2006 Mary Kingsley Zochonis lecture
Transglobal media flows and African popular culture: revolution and reaction in Muslim Hausa popular culture
by Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu, Center for Hausa Cultural Studies, Kano, Nigeria (www.kanoonline.com/chcs)
Abstract:
This presentation explores the impact of global trends and flows of popular culture to Muslim Hausaland from 1935 to 2005 in three distinct areas: prose fiction, oral performing arts and video film. The paper specifically analyses the impact of popular culture from the Far East and Asia on the transformation of the identity of creative and performing arts among the Hausa of northern Nigeria. The main work that led the way to such literary influence was Magana Jari Ce, often considered the unalloyed Hausa literary classic. This book, published in 1937, gave birth to a phenomenon of artistic adaptation - or more directly, appropriation - of creative works by the Hausa from countries and cultures deemed to share the same cultural space as the Hausa. Magana Jari Ce, based on extensive re-telling and re-structuring of folk tales from various European, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern cultures laid the foundation of using the cultural identity of other societies in Hausa popular culture. When globalisation became electronic in the form of Hindi cinema, Hausa performance artistes followed the lead of literary adapters of the Others’ literature, and this led to the emergence oral poets - both in the popular culture and religious domains - who use Hindi film song motifs as a template for their art. This process culminated with the appearance of the Hausa video film from 1990 which is almost exclusively based on the Hindi film concept of storyline and uses the essential features of Hindi film - which was the love triangle, forced marriage and long song and dance routines that focus mainly on the sexuality of the female mime singers. This revolution in mass popular culture was counteracted by a reaction from the Islamic environment which the “modernising” Hausa popular culture finds itself.
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