Cultured states : youth, gender, and modern style in 1960s Dar es Salaam

Bibliographic Information

Cultured states : youth, gender, and modern style in 1960s Dar es Salaam

Andrew Ivaska

Duke University Press, 2011

  • : pbk

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Note

Bibliography: p. [253]-269

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Cultured States is a vivid account of the intersections of postcolonial state power, the cultural politics of youth and gender, and global visions of modern style in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during the 1960s and early 1970s. Andrew Ivaska describes a cosmopolitan East African capital rocked by debates over youth culture, national cultural policy, the rumored sexual escapades of the postcolonial elite, the content of university education, leftist activism, and the reform of colonial-era marriage laws. If young Tanzanians saw themselves as full-fledged participants in modern global culture, their understandings of the modern conflicted with that of a state launching "decency campaigns" banning cultural forms such as soul music, miniskirts, wigs, and bell-bottoms. Promoted by the political elite as a radical break from the colonial order, these campaigns nonetheless contained strong echoes of colonial assumptions about culture, tradition, and African engagements with the modern city. Exploring the ambivalence over the modern at the heart of these contests, Ivaska uses them as lenses through which to analyze struggles around gender relations and sexual politics, youth and masculinity, and the competition for material resources in a Dar es Salaam in rapid flux. Cultured States is a major contribution to understandings of urban cultural politics; national political culture; social struggles around gender, generation, and wealth; and the transnational dimensions of postcolonial histories too often conceived within national frames.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Postcolonial Public Culture in Sixties Times 1 1. National Culture and Its Others in a Cosmopolitan Capital 37 2. "The Age of Minis": Secretaries, City Girls, and Masculinity Downