Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa

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.

The papers are based on contributions for a conference organised by the research project "Cultural Images in and of Africa" of the Nordic Africa Institute together with the Sibelius Museum/Department of Musicology and the Centre for Continuing Education at Åbo Akademi University in Åbo (Turku), Finland in Oct. 2000.

The book includes a keynote speech by Christopher Waterman (UCLA), and an introduction by Annemette Kirkegaard, Copenhagen University. Both Southern, West and East Africa are represented in the studies, which cover a great variety of musics.

About the editor
Mai Palmberg is a political scientist from Åbo Academy University in Finland, and works since 1984 at the Nordic Africa Institute. She has written, among other things, on political developments in southern Africa, aids in Africa, and the images of Africa in school books.