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MATTHIAS KRINGS and UTA REUSTER-JAHN , editors, Bongo Media Worlds: producing and consuming popular culture in Dar es Salaam . Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung 34. Cologne : Rüdiger Köppe Verlag ([euro]34.80 - 978 3 89645 834 6 ). 2014, 286 pp.
Reviews
Primarily based on 2009-10 fieldwork conducted in Dar es Salaam, this collection is the outcome of a project on negotiating culture through new media and popular genres in contemporary neoliberal Tanzania, 'bongo', by a team of staff and students at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Most contributions include researchers' descriptions of their participation in the processes of media production.
The chapters examine several appropriations of global media flows as ways of bridging the cultural gap between the 'foreign' and the 'local'. A major argument of the book is 'the agency of local audiences vis-à-vis transnational media circulating in an already globalised world' (p. 182, emphasis added). Tanzanian spectators are not 'victims of an alleged cultural imperialism - be it American, Chinese or Nigerian', but they adapt 'something alien to the conditions of "home"' (p. 182). The rationale for this collection, as suggested above, lies in contesting discourses on US/foreign cultural imperialism ('the West' and 'the rest') that have been key debates in media studies. This approach, however, overlooks Tanzania's longstanding familiarity with global cultural flows.
An introduction contextualizing the case studies presented is somewhat anecdotal and undertheorized. It is followed by an inadequately referenced overview of some of the existing literature on bongo flava (foreign-derived Swahili music), and...