sounds as well as a selected discography and a glossary of musical terms.
Call Number: ML3502.9 .B37 1995ISBN: 9780785804437Publication Date: 1995-09-01 -
Bamako Sounds: the Afropolitan ethics of Malian music
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"Bamako Sounds" tells the story of an African city, its people, their values, and their music. Centered on the music and musicians of Bamako, Mali s booming capital city, this book reveals a community of artists whose lives and works evince a complex world shaped by urban culture, postcolonialism, musical expression, religious identity, and intellectual property. Drawing on years of ethnographic research with classically trained players of the kora (a twenty-one-string West African harp) as well as more contemporary, hip-hop influenced musicians and producers, Ryan Thomas Skinner analyzes how Bamako artists balance social imperatives with personal interests and global imaginations. Whether performed live on stage, broadcast on the radio, or shared over the Internet, music is a privileged mode of expression that suffuses Bamako s urban soundscape. It animates professional projects, communicates cultural values, pronounces public piety, resounds in the marketplace, and quite literally performs the nation. Music, the artists who make it, and the audiences who interpret it thus represent a crucial means of articulating and disseminating the ethics and aesthetics of a varied and vital Afropolitanism, in Bamako and beyond."
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781452944401Publication Date: 2015-01-01 -
Beyond memory : recording the history, moments and memories of South African music
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"South Africa possesses one of the richest popular music traditions in the world - from marabi to mbaqanga, from boeremusiek to bubblegum, from kwela to kwaito. Yet the risk that future generations of South Africans will not know their musical roots is very real. Of all the recordings made here since the 1930s, thousands have been lost for ever, for the powers-that-be never deemed them worthy of preservation. If one peruses the books that exist on South African popular music, one still finds that their authors have on occasion jumped to conclusions that were not as foregone as they had assumed. Yet the fault lies not with them, rather in the fact that there has been precious little documentation in South Africa of who played what, or who recorded what, with whom, and when. This is true of all music-making in this country, though it is most striking in the music of the black communities. Beyond memory: recording the history, moments and memories of South African music is an invaluable publication because it offers a first-hand account of the South African music scene of the past decades from the pen of Max Thamagana Mojapelo, who was situated in the very thick of things, thanks to his job as a DJ at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. This book - astonishing for the breadth of its coverage - is based on his diaries, on interviews he conducted and on numerous other sources, and we find in it not only the well-known names of recent South African music but a countless host of others whose contribution must be recorded if we and future generations are to gain an accurate picture of South African music history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries"--Publisher's description
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781920355906Publication Date: 2008 -
Hip hop Africa new African music in a globalizing world
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Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip hop and other music...
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786613921109Publication Date: 2012 -
Listening for Africa : freedom, modernity, and the logic of Black music's African origins
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In Listening for Africa David F. Garcia explores how a diverse group of musicians, dancers, academics, and activists engaged with the idea of black music and dance’s African origins between the 1930s and 1950s. Garcia examines the work of figures ranging from Melville J. Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and Asadata Dafora to Duke Ellington, Dámaso Pérez Prado, and others who believed that linking black music and dance with Africa and nature would help realize modernity’s promises of freedom in the face of fascism and racism in Europe and the Americas, colonialism in Africa, and the nuclear threat at the start of the Cold War. In analyzing their work, Garcia traces how such attempts to link black music and dance to Africa unintentionally reinforced the binary relationships between the West and Africa, white and black, the modern and the primitive, science and magic, and rural and urban. It was, Garcia demonstrates, modernity’s determinations of unraced, heteronormative, and productive bodies, and of scientific truth that helped defer the realization of individual and political freedom in the world.
Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 2017 -
Music, Performance and African Identities
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Cutting across countries, genres, and time periods, this volume explores topics ranging from hip hop's influence on Maasai identity in current day Tanzania to jazz in Bulawayo during the interwar years, using music to tell a larger story about the cultures and societies of Africa.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781136830280Publication Date: 2012-03-15 -
Music of Africa
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"The study of African music is a study at once of unity and diversity. The range of indigenous musical resources and practices found on this vast continent is as wide and varied as its topography. In this informative and highly readable book, Professor Nketia provides an overview of the musical traditions of Africa with respect to their historical, cultural, and social backgrounds, their organization and practice, and delineates the most significant aspects of musical style."--Back cover.
Call Number: ML350.N595 M9ISBN: 9780393021776Publication Date: 1974-01-01 -
Popular Music Censorship in Africa
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In Africa, tension between freedom of expression and censorship in many contexts remains as contentious, if not more so, than during the period of colonial rule which permeated the twentieth century. Over the last one hundred years popular musicians have not been free to sing about whatever they wish to, and in many countries they are still not free to do so. This volume brings together the latest research on censorship in colonial and post-colonial Africa, focusing on the attempts to censor musicians and the strategies of resistance devised by musicians in their struggles to be heard. For Africa, the twentieth century was characterized first and foremost by struggles for independence, as colonizer and colonized struggled for territorial control. Throughout this period culture was an important contested terrain in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles and many musicians who aligned themselves with independence movements viewed music as an important cultural weapon. Musical messages were often political, opposing the injustices of colonial rule. Colonial governments reacted to counter-hegemonic songs through repression, banning songs from distribution and/or broadcast, while often targeting the musicians with acts of intimidation in an attempt to silence them. In the post-independence era a disturbing trend has occurred, in which African governments have regularly continued to practise censorship of musicians. However, not all attempts to silence musicians have emanated from government, nor has all contested music been strictly political. Religious and moral rationale has also featured prominently in censorship struggles. Both Christian and Muslim fundamentalism has led to extreme attempts to silence musicians. In response, musicians have often sought ways of getting their music and message heard, despite censorship and harassment. The book includes a special section on case studies that highlight issues of nationality.
Call Number: ML3917.A4 P6 2006ISBN: 9780754652915Publication Date: 2006-08-28 -
Song walking : women, music, and environmental justice in an African borderland
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Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women's walking songs (amaculo manihamba)--once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)--she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place. This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 022653815XPublication Date: 2018 -
Women's songs from West Africa
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Exploring the origins, organization, subject matter, and performance contexts of singers and singing, Women's Songs from West Africa expands our understanding of the world of women in West Africa and their complex and subtle roles as verbal artists. Covering Côte d'Ivoire, the Gambia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and beyond, the essays attest to the importance of women's contributions to the most widespread form of verbal art in Africa.
Call Number: eBookPublication Date: 2014
Biographies
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Breakout: profiles in African rhythm
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Based on exclusive interviews, Breakout tells the often riveting personal stories of fourteen popular musicians—some well known, others not—from Zaire, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The first book on African pop music to look closely at the lives of the musicians themselves, Breakout deals with four African musical genres: soukous, highlife, afro-beat, and palm wine. Amid Africa's deepening economic and political crises of the last two decades, African musicians who developed these genres faced the need to cross cultural boundaries, or "break out," and achieve a hit in the international marketplace. Challenging conventional assumptions, Gary Stewart demonstrates for the first time the true dimensions of this struggle to create music that will qualify as both an authentic cultural expression and an export commodity. From accounts of the outrageous Fela, who snipes at African leaders and recounts his days with Isis in ancient Egypt, to S. E. Rogie, who lurches from the pinnacle of stardom in West Africa to delivering pizzas in California, to Olatunji, who finds new life with the Grateful Dead, these are the stories of Africans straddling traditional life and an encroaching modernity—and also the stories of third world musicians surmounting political and economic chaos at home and carrying their music to a world dominated by Western cultural and economic power.
