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Johannes Fabian was one of the first anthropologists to
introduce the concept of popular culture into the study of
contemporary Africa. Drawing on his research in the Shaba
region of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he
has been writing for thirty years about the practices,
beliefs, and objects that make up popular culture in an
urban African setting: labor and language, religious
movements, theater and storytelling, music and painting,
grassroots literacy and historiography.
In Moments of Freedom Fabian reflects on
anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture. He
retraces how his explorations of popular culture in this
urban-industrial setting showed that classiclal culture
theory did not account for large aspects of contemporary
African life. Popular culture draws on various genres of
representation and performance, and Fabian explores the
notion of genre itself as it applies to Shaba religious
discourse, painting, and the theater. He also addresses the
element of time and how spatial thinking about culture,
ethnicity, and globalization acts as an obstacle to
appreciating the contemporaneity of African popular culture.
The volume ends with a discussion of contestation in light
of current calls for democratization.
In Moments of Freedom, Johannes Fabian takes stock
of decades of anthropological work on popular culture and
examines the development of his own thought over time.
Throughout the volume, he makes eloquent connections to
other firelds such as history, folklore studies, and
cultural studies, suggesting areas for further research in
each.
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"Anyone familiar with Professor Fabian's work is unlikely
to be surprised by the power of the analysis, the interest
of the ethnographic examples, or the range of theoretical
questions he explores in this book. It is enormously
interesting to see how the changing situation of
anthropology and the changing times in Shaba have shaped the
work of one of the leading African anthropologists."
--K. Anthony Appiah, Harvard University
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