The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing Through Music and the Arts
Gregory Barz and Judah Cohen
Abstract
This book enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across Africa by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. Chapters investigate and engage the social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa to the wider world, the text here brings int ... More
This book enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across Africa by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. Chapters investigate and engage the social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa to the wider world, the text here brings intimate, inspiring portraits of the performers, artists, communities, and organizations that have shared here their insights and the sense they have made of their lives and actions from deep within this devastating epidemic. Covering the wide expanse of the African continent, the chapters include explorations of, for example, the use of music to cope with AIDS; the relationship between music, HIV/AIDS, and social change; visual approaches to HIV literacy; radio and television as tools for “edutainment”; several individual artists’ confrontations with HIV/AIDS; various performance groups’ response to the epidemic; combating HIV/AIDS with local cultural performance; and more. Source material, such as song lyrics and interviews, weaves throughout the collection, which is a nuanced and profoundly affective portrayal of the intricate relationship between HIV/AIDS and the arts in Africa.
Keywords:
music,
Africa,
HIV/AIDS,
creative expression,
cultural performance,
artists,
edutainment,
social change,
arts
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199744473 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199744473.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Gregory Barz, editor
Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Vanderbilt University
Judah Cohen, editor
Professor of Jewish Culture, Indiana University
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