University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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

Deja, Richard Michael

Content Files
DEJA-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf

Permalink

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

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
Date of Ingest
2016-11-10T17:50:16Z
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
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/92778
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2016 Richard M. Deja

Owning Collections

Dissertations and Theses [Graduate College] - Music
Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois