Popular Cultural Materials and Public Spheres: Perspectives from Africa, India and Europe.
Hofmeyr, Isabel ; Kaarsholm, Preben
The papers collected here were presented at a seminar entitled
"Popular Cultural Materials and Public Spheres: Perspectives from
Africa, India and Europe" held in Denmark in September 2004. The
seminar formed part of an ongoing ENRECA-funded project on the theme of
"Political and Cultural Institutions in Development". (1) The
project has three partners: the International Development Studies
programme at Roskilde University, Denmark (IDS); the Centre for Studies
in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India (CSSS); and the Centre for Basic
Research, Kampala, Uganda (CBR). The broad objective of the ENRECA project is to develop South-South collaboration between the African and
the Indian institution and their local networks, with IDS, Roskilde
functioning as a catalyst, and with the enhancement of capacity in
Uganda as the primary goal. Researcher training courses and joint
research seminars in India and Uganda have been central activities, and
four Ugandan PhD projects have received fellowships from the project, of
which three have so far been completed. In Calcutta, a number of young
researchers have been attached as postdoctoral fellows and research
interns.
An important strand in the project has been the establishment of
archives as resources to support the work of researchers and
postgraduate students working within the field of "Urban Culture
and Democracy". In Calcutta, at the CSSS, an extensive collection
on the modern urban history of Calcutta has been established, bringing
together materials from the fields of both 'high' and
'popular' culture and giving priority to written texts and
images. In Kampala, at the CBR, a smaller archive of popular cultural
documents has been set up, which has been focused in particular on
recordings of songs and other popular music.
The purpose of the 2004 Roskilde seminar was to discuss the
outcomes of these two processes of archive building, and to debate in a
broader theoretical perspective the issues involved in the
classification of cultural institutions, styles and genres. Definitions
of certain cultural forms as 'high' or 'canonical'
and of others as 'low' or 'popular' reflect complex
processes of differentiation which are linked to the changing functions
that cultural articulations have been made to fulfil within specific
trajectories of social and political history.
In addressing these themes, the papers presented here bring
together two concerns: that of the archive and that of popular culture.
At times, and particularly in relation to colonial archives, these two
areas are thought of as being in opposition to each other: the archive
is a "paper empire" (Stoler 2002:90) representing state power
and that which is official; the popular encapsulates that which is
unofficial and stands outside the state. In this formulation the archive
and popular memory stand in opposition to each other.
While possibly true for colonial and certain types of state
archive, this opposition is overdrawn. Increasingly, the idea of
archivability has come to encompass the realm of the popular. While
popular memory is elusive, in certain quarters it has come to stand at
the centre of museums (the District Six Museum in Cape Town and the
Hector Peterson Museum in Johannesburg are two apt examples) and
archives. As Barber and Moraes Farias point out in their paper, which
discusses the process of establishing an electronic archive of Yoruba
popular religious media, the idea of the archive has almost become
synonymous with that of a collection of popular everyday artefacts:
Often, modern archives are created to capture and preserve
precisely those ephemeral, everyday objects and activities
which in the past would have been excluded or ignored. Think
of the way officialdom selects constellations of 'typical'
cultural items to seal into pods for aliens, or future
generations, to discover. These representatives of the banal
and the everyday are selected to become canonical, to stand for
a whole culture and a whole historical epoch. (22)
Barber and Moraes Farias indicate that the process of establishing
an archive of the popular involves thinking through the formal and
intellectual properties of the material one is archiving and then
designing a repository whose methods of classification and access
capture some of the intellectual properties and chemistry of the
material being archived. The material being preserved and the archive
itself are in a reflexive dialogue that can mutually illuminate their
respective intellectual qualities.
The papers in this collection illustrate and explore these
propositions in more detail. The first section is entitled
"Archiving the Popular" and the second "The Popular as
Potential Archive". As the focus is on Africa, India and Europe,
the papers in the second section draw out some of the comparative
dimensions which the collection sparks. The first section comprises four
papers that focus on actual archives. The first of these, discussed by
Barber and Moraes Farias, is the electronic archive arising out of a
project investigating the role of the media in the constitution of new
religious publics in western Nigeria. It is run jointly by the
University of Birmingham and the School of Oriental and African Studies in England. The second, discussed in the papers by Ssewakiryanga and
Isabirya, and Nannyonga-Tamusuza, is the collection of popular Ugandan
music established by the CBR in Uganda. Finally, Ashish
Rajadhyaksha's paper on "Archive and Experience" presents
reflections around the establishment of a Media and Culture Archive at
the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore.
