From place to placelessness: Malawian musicians, commercial music, and social worlds in southern Africa

Deja, Richard Michael

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/92778 Copy

Description

Title

From place to placelessness: Malawian musicians, commercial music, and social worlds in southern Africa

Author(s)

Deja, Richard Michael

Issue Date

2016-07-08

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Turino, Thomas

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Buchanan, Donna

Committee Member(s)

• Solis, Gabriel
• Barnes, Teresa

Department of Study

Music

Discipline

Musicology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Malawian Music
• Popular Music in Malawi
• southern Africa
• Music in southern Africa
• Popular music
• African popular music
• social worlds
• cultural citizenship
• cosmopolitanism
• Afropolitanism

Abstract

This dissertation examines how social belonging and community ties among Malawians and other individuals in southern Africa articulate with multiple geographic and social scales. As an ethnographic study focusing on musicians, this work demonstrates how musical sounds and practices are integrated into the construction of individual and group subjectivities. Using musical practices as tangible references to various social worlds among specific individuals, this study illustrates the complex multiplicity of Malawian subjectivities and identities. In conjunction with a substantial literature, this study is also intended as a corrective to social analyses that are overly binary in scope: global-local, African-Western, Cosmopolitan-non-Cosmopolitan, modern-traditional.

Graduation Semester

2016-08

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/92778

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Richard M. Deja

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