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In Performance and Politics in Tanzania, Laura Edmondson examines how politics, social values, and gender are expressed on stage. Now a disappearing tradition, Tanzanian popular theatre integrates comic sketches, acrobatics, melodrama, song, and dance to produce lively commentaries on what it means to be Tanzanian. These dynamic shows invite improvisation and spontaneous and raucous audience participation as they explore popular sentiments. Edmondson asserts that these performances overturn the boundary between official and popular art and offer a new way of thinking about African popular culture. She discusses how the blurring of state agendas and local desires presents a charged environment for the exploration of Tanzanian political and social realities: What is the meaning of democracy and who gets to define it? Who is in power, and how is power exposed or concealed? What is the role of tradition in a postsocialist state? How will the future of the nation be negotiated? This engaging book provides important insight into the complexity of popular forms of expression during a time of political and social change in East Africa.
Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.
Since gaining independence, the United Republic of Tanzania has enjoyed relative stability. More recently, the nation transitioned peacefully from "single-party democracy" and socialism to a multiparty political system with a market-based economy. But Tanzania's development strategies—based on the leading economic ideas at the time of independence—also opened the door for unscrupulous dealmaking among political elites and led to economic decline in the 1960s and 1970s that continues to be felt today. Indeed, the shift to a market-oriented economy was motivated in part by the fiscal interests of government profiteers. The Political Economy of Tanzania focuses on the nation's economic development from 1961 to the present, considering the global and domestic factors that have shaped Tanzania's economic policies over time. Michael F. Lofchie presents a compelling analysis of the successes and failures of a country whose postcolonial history has been deeply influenced by high-ranking members of the political elite who have used their power to advance their own economic interests. The Political Economy of Tanzania offers crucial lessons for scholars and policy makers with a stake in Africa's future.
Full parliamentary democracy did not come quickly or easily to Tanzania. In 1962, the first constitution of Tanzania as an independent republic shifted power from parliament to the executive: specifically to the presidency. In 1965, the interim constitution further eroded the powers of parliament in favour of a one party state, controlled by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU). Parliament became little more than a token, rubber-stamping organisation. This multi-contributory study traces the development of multi-party democracy in Tanzania from the appointment of the first two chiefs to Tanganyika's colonial Legislative Council in 1945 to the present day. It highlights the struggle for supremacy between parliament and the executive during the period from 1968 to 1992, when parliament began to assert itself as a vibrant multi-party institution.
Explores how performance arts, whether staged or in daily life, regularly interface with political action across the African continent
This chronology for 2005 to 2017 compiles the chapters on Tanzania previously published in the Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara.
Monograph of essays comprising a comparison of the political systems of Kenya and Tanzania and their contrasting approach to development policy up to mid-1977 - compares political party-state relations, elections, public administration, political ideology, social class structure, rural worker self help, rural development policy, urban planning and performance, educational policy and social mobility, regional level foreign policy, etc. Bibliography pp. 267 to 289, references and statistical tables.
This study, the first book-length treatment of its subject, draws on a large base of elusive material and on extensive field research. It is the result of the author's wide experience of teaching and producing theatre in Africa, and of her fascination with the ways in which traditional performance forms have interacted with, or have resisted, non-indigenous modes of dramatic representation in the process of evolving into the vital theatres of the present day. A comparative historical study is offered of the three national cultures of Ethiopia, Tanganyika/Tanzania, and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Not only (scripted) drama is treated, but also theatre in the sense of the broader range of performance arts such as dance and song. The development of theatre and drama is seen against the background of centuries of cultural evolution and interaction, from pre-colonial times, through phases of African and European imperialism, to the liberation struggles and newly-won independence of the present. The seminal relationship between theatre, society and politics is thus a central focus. Topics covered include: the function in theatre of vernacular and colonial languages; performance forms under feudal, communalist and socialist régimes; cultural militancy and political critique; the relationship of theatre to social élites and to the peasant class; state control (funding and censorship); racism and separate development in the performing arts; contemporary performance structures (amateur, professional, community and university theatre). Due attention is paid to prominent dramatists, theatre groups and theatre directors, and the author offers new insight into African perceptions of the role of the artist in the theatre, as well as dealing with the important subject of gender roles (in drama, in performance ritual, and in theatre practice). The book is illustrated with contemporary photographs.