Swahili Newspaper Poetry: Articulating Politics in Postsocialist Tanzania

Kelley AskewSpeaker: Kelly Askew
Topic: “Swahili Newspaper Poetry: Articulating Politics in Postsocialist Tanzania”
Date: Thursday, January 23, 2014
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Place: Room 201 International Center

Kelly M. Askew is founding Director of the African Studies Center and Associate Professor in the departments of Anthropology and Afroamerican/African Studies at the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in Music and Anthropology from Yale University (1988) and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University (1997). Her publications include two edited volumes, African Postsocialisms (co-edited with M. Anne Pitcher, Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (co-edited with Richard R. Wilk, Blackwell Publishers, 2002), articles on topics ranging from nationalism to gender relations to Hollywood film production, and the book Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Production in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 2002), a finalist for the 2003 African Studies Association Herskovits Award for best scholarly work on Africa.

In addition to her research in East Africa on performance, nationalism, media, postsocialism, and the privatization of property rights, Dr. Askew has produced several ethnographic films. She co-produced a four-part video documentary series, Rhythms from Africa (Tomas Film/Acacia Productions, 2004), which explores music in South Africa and in Zanzibar, and a full-length feature documentary film Poetry in Motion: 100 Years of Zanzibar’s Nadi Ikhwan Safaa (Jahazi Media, 2012) on the history of Zanzibar’s oldest taarab orchestra. Most recently, she completed The Chairman and the Lions (2012), a film documenting the multiple challenges facing a Maasai village, which won 1st Prize at the 2013 ETNOFilm Festival of Ethnographic Film (Croatia) and the Special Jury Award at the 2013 Zanzibar International Film Festival (Tanzania).