Archiving the popular
In their paper, Barber and Moraes Farias provide a history of the
project that set out to collect popular religious media in western
Nigeria, and the way in which the electronic archive documenting the
materials collected is being built up. As they indicate, the
intellectual objectives of the project have shaped the design and
architecture of the archive. The project sought to document and
understand the explosion of and competition between religious media in
western Nigeria in the 1990s. Focusing on one Ibadan suburb between 1996
and 1999, researchers collected a broad spectrum of material: pamphlets;
audio tapes of sermons and music; video dramas; newspaper clippings; TV
and radio programmes; posters; handbills; tracts; and leaflets.
Interviews were also conducted. The objective was to understand how new
media technology was shaping new kinds of religious publics: previously
there had generally been toleration between Christian and Islamic
communities, but by the 1990s distinctive and antagonistic religious
groupings were beginning to coagulate.
As Barber and Moraes Farias indicate, the purpose of the project,
and the electronic archive arising out of it, was not to assemble an
exhaustive collection of religious media. Rather the function was to try
and understand this material as a field of discourse, and hence to
analyse the ways in which it undertook its intellectual work of
addressing its constituencies. Because the material covered different
religions, genres and languages, the collection could illustrate the
interactions of these various strands, and how they interacted as a
field. It could also demonstrate the common themes and ideas across
religions--"what is most interesting about the texts is not their
intrinsic individual properties but the way they behave as part of a
field. They are best encountered in the course of traversing this
field" (26). In establishing the electronic archive of this
material, the project leaders sought to design a system that would allow
anyone using it to understand and in some ways experience the modes of
intellectual operation in the discursive field as a whole.
The next two papers by Richard Ssewakiryanga and Joel Isabirye, and
by Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza discuss the problems of archiving popular
music in Uganda. Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye refer specifically to the
CBR archive. Nannyonga-Tamusuza touches briefly on this archive while
ranging more broadly on the intellectual and practical challenges of
archiving popular music. Both papers focus on the centrality of popular
music to everyday life in Uganda: Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye demonstrate
how it functions as a political field in which singers can comment in
coded or indirect form on political oppression. Popular music functions
as a site in which ruler and ruled reach uneasy accommodations, with
rulers using popular music as a form of political containment. As
Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye demonstrate, Amin, like many other African
despots, understood the centrality of music to everyday life and sought
to use and manipulate it by providing extensive patronage for military
jazz bands.
Nannyonga-Tamusuza points out the range of problems involved in
archiving popular music. Some of these are practical and relate to the
constrained resources and capacity for preservation and collection in
many African institutions. Others are intellectual and relate to the
ways in which 'the popular' is defined. As Nannyonga-Tamusuza
points out, where museums and official institutions do evince an
interest in 'popular' music, this is invariably defined as
'traditional'. With this 'traditionalism' firmly in
view, curators are unable to see, or indeed often to grasp, the
significance of the emergent popular forms that defy binary
categorisations of tradition and modernity. Elsewhere, deciding on where
to place the boundaries on definitions of popular music will have
consequences for what might be collected: "The question is: how do
the limitations of constructing music as being 'popular'
influence the decisions made on what of Uganda's music should be
archived as 'popular'?" (35). As Nannyonga-Tamusuza
indicates, problems of definition rapidly compound:
[Is] music created outside Uganda, but by Ugandans ... indeed
Ugandan popular music? How can we qualify what is Ugandan, with
the irresistible influence from the global? Besides, how can we
determine the popular of the music in and outside Uganda? Who
determines the popular of such music? These are contentious
issues, which would challenge any archivists labouring to
classify and catalogue the so-called 'Ugandan popular music'. (36)
The article then goes on to probe these issues in more detail. The
question of definition in relation to musical genres is complex since
musical forms are so notoriously fluid and fugitive. Nannyonga-Tamusuza
quotes Kofi Agawu who notes that the diversity of the forms of popular
music has meant "the absence of widely accepted names for its
genres", a feature which in turn has "delayed the emergence of
reliable taxonomies" (35).
An additional problem, as both papers on Ugandan music indicate, is
that of piracy, or "'Piracy and Dubbing Disease'
(PDD)", as Nannyonga-Tamusuza terms it. Piracy practices create
significant problems for the archivist. Pirated CDs or tapes lack the
information critical for classification, such as details of where, by
whom and on what date the recording was done.