Call Number: ML3502.5 .S73 1992ISBN: 9780226774053Publication Date: 1992-06-01 -
Fela: the life & times of an African musical icon
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Musician, political critic, and hedonist, international superstar Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created a sensation throughout his career. In his own country of Nigeria he was simultaneously adulated and loathed, often by the same people at the same time. His outspoken political views and advocacy of marijuana smoking and sexual promiscuity offended many, even as his musical brilliance enthralled them. In his creation of afrobeat, he melded African traditions with African American and Afro-Caribbean influences to revolutionize world music. Although harassed, beaten, and jailed by Nigerian authorities, he continued his outspoken and derisive criticism of political corruption at home and economic exploitation from abroad. A volatile mixture of personal characteristics -- charisma, musical talent, maverick lifestyle, populist ideology, and persistence in the face of persecution -- made him a legend throughout Africa and the world. Celebrated during the 1970s as a musical innovator and spokesman for the continent's oppressed masses, he enjoyed worldwide celebrity during the 1980s and was recognized in the 1990s as a major pioneer and elder statesman of African music. By the time of his death in 1997 from AIDS-related complications, Fela had become something of a Nigerian institution. In Africa, the idea of transnational alliance, once thought to be outmoded, has gained new currency. In African America, during a period of increasing social conservatism and ethnic polarization, Africa has re-emerged as a symbol of cultural affirmation. At such an historical moment, Fela's music offers a perspective on race, class, and nation on both sides of the Atlantic. As Professor Veal demonstrates, over three decades Fela synthesized a unique musical language while also clearing -- if only temporarily -- a space for popular political dissent and a type of counter-cultural expression rarely seen in West Africa. In the midst of political turmoil in Africa, as well as renewal of pro-African cultural nationalism throughout the diaspora, Fela's political music functions as a post-colonial art form that uses cross-cultural exchange to voice a unique and powerful African essentialism.
Call Number: ML410.F2955 V43 2000ISBN: 9781566397643Publication Date: 2000-05-19 -
Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the music that made Zimbabwe
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Like Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singer, composer, and bandleader Thomas Mapfumo and his music came to represent his native country's anticolonial struggle and cultural identity. Mapfumo was born in 1945 in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The trajectory of his career--from early performances of rock 'n' roll tunes to later creating a new genre based on traditional Zimbabwean music, including the sacred mbira, and African and Western pop--is a metaphor for Zimbabwe's evolution from colony to independent nation. Lion Songs is an authoritative biography of Mapfumo that narrates the life and career of this creative, complex, and iconic figure. Banning Eyre ties the arc of Mapfumo's career to the history of Zimbabwe. The genre Mapfumo created in the 1970s called chimurenga, or "struggle" music, challenged the Rhodesian government--which banned his music and jailed him--and became important to Zimbabwe achieving independence in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s Mapfumo's international profile grew along with his opposition to Robert Mugabe's dictatorship. Mugabe had been a hero of the revolution, but Mapfumo's criticism of his regime led authorities and loyalists to turn on the singer with threats and intimidation. Beginning in 2000, Mapfumo and key band and family members left Zimbabwe. Many of them, including Mapfumo, now reside in Eugene, Oregon. A labor of love, Lion Songs is the product of a twenty-five-year friendship and professional relationship between Eyre and Mapfumo that demonstrates Mapfumo's musical and political importance to his nation, its freedom struggle, and its culture.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822375425Publication Date: 2015-05-01 -
Makeba: my story
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The inspiring story of the black South African singer, her efforts against apartheid, and of the country she still calls home.
Call Number: ML420.M16 A3 1987ISBN: 9780453005616Publication Date: 1988-01-26 -
Oliver Mtukudzi: living Tuku music in Zimbabwe
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Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean guitarist, vocalist, and composer, has performed worldwide and released some 50 albums. One of a handful of artists to have a beat named after him, Mtukudzi blends Zimbabwean traditional sounds with South African township music and American gospel and soul, to compose what is known as Tuku Music. In this biography, Jennifer W. Kyker looks at Mtukudzi's life and art, from his encounters with Rhodesian soldiers during the Zimbabwe war of liberation to his friendship with American blues artist Bonnie Raitt. With unprecedented access to Mtukudzi, Kyker breaks down his distinctive performance style using the Shona concept of "hunhu," or human identity through moral relationships, as a framework. By reading Mtukudzi's life in connection with his lyrics and the social milieu in which they were created, Kyker offers an engaging portrait of one of African music's most recognized performers. Interviews with family, friends, and band members make this a penetrating, sensitive, and uplifting biography of one of the world's most popular musicians.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780253022387Publication Date: 2016-10-31
