Figure 2 - uploaded by Debra Klein
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
This article celebrates and pays tribute to the work of Karin Barber by joining analyses of the history of political and economic conditions with analyses of the relationship between people's lifestyles and aesthetic forms of production. This paper analyzes a Yorùbá alárìnjó (traditional singing, dancing, drumming, and masquerade) performance and a...
Context in source publication
Citations
... "With oil revenues in the hands of the few, the rest of the Nigeria people were left to hold onto and scavenge whatever means of employment came their way… farmers, tailors, market women and men, street hawkers, barbers, business entrepreneurs, auto parts salesmen, students, craftspeople, performing artists -all were driven to the extremes of their creativity during the increasing devaluation, inflation, and desperation of the late nineties" ( Klein 2007 To understand Ìgboro as a concept, it is important to consider what the sub-categories signify. Derivatively, the term "Ọmọ-ìgboro" is a combination of the noun "Ọmọ + ìgboro" (a child/ a person + inner city/ township). ...
... Thus, professionals like musicians (praise singers) and drummers are examples of professionals that are not considered part of the elite or upper class. Klein's (2012) provides an example of the social condition of the "drummers and masquerade dancers from Èrìn-Òsun" whom she describes as "strictly artisans, members of a lower, working class" (130). ...
... Is the appropriation of musical performance space the exclusive right of the ruling elite or the state? Klein (2007) talks about the power dynamics inherent in cultural brokerage; she deploys the example of how Yorùbá artists "perform Africa" in the global market expected from them, 147 My use of "lack of education" in this context of ìgboro discussion does not necessarily establish a lack of competence in literacy culture or practice. Specifically, we think of a Yorùbá primary school or secondary educated person vis-à-vis opportunities and social stratification that is predominantly skewed to favour higher degrees. ...
This study explores how fújì shapes the contemporary Yorùbá urban space in various ways
and vice versa. The dialectic and reflexive dynamics existing between fújì music and the Yorùbá urban lifeworld is one of the recurrent themes in the work. The thesis queries how fújì constitutes the aesthetic of lived experience in the contemporary urban Yorùbá lifeworld. As an interdisciplinary project, it takes fújì lyrics as the text for close reading in literary studies and uses ethnography-generated materials from interviews and participants' observations. The arguments in this work are submerged under two broad strands; they are: “fújì:Reading Dynamism and Complexities of the Everyday” and “Aesthetic Experience and the Agency of Music (fújì) on the Performance of Social Persona”.Fújì challenges working with the assumption that centres on written traditions as limiting and exclusionary. Yorùbá concepts of “ìgboro”, the street, comes alive as part of the main analytical concept in the thesis; it is derived from fújì text and its context of production. My use of ‘ìgboro’ in the work signals a broad range of experiences, synonymous categories, and concepts - referencing the discourse around the lower strata space of the contemporary urban Yorùbá space. Ìgboro discourse is embedded in the discourse of social mobility and stylised masculine performativity in the Yorùbá urban space. The second overarching theme in this work speaks to “Aesthetic Experience and the Agency of Music (fújì) on the Performance of Social Persona”, where fújì’s agency is emphasised as an experience of acting upon listeners.
... There is much scholarship dedicated to the discussion of the concepts and categories of tradition and modernity in African contexts (Klein 2007;Meyer 2015;Ranger 1983Ranger , 1993). Meyer's discussion about why we must be careful about using these concepts uncritically is worth mentioning: scholarship and African institutions still fail to question the very categories of tradition and modernity that were created through colonialism. ...
... I can't even remember when I first heard the Yorùbá axiom, "Our tradition is a very modern tradition." While Yorùbá popular culture producers continue to regenerate and reinvent traditional culture, Kelani and other culture producers are ever-conscious of the potential loss of traditional knowledge and skills in the face of modernity (Barber 2000(Barber , 2007Haynes 2016;Klein 2007Klein , 2012. Thus, Kelani selfconsciously engages in the process of reimagining and recontextualizing traditional culture, grounded in Yorùbá morality, into new aesthetic formations for present and future audiences. ...