Yet another problem with regard to making decisions on what to
preserve, as Nannyonga-Tamusuza illustrates, relates to how agendas of
the 'popular' are determined. Both papers on Ugandan music
focus on the influence of radio: with the liberalisation of the airwaves
after Museveni came to power in 1986, radio in the form of new FM
stations has come to assume a central role. Radio playlists, often
influenced by US trends, mould perceptions of popularity. Phone-ins play
a role in determining popularity ratings of songs, but inevitably
reflect the taste of those with ready access to telephones. There is
also the DJ factor. Radio DJs play what they deem to be popular or songs
in which they have had a hand, and financial interest, in producing--it
is not uncommon for radio DJs to own music recording studios or to be
musicians with their own bands. As Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye indicate,
there are other sites which play a central role in profiling popular
music. These are the discotheque and the karaoke bar.
Several of these themes are picked up by Ssewakiryanga and
Isabirye. They too demonstrate the complexity of genre by tracing the
genealogies of two musical styles. The first is kadongo kamu (bowl
lyre), a traditional form in which this instrument is combined with the
single box guitar. More recently, the form has been mixed with disco
music and Jamaican instrumental. The second is Katemba (urban theatre)
music, originally a form of music included in court dramas performed for
the Luganda court, which then spread into popular forums to become a
distinct and massively popular genre called band music. However, as
Nannyonga-Tamusuza explains, there are strong crossover features between
the kadongo kamu and band music:
... since the late nineties, it has become increasingly difficult
to differentiate kadongo kamu from band music. A new fusion, which
I hesitantly call 'kadongo kamu band music' cropped up. In this
genre, while the instrumentation is characteristically more of the
band music type, the identity of kadongo kamu is captured in the
vocal style and the disguised baakisimba rhythms. (47)
The papers by Nannyonga-Tamusuza and by Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye
thus address very directly and open up for comparative discussion issues
and concerns that are at the heart of the development of the popular
cultural materials archive at the CBR in Kampala. In the context of the
Calcutta modern urban history archive at the CSSS, the focus of interest
has been broader and--as will be discussed below--has taken into account
to a greater extent the differentiation between varieties of
'elite' and 'popular' culture, as well as the
history of struggles around urban space which has provided the setting
for genres and articulation of culture.
In his paper on "Archive and Experience", Ashish
Rajadhyaksha takes off from discussions around the CSSS urban history
archive in Calcutta and its "Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal"
exhibition in 2002. He describes how new types of archival projects have
attempted to step in to compensate for the decline in "major public
archiving institutions" and the growing privatisation of archives,
which have been experienced in India in recent years. He discusses the
relationship between archives and 'collective memory' as an
interactive one, with archives providing possibilities for the shaping
of future forms of collective memory.
Rajadhyaksha then reflects on the distinction between the notions
of 'collection', 'catalogue', and
'archive', and talks about the painfulness of his experience
in collecting rich materials (with Paul Willemen) for the Encyclopaedia
of Indian Cinema, which they first published in 1994, and seeing them
reduced to a 'catalogue' of references. On the basis of this,
he goes on to discuss the setting up of new types of archives to serve
and make possible new modalities of collaborative and interdisciplinary
teaching and research, and uses the electronic Media and Culture Archive
at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore as his
example. He describes the building of archives as an interactive and
interdisciplinary exercise aimed at developing new "backbones"
of electronic databases as well as the necessary "middleware"
to utilise these in the environments of "satellite-uplinked
classrooms". He concludes that archive-building of this nature is
an integral part of research collaboration, and points to the ongoing
project of "Indian Ocean" studies between the CSCS in
Bangalore and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg as an
instance of this.
The popular as potential archive
The second section of this volume examines different instances of
public spheres brought into being by different popular cultural
formations. Each paper treats these cultural formations as an archive in
the sense outlined by Barber and Moraes Farias, namely as fields of
discourse that address and constitute publics in particular ways. The
papers all demonstrate the layered, differentiated and contradictory
ways in which these fields operate.
As Kaarsholm argues in relation to the formation of public spheres,
these can only be properly understood in relation to "the ways in
which debates are conducted, how articulations are made and regulated,
how regulations can be challenged, and what encouragements and obstacles
for dialogue are active--in short, how the field functions as one of
public culture" (87).
