Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era

Abstract:In the last years of Idi Amin’s reign, modern dance was introduced at Namasagali College, a Catholic boarding school in rural Uganda, as a means of encouraging modern, liberal self-awareness in students. Drawing on interviews with Namasagali’s former headmaster, teachers, and students, this article offers the first scholarly consideration of this important school, and contextualizes its modern dance curriculum within Africa’s historical modernity/modernization problematic. The school’s progressive educational program, with its focus on creative exploration and ownership of the body, was framed within a neocolonial regimen of discipline and punishment that aimed to drill modern behavior into students. In its clashing modes of government, this school exhibited contradictions that have perennially troubled Western liberal intervention in Africa.

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Circuits of Compassion: The Affective Labor of Uganda’s Christian Orphan Choirs

Boyd¹

2020

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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Uganda’s touring orphan choirs engage in a form of charity that is dependent on the mobility not only of money, but also of people and sentiments. Boyd considers the moral economies that underlie this ongoing project of compassionate “circulation.” If a key finding of the work on humanitarian affect has been how such “affective surpluses” mask inequalities between donors and recipients, this article considers how participants in charitable relationships conceive of dependency and indebtedness differently. These differences compel us to understand how moral and religious sentiments give shape to the inequalities inherent in dominant forms of global humanitarian “care.”

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Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era

Cited by 27 publications

References 36 publications

Commodification of Music in the Digital Age: Locating Namibia’s Oviritje Popular Music Genre in the Capitalist Music Economy

Commodification of Music in the Digital Age: Locating Namibia’s Oviritje Popular Music Genre in the Capitalist Music Economy

Dance, Discipline, and the Liberal Self at a Ugandan Catholic Boarding School

Circuits of Compassion: The Affective Labor of Uganda’s Christian Orphan Choirs

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