You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa
You Can't Go to War without Song explores the role of public performance in political activism in contemporary South Africa. Weaving together detailed ethnographic fieldwork and an astute theoretical framework, Omotayo Jolaosho examines the cohesive power of protest songs and dances within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of many social movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition after 1994.

Jolaosho demonstrates the ways APF members adapted anti-apartheid songs and dance to create new expressive forms that informed and commented on their struggles for access to water, electricity, housing, education, and health facilities, the costs of which had been made prohibitive by privatization.

You Can't Go to War without Song offers profiles of individual activists to amplify its central point: social movements like the APF are best understood as the coming together of individuals, and it is the songs and dances of the movement that bind these individual together and create opportunity for community organization. Chapters on women and youth complicate such understandings of community, however, showing how activist live and experiences are shaped by gender and generation.

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You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa
You Can't Go to War without Song explores the role of public performance in political activism in contemporary South Africa. Weaving together detailed ethnographic fieldwork and an astute theoretical framework, Omotayo Jolaosho examines the cohesive power of protest songs and dances within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of many social movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition after 1994.

Jolaosho demonstrates the ways APF members adapted anti-apartheid songs and dance to create new expressive forms that informed and commented on their struggles for access to water, electricity, housing, education, and health facilities, the costs of which had been made prohibitive by privatization.

You Can't Go to War without Song offers profiles of individual activists to amplify its central point: social movements like the APF are best understood as the coming together of individuals, and it is the songs and dances of the movement that bind these individual together and create opportunity for community organization. Chapters on women and youth complicate such understandings of community, however, showing how activist live and experiences are shaped by gender and generation.

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You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa

You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa

by Omotayo Jolaosho
You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa

You Can't Go to War without Song: Performance and Community Mobilization in South Africa

by Omotayo Jolaosho

Hardcover

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Overview

You Can't Go to War without Song explores the role of public performance in political activism in contemporary South Africa. Weaving together detailed ethnographic fieldwork and an astute theoretical framework, Omotayo Jolaosho examines the cohesive power of protest songs and dances within the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), one of many social movements that emerged in the wake of South Africa's democratic transition after 1994.

Jolaosho demonstrates the ways APF members adapted anti-apartheid songs and dance to create new expressive forms that informed and commented on their struggles for access to water, electricity, housing, education, and health facilities, the costs of which had been made prohibitive by privatization.

You Can't Go to War without Song offers profiles of individual activists to amplify its central point: social movements like the APF are best understood as the coming together of individuals, and it is the songs and dances of the movement that bind these individual together and create opportunity for community organization. Chapters on women and youth complicate such understandings of community, however, showing how activist live and experiences are shaped by gender and generation.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253063205
Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date: 07/26/2022
Pages: 310
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Omotayo Jolaosho (they, them, their[s]) was a cultural anthropologist with a background in performance and integrated arts. An Assistant Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida, their publications included the transnational anthology African Women Writing Resistance: Contemporary Voices. Jolaosho died in 2021.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Activist Portrait: Ma Patrycja
1. Emergence
2. Routinization
Activist Portrait: Kanelo
3. Efflorescence
Activist Portrait: Lebo
4. Ruptures
Activist Portrait: Willeen
5. Countermobilization
6. Redemption
Conclusion
Epilogue: Wesley
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Yolanda Covington-Ward

You Can't Go to War without Song is an exceptional ethnography that is carefully and thoughtfully researched and engagingly written with a keen sensitivity to the relational and power dynamics of post-apartheid mobilization movements in South Africa.

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