Kaarsholm explores these propositions against a set of debates
regarding the post-apartheid landscape of civic organisations and civil
society. In some analyses, there has been a demise of the vibrant array
of civil society organisations that so effectively opposed apartheid.
Kaarsholm takes a less pessimistic view and argues that there is indeed
a lively world of civil society organisations if one knows where to
look. He examines the crowded public domain of two informal settlements
just north of Durban, which bustle with numerous religious and cultural
organisations. His paper first focuses on the religious domain, where
different 'brands' of Christianity jostle with each other, and
where mainstream denominations and African Initiated Churches elbow each
other for spiritual room. In addition, Islam complicates this mix.
These religious organisations sustain a complex field of moral
debate, and within this field Kaarsholm focuses on virginity testing, a
practice that has arisen recently partly as a response to the HIV/AIDS
crisis. The paper zeroes in on interviews with various virginity
testers, and these demonstrate the different positions and ideas that
characterise the field. Whether discussing healing, family
responsibility, gender and culture, human versus cultural rights or
analyses of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, there are a variety of positions and
analyses in circulation. As Kaarsholm notes, these local debates provide
an alternative set of ideas about healing, purity and HIV/ AIDS to those
generally encountered in the mainstream media, which tend to be
dominated by the views of the state or the Treatment Action Campaign. If
one attends closely to local cultural formations, there are ongoing and
vibrant debates offering different visions of the nature of the moral
crisis facing South Africa; different strategies for moral regeneration;
and competing ideas of what constitutes healing and purity.
This question of understanding any cultural formation as an archive
surfaces in the papers by Mukherjee and Zerlang, which examine two
apparently unrelated phenomena, namely the emergence of realism as an
artistic style in colonial Bengal and the ways in which orientalism took
on a specific manifestation in nineteenth-century Denmark. Both papers
demonstrate that these two formations were made and distributed across a
set of linked sites. They both deal with the politics of representation
in an imperial moment, and from this perspective they demonstrate how
questions of fantasy, myth and realism, and their configuration,
constituted a strand in the contested debates around colonial
modernities.
Zerlang demonstrates how fantastic and fabulous representations of
the 'Orient' were produced and consumed across a bewildering array of sites--novels, operas, popular music, interior decoration,
science, travelogue, exhibitions, funfairs, buildings, department
stores, paintings, magazines. Together these produced a type of fabulous
realism, in which fantastic representations of the 'Orient'
were at times consumed as 'realistic' depictions. Likewise, in
colonial Bengal, certain techniques of realist painting adopted from
British portraiture and landscape painting, disseminated initially from
art schools and colleges, were then taken up in popular forms of picture
and printmaking. These include court-patronised miniature painters who
had to adapt their styles as their erstwhile patrons developed a taste
for the new illusionist and naturalistic idioms of realism.
These new visual styles were matched by new mechanised mass-production techniques which infiltrated the art market in
Calcutta--and have been extensively documented in the CSSS urban history
archive. This market had previously been dominated by different
traditions of picture-making, such as the Kalighat painters (who fed the
demand for mementoes created by pilgrims, tourists and traders to the
Kalighat temple) or the wood and metal engravers of Battala, the major
Bengali book printing of Calcutta. As the new realist conventions became
more widespread, picture makers had to adapt their woodcuts to compete
with colour lithography and oleography. Mukherjee summarises the
situation: "By the 1870s, the popular art market in Calcutta was
invaded with the new kinds of standardised mass-produced
'realistic' pictures with glossy colour and texture, which
ultimately drove the Kalighat and Battala pictures out of the
market" (113).
As these various traditions encountered each other, "realism
underwent considerable dilutions and subversions in its effort to
accommodate existing traditional iconography. Realistic iconographies of
gods and goddesses now existed within palatial interiors with decorative
backdrops and settings" (118). The implications of this process are
still apparent today. Mukherjee explains: "These oleographs
performed the important function of further 'refining' popular
taste and producing newer orders of religious and social iconography
that paved the way for a new kind of popular art, the kind which we can
now see in film posters, hoardings and calendars of the twentieth
century" (119).
