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Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, by Thomas Turino. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 401 pp. ISBN 0-226-81702-4 paper.
The development of commercial industrial metropolises in the southern African region during the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) gave rise to the influx of migrant labor from rural outbelts to the urban townships. When migrant laborers arrived from these labor colonies that supplied the mining and manufacturing industries of the federation, they brought their bodies and their cultures. Their music, dance, and theater became the raw material of a new kind of cultural production and, as such, vehicles of adaptation to the urban environment. The process of adaptation is not the mere conversion of the rural to the urban; it also means immersion into the capitalist economy. Thomas Turino's book situates itself in the relationship that evolved between the indigenous and the cosmopolitan/global in the development of musical professionalism in Zimbabwe. The relationship between the cultural institutions of transnational capital (the entertainment industry) and indigenous Third World cultural expressions demonstrates the tendency of hegemonic institutions to absorb and control Third World images and the tendency of these images to puncture popular notions of pleasure. In this collaboration there is tension between the ideological frame of reference represented by the agency of transnational capitalism and that of indigenous cultural expression born out of local traditions and a culture of resistance to colonial subjugation.
The first part of the book discusses the use of mbira music, which is used for ritual possession. The author explains how this practice evolved from uncompensated collaboration to music being played in return for gifts and then finally to contracts for money. He discusses how professionalism in this region's music industry began to emerge in the 1950s with the institution of cultural programs and social alliances under the federation, and how these programs enhanced the spread of cosmopolitan ideas such as musical professionalism, modernist reformism, and cultural preservationism. Thomas Turino illustrates how...