From place to placelessness: Malawian musicians, commercial music, and social worlds in southern Africa

This dissertation examines how social belonging and community ties among Malawians and other individuals in southern Africa articulate with multiple geographic and social scales. As an ethnographic study focusing on musicians, this work demonstrates how musical sounds and practices are integrated into the construction of individual and group subjectivities. Using musical practices as tangible references to various social worlds among specific individuals, this study illustrates the complex multiplicity of Malawian subjectivities and identities. In conjunction with a substantial literature, this study is also intended as a corrective to social analyses that are overly binary in scope: global-local, African-Western, Cosmopolitan-non-Cosmopolitan, modern-traditional.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Musicology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Deja, Richard Michael

Contributors dc:contributor

• Turino, Thomas
• Buchanan, Donna
• Solis, Gabriel
• Barnes, Teresa

• Malawian Music
• Popular Music in Malawi
• southern Africa
• Music in southern Africa
• Popular music
• African popular music
• social worlds
• cultural citizenship
• cosmopolitanism
• Afropolitanism

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 Richard M. Deja

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/92778

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/92778