Zerlang provides an equally complex discussion of Danish
orientalism. In fine-grained detail, he outlines an archive of Danish
orientalism while demonstrating the complex ways in which this cultural
formation seduced its audiences. As he demonstrates, one could
experience orientalism in every possible site and through an array of
media. At home, householders in Copenhagen filled their rooms with
divans, ottomans, Moroccan pillows, and heavy brocade curtains in order
to make their interiors resemble the lavish tent of a nomad. In
department stores, shoppers could acquire 'oriental' goods and
see 'oriental' displays. The Tivoli Gardens became an oriental
theme park, fashioned to resemble a bazaar. Aladdin became a craze and
appeared repeatedly in musicals, plays, stories and images. Everyday
life was hence saturated with the 'Orient' and one could
experience this phenomenon through many different forms of media and
modes of address. As Zerlang demonstrates, some of these included
endless repetition of particular tropes so that the bazaar, the harem,
the mosque, the dervish dancers became permanently familiar, but
eternally strange. Other techniques were borrowed from the world of
popular visual culture with the 'Orient' being portrayed as a
dramatic tableau, a panorama, or in the form of an exhibition.
Through these multiple modes of address and experience, audiences
could experience the 'Orient' as both fantastic and
'real'. As Zerlang indicates, this particular formation has to
be read as part of the broader emergence of modernism which affected
Denmark as much as it affected Bengal:
... the predeliction for orientalism was a version of modernism: a
cultural answer to the concomitant experiences of 'emancipation' and
'alienation'. Going out into the expanding arena of entertainment
Copenhageners mentally dressed up as Orientals and surrounded
themselves by arabesques and Bengal light. (134)
However, as Zerlang carefully reminds us, this is not simply some
vague modernism or some generalised orientalism, but is instead
specifically historically situated, in the same way as Mukherjee
demonstrates for the emergence of 'realism' in colonial
Bengal. As Zerlang shows, the orientalism of Denmark was different from
that produced in England, Germany or France. As Zerlang explains,
nineteenth-century Denmark was a country that had been stripped of much
of its territory: "The English bombarded Copenhagen and took its
navy in 1807, Norway was lost in 1814 after Denmark's unlucky
alliance with Napoleon, the small Danish colonies in India were given up
in 1845, and in 1864, after a war with Prussia, Denmark lost 40% of its
territory." This experience of marginalisation "promoted a
certain identification with the Orient which was also a marginal world
in the modern struggle for life" (126).
The studies by Mukherjee and Zerlang point to the centrality of
circulation in forms of popular culture and the formations of audiences
and publics. In Michael Warner's terms (2002:62-68), it is the
reflexive circulation of texts that brings publics into being and one
way of thinking about the imaginative work that these formations enable
is to think about the ways in which texts dramatise the limits of their
circulation. Isabel Hofmeyr develops this point in her piece "Books
in Heaven: Dreams, Texts and Conspicuous Circulation". Her starting
point is the phenomenon of miraculous literacy, in which the ability to
read and write is conferred through divine revelation. The phenomenon is
found throughout the world, but this article examines versions of
miraculous literacy that occur in African Christianity. In these dream
visions and revelations, it is clear that texts circulate between heaven
and earth--texts can, for example, be presented to believers in heaven,
and then brought to earth. In one dream, a blackboard with a hymn
written on it scrolls down from heaven.
This idea of magical circulation is common to much evangelical
Protestant thinking, which imputes extraordinary capacities to
religiously inspired texts which, apparently unaided by human agency,
can travel across the face of the earth, converting those in their path.
Hofmeyr traces such cases of conspicuous circulation and then, turning
to Warner, asks what these far-flung circuits of circulation may tell us
about the formation of publics. Looking specifically at African
Christianity, the article puts forward two answers. The first is that
"this particular way of imaging texts retrospectively signs up the
ancestors via the medium of print culture. Rather as Mormons draw up
family trees so as to sign up their dead ancestors for late entry to
heaven, so in this circulation of texts between heaven and earth, the
dead can retrospectively be included in modernity" (149). The
second answer is that "the circulation of texts between worlds
opens up possibilities for imagining the self that speak to realms other
than the national, particularly in the situation of dealing with the
colonial state ... It is a form of address that is more than subnational
or transnational, it is transworldly and transglobal" (149-150).
In her paper on "Writing, Self-realization and Community:
Henry Muoria and the Creation of a Nationalist Public Sphere in
Kenya", Bodil Folke Frederiksen examines the case of Henry Muoria,
a journalist and politician, whose life stretched from 1914 to 1997, and
included long periods in Kenya as well as of exile in the UK. He had
networks of belonging in both Nairobi, the Kenyan countryside, and the
African diaspora in London. Throughout his life, Muoria was preoccupied
with the access of Africans to the public sphere, and he himself
experienced exclusion and silencing both in Britain while in exile and
in Kenya after independence. He had a keen understanding of proverbs and
wise sayings as an archive of his people's knowledge and ideas, and
incorporated these in journalistic writings in his Gikuyu newspaper
Mumenyereri, his books and his autobiography.
