Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda

by Andrea Mariko Grant

Overview

Youth, Pentecostalism, and Popular Music in Rwanda offers fascinating insight into the lived experiences of young people in Rwanda through ethnographic analysis of the ambiguities and ambivalences that have accompanied the country's rapid post-genocide development. Andrea Mariko Grant considers how Pentecostalism and popular music offer urban young people ways to craft themselves and their futures; to imagine alternative ways to 'be' Rwandan and inhabit the city in the post-genocide era. Exploring the idiom of the heart – and efforts to transform it – this book offers a richly nuanced perspective of urban young people's everyday lives, their aspirations and disappointments, at a political moment of both great promise and great constraint. Rather than insist on a resistance-dominance binary, Grant foregrounds the possibilities of agency available to young people, their ability to make 'noise', even when it may lead to devastating consequences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009262675
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2025
Series:	The International African Library , #74
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Andrea Mariko Grant is an anthropologist based at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on art, popular culture, and media, and their intersections with identity and politics. She was previously a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Transforming hearts; 1. Of hearts, visions, and Pentecostal subjects; 2. Who are the 'true' sons of God? Ubwenge and Pentecostal ethics; 3. Leaving a legacy: Pentecostal women and timework; 4. Rwanda Shima Imana: the politics of thanksgiving; 5. Pentecostal sounds and voice; 6. Singing from the heart: Music after 1994; 7. Singing life: Hip hop in the city; 8. The making of a 'superstar'; Conclusion: Mihigo and the politics of humanity; Works Cited; Index.