... I can't even remember when I first heard the Yorùbá axiom, "Our tradition is a very modern tradition." While Yorùbá popular culture producers continue to regenerate and reinvent traditional culture, Kelani and other culture producers are ever-conscious of the potential loss of traditional knowledge and skills in the face of modernity (Barber 2000(Barber , 2007Haynes 2016;Klein 2007Klein , 2012. Thus, Kelani selfconsciously engages in the process of reimagining and recontextualizing traditional culture, grounded in Yorùbá morality, into new aesthetic formations for present and future audiences. ...
This article opens with the suggestion that the art of world-renowned and critically acclaimed Nigerian filmmaker, Tundé Kelani, is analogous to the work of Òrìṣà Èṣù, supernatural trickster who opens the portal to the spirit realm, the past, and the future. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research with Yorùbá performing artists in Òṣun and Kwara states, this article builds on Yeku’s concept of Alter/Native narrative and Meyer’s discussion of aesthetic formation to argue that Kelani’s innovative evocations of Yorùbá traditional culture can be understood as aesthetic formations of a morality for the present and future. Kelani’s films evoke and create aesthetic formations that reimagine and recontextualize Yorùbá traditional culture into new allegories and myths for contemporary audiences. Illustrating how Kelani’s representations of Yorùbá traditional culture and morality are central to his films’ allegorical impact, moral themes in thirteen Kelani films are identified. Through Èṣù-like storytelling, Kelani’s films reimagine tradition and offer new allegories that challenge postcolonial institutions and awaken our spirit and desire to create a more balanced world.
... In a nut shell, Kelani, while disseminating immediate/cogent messages, also transforms culture in manifold ways. Debra Klein (2012), reiterates the idea that Yoruba cultural creators flaunt "popular cultural forms while celebrating their specificity and creativity" (Klein, 128: 2012). Kelani's films resonate with Karin Barber's theories which reveal the impact of "popular cultural aesthetics" on the African text and how it has emerged from the material conditions of its productions. ...
Tunde Kelani, a prominent Nigerian cinematographer who has come to the limelight since 1982, has nineteen (19) films among several collaborations, which underscore the Nigerian leadership question and national transformation. Scholarly reviews on Kelani exclusively focus on cultural aesthetics, storytelling narratives, political themes, didactics, directing, Mise-en-scène. Notwithstanding, the ornate onomastic resources in his film, Saworoide, has been overlooked, particularly the significance of the masculine impression of some of his characters to Nigerian history. An exception is Abiodun Michael (2016), who highlights the sociocultural value and categorisation of Yoruba names in Kelani’s Saworoide but excluded Yoruba masculine names. The evolving field of men and masculinity in Nigeria also generates scholarly discussions, especially in oral literature, literature and youth culture. However, despite these remarkable strides from these masculinity perspectives, there is a lack of attention to the intersection of masculinity and film in Nigeria, especially in the films of Tunde Kelani. Notably, Kelani creates an equilibrium of gender in his characterisation, designating some male characters with nicknames, roles and traits that conspicuously reinforce traditional masculine features, particularly Kangidi (Adamant), Yangi (Flint), Adaripon (Proud), Roboto (Round), Kanjuko (Rigid), Ageku (Half-dead), Gbegilodo (Logger) and Lagata (Third-party) are at the top. Nicknames in Africa are issued when an individual fails to conform to a natal name. Thus, society or audience would study the natural attributes and suggest a new name befitting the bearer’s traits (Izevbaye, 1981). The analysis would reveal that the names are appellative, allegoric, satirical butts and descriptive of the significance of characterisation to the thematic configurations of the film, especially in epitomising history-preservation, socio-political construction and revolution for a better Nigeria. The film, a parody of military administration in Nigeria, equally exemplifies the corruption, embezzlement, assassination, lawlessness, betrayal of former military leaders and others involved in the political theatre.
... Popular culture has a strategic space both in historical and contemporary realities of a society (Parker, 2011;Storch, 2016). Most research on popular culture has been limited to popular music, religion, lifestyles, fashion and aesthetics (see, for example, Klein, 2012;Levine, 1990;Mantie, 2013;Storch, 2016;Wertheimer, 2006). Beyond these mentioned aspects of culture, popular culture permeates every aspect of human life and social relations. ...