Muoria saw himself and his individual strivings as representative
of those of his African community, with his life as a journalist,
politician and family man being closely linked in the contexts of
colonial Kenya, Britain during his exile, and Kenya after independence.
In his life and writings, he sought to mediate between understandings of
community, nation and public at different levels--from that of the
Gikuyu in Kenya to Africa as a whole--and tried out different genres of
public culture to match these levels--proverbs, autobiography,
journalism, politics. In his 1982 autobiography, Frederiksen writes,
Muoria would identify himself closely with his writings, was proud to be
known as "the writer" or "the editor", and
particularly proud when Jomo Kenyatta--who later dropped him as an
ally--would refer to him as "Mumenyereri" (rightful guardian),
which was the name of the newspaper he published.
In the last paper in the collection--"An Equal Right to the
City: Contests over Cultural Space in Calcutta"--Partha Chatterjee
takes off from the famous statement by Henri Lefebvre that 'the
urban'--since Greek-Roman antiquity--has served as a model space
for 'free citizenship'. With Eurocentric arrogance, Lefebvre
declined to consider whether this would also apply to what he called
"the oriental city" and to "town and country"
relations within "the Asiatic mode of production", and
Chatterjee sets out to investigate the generality of Lefebvre's
understanding in a situation of intensified global capitalism, in which
the world's biggest megacities are now situated outside the West.
To do this, he uses types of materials which have been collected in
the CSSS urban history archive, and examines the history of public
spheres in Calcutta from an 'early modern' period in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, through the 'colonial
modern' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the
post-colonial and post-Partition period of 'nationalist'
modernity. Chatterjee describes how the distinction between public and
private could be used as a basis for informal segregation in an urban
environment of colonial 'liberalism', and maps out the
cultural strategies through which the elites and the poor fought for
access and control within the urban space. He examines two fields of
entertainment culture to exemplify this--the development of both
English- and Bengali-language elite theatre in Calcutta, and the history
of football as a popular cultural genre. Within the latter, two
landmarks are highlighted. First, the 1911 "Shield final"
victory of the barefoot Indian Mohun Bagan team over the British East
Yorkshire Regiment team, whose "symbolic power ... was
incalculable". Secondly, the post-1947 rise of East Bengal Club
"as the chief public institution asserting the identity of the
refugees from East Pakistan," which on the football
ground--according to Chatterjee--"was the most important event in
the post-colonial period", not least because it signalled the
'domestication' of the masses of East Pakistan refugees into
the fabric of Calcutta--"one of the most remarkable stories of
urban history anywhere in the twentieth century" (185).
Between them, the papers in the present collection take on the task
of exploring the various permutations produced by putting the terms of
the 'popular' and the 'public' side by side. What
does it mean to constitute an archive of popular cultural materials?
What might a popular archive be? What are popular conceptions of
archives? If conceptualised as a type of archive, what insights might we
learn from bodies of popular cultural materials, such as newspapers and
pamphlets? As the ENRECA project traverses Europe, Africa and India,
these questions are considered across a range of sites and the insights
from these areas are thrown into comparative relief. The papers point to
different histories and different distinctions between forms of
culture--between the 'elite' and the 'popular', and
between cultural institutions and articulation at different levels of
the local, the national and the global. They also show how the contexts
and histories of the cases examined have involved different
constructions of public spheres and public cultures, and how this has
influenced the ways in which civil societies have emerged and interacted
with the state. Finally, the papers demonstrate how forms of state and
power have attempted to restrict or regulate public space, and how
articulations of culture and the differentiation of cultural genres have
developed strategies to expand it, providing new landscapes and settings
for citizenship and democratic aspirations.
References
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. "Colonial Archives and the Arts of
Governance: On the Content in the Form". In Hamilton, Carolyn,
Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid & Razia
Saleh (eds). Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip: 83-100.
Warner, Michael. 2002. "Publics and Counterpublics".
Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.
Note
(1.) ENRECA is a programme of DANIDA--the Danish government's
development assistance organisation--with the aim of enhancing research
capacity in developing countries.