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Stephanie Newell & Onookome Okome (eds),

Popular Culture in Africa: The episteme of the everyday

New York & London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2014

ISBN 9280415532921 (hbk) $140

Any book about popular culture in Africa is likely to find some orientation from Karin Barber's seminal essays: ‘Popular Arts in Africa’ (1987) and ‘Views from the Field’ (1997). The editors of Popular Culture in Africahave done more than touch base with these two important essays, they have persuaded her to write a densely argued seven page Foreword in which she revisits and sometimes corrects her earlier ideas. The editors’ Introduction reflects their allegiance to Barber's founding concepts, and almost every one of the fifteen articles in the book cites Barber, usually in reverential mode. The book is a Festschrift in all but name.

Barber's ‘scholarly architecture’, as Newell and Okome describe her work, derives to some extent from Raymond Williams's categorization of British culture into residual, dominant and emergent culture, which in Barber's 1987 essay becomes transmuted into ‘traditional, elite and popular’, although by 2014 she regrets this simplification, preferring to rely on more complex, overlapping categories.

Much of the book is devoted to arguments about the tendency for commentators to apply binary terminology, such as traditional/modern, oral/literate and local/global. The various authors, anxious to deconstruct false antinomies, emphasize simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Barber herself gives the example of Tanzanian Hip Hop, in which ‘gangsta’ costumes seem to exclude the genre from mainstream society, while the lyrics, for the most part, promote healthy lifestyles.

After the editors’ Introduction Popular Culture in Africais divided into four parts: I Theoretical Overviews; II Gender and Sexuality; III The Place of Humor; and IV Popular Discourses of the Streets.

The editors’ overview is a very useful update of some arguments which emerged from Barber's earlier essays. Newell and Okome try to map the class and ethnic variables which are able to describe the literate, but to a large extent subaltern, groups who are most responsible for the creation of popular arts. These include ‘sub-elites, emergent elites, local intellectuals, urban intellectuals, cultural brokers and local cosmopolitans’. The last term has given rise to a common colloquial construct: ‘Afropolitan’.

Natasha Distiller writes with the urgency of a polemicist and, contradictorily, the coolness of a cultural theorist. ‘Looking at Shakespeare in South African literary history’, she argues, ‘is one way to look afresh at our cultural politics, particularly in the current context where racial identities are being hardened and simplified’ (143). She places Shakespeare at the heart of a fierce and far-from-resolved debate about ‘English’, ‘Englishness’ and ‘English Literature’ in a country bent on identifying itself afresh, but she keeps in focus South African writers (Plaatje, Themba, Modisane, Nkosi, Mphahlele) and politicians (Malema, Mbeki, Zuma). Given particular prominence are her references to Kapano Matlwa's novel, Coconut (2007).

The coconut – ‘black outside and white inside’ – is an easily maligned figure in post-colonial countries, and part of Distiller's project is to assert the viability of ‘coconuttiness’ in post-apartheid South Africa: ‘the African coconut is both/and, both Englished and transforming of Englishness. And this is a legitimate South African identity’ (45). Without a recognition of its complex history, South Africa will find itself a post-colonial victim of the ‘toxic politics of the binary formation’ (99). There is much more than this in the supple arguments deployed in this book, a painstakingly articulated essay on cultural politics. Or, to be more accurate, a collection of six related essays on the cultural politics of post-apartheid and post-Mbeki (‘the coconut president’ – [126]) South Africa.

Garrick flourished during the years when educated Englishmen (and a few privileged English women) were admiring their own enlightenment at the same time as they debated issues of 'proper' public conduct. He both encouraged and benefited from a new, quasi-philosophical interest in actors as exemplars of controlled behaviour. Some measure of self-admiration is essential to any actor's wellbeing, and Garrick, despite his constant fear of ridicule, had plenty of it; a current of concern with how he 'looks' runs through his voluminous correspondence. His career marks a transition from an insistently aural theatre, represented by the sonorous James Quin (1693-1766), to a primarily visual one.

The demand for looking-glasses boomed during the final decades of the eighteenth century, indicative both of an increase in self-awareness and of 'the new prominence of beauty as a social and political category'. The idea of the spectator as detached observer and connoisseur, boosted by Addison and Steele's launching of The Spectator in 1711, was not swept away, but it was subjected to pressure by the contradictory cult of sensibility. Laurence Sterne's sentimental traveller carries with him everywhere 'the interest . . . which men of a certain turn of mind take . . . in their own sensations'. A Sentimental Journey was the publishing highlight of 1768, and not all its readers were alert to the wicked innocence of its irony. Hugh Kelly's False Delicacy, puffed into popularity that same year at Drury Lane by Garrick's publicity machine, imported 'sentiment', in the form of exaggerated altruism, to the theatre without a hint of irony.

'The more I learned about Brecht the less I liked him', wrote the American journalist Bruce Cook, after concluding his research for Brecht in Exile. The response is familiar. Assessments of Brecht the man continue to intervene in assessments of Brecht the writer, generally to the detriment of both. The destruction of reputation is big media business, and a stubbornly opinionated marxist is a tempting prospect for scandalmongers in the capitalist democracies. It may be argued that Brecht's subject-matter licenses such moral scrutiny. If you write about 'goodness' as often as he does, you are likely to have your own virtue questioned. Brecht's inclination was to measure bourgeois notions of morality against the exigencies of economic privation under capitalism. The inclination of some Western critics has been to measure Brecht's personal morality against the approved norms of the soi-disant democracies, and to launch attacks on his political integrity from the elevated vantage-point thus secured. My purpose, in this essay, is not to defend Brecht, but to indicate as fairly as I can the circumstances against and within which he wrote.