The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria describes children as the heritage of the society because children occupy a special place in societal survival and continuity. Children are esteemed and appreciated. Thus, the embedded culture propagates the essentiality of children, the need for proper socialisation and internalisation to make a responsible being (Omoluabi). Also, children are prioritised above material wealth, and the essentiality of child wellbeing and education is emphasised in aspects of popular culture such as oral poetry, proverbs, local songs and popular music among others. Using extant elements of Yoruba popular culture which have remained dominant, this article contextually examines the value of children among the Yoruba.
Using case studies mostly drawn from Southern Africa and West Africa, this chapter begins by chronicling the colonial histories of radio, television, and film in Africa and how these cultural industries emerged as a critical part of the colonial edifice. The fact that broadcasting and film were the epicenter of the colonial audio-visual cultures continues to pose huge challenges to the initiatives of postcolonial Africa to decolonize its cultural industries. Several centuries of colonization in the continent have culminated in a form of coloniality with its own internal logic and agency. There are challenges for media practicers to think and act in non-colonial ways particularly at the levels of form, content, and worldviews. At the national leadership level, a toxic mix of self-hatred and inferiority complexes has fossilized in the minds of the Black elite who ought to develop policies that confront old and new forms of cultural domination. In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, the apartheid legacy of institutionalized and systemic anti-Black racism remains intact to the extent that decolonizing television and film industries by bringing in black actors and democratizing broadcasting policies has not necessarily transformed post-apartheid audio-visual cultures. In the film industry, for example, the filmmaker and actor Leon Schuster continued to use racist tropes like the ‘black face’ in ways that were prejudicial to the Black people. Leon Schuster appropriated this well-known racist trope to make mega-profits out of what I have dubbed the post-apartheid race-pleasure economy, a sub-economy of South Africa’s white stream economy that is driven by the mockery of Blackness to entertain White audiences and black colonial subjects of the post-apartheid moment. The race-pleasure economy is based on the active reproduction of the color line performed through Black colonial stereotypes, parodies, and caricatures invented by the apartheid racism machinery of various media and cultural industries. The chapter presents West African films of Sembene Ousmane and Nollywood’s Tunde Kelani as gesturing to alternative Afrocentric film traditions for postcolonial Africa. They symbolize decolonial visual cultures for the continent where Blacks are subjects and not objects of history and where Black film celebrates African cultures as a source its codes and conventions. Both Ousmane and Kelani regarded their role as African film makers as that of transforming both their culture industry and their societies through story telling. African film makers were not only supposed to create disruptive narratives to the grand narrative of the Western gaze, but were also supposed to resist the hegemony and dominance of Euro-American cinematography by creating distinct African film genres. Thus, their films were rich in symbolism, song, metaphor, and diverse folkloric narrative devices that resurrected forms of story telling that were steeped in African culture and traditions.
During the 1960s in post-independence Nigeria, Síkírù Àyìndé Barrister (1948-2010) pioneered and coined the term fújì, a Yorùbá genre of popular dance music. While Barrister was a soldier in the Nigerian army in the late 1960s, he transformed wéré/ajísari music, songs performed by and for Muslims during the Ramadan fast, into this new style of dance music. Fújì is characterized by its Islamic-influenced vocal style, Yorùbá praise poetry (oríkì), and driving percussion. Fújì’s popularity hit a peak in Nigeria and on the global stage in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and fújì bands continue to record their music and perform throughout Nigeria and across the globe into the twenty-first century.
This article dispenses with the continuing dialogue on Tunde Kelani, as a filmmaker with a conscience and one who strives at discussing the on-going political quagmires, which have instigated reactionary movements and forces to clamour for an ideal leadership suitable for the appropriate governing of Nigeria. Tunde Kelani’s major works are politically committed and illustrate contemporary issues and politics as well as critique the inevitable conundrum of corruption. In this paper there is an affirmation that with Kelani’s adaptation of Hubert Ogunde’s Yoruba Ronu, the imaginative communication in the context of dance has become a means for him to examine issues with the aid of the visual elements of film. Dance is employed in addressing a faulty political system in Tunde Kelani’s adaptation, Yoruba E Ronu. With music, song, drama, dialogue, mime and poetry and the artistry of dance on screen, Kelani’s postcolonial logic is further buttressed in his tenacity as an auteur filmmaker who is highly concerned about the very nature and consequences of Nigeria’s ossified political system.
Keywords: Tunde Kelani, Hubert Ogunde, Yoruba Ronu, Dance, Film, Yoruba E Ronu, Auteurism, Cinema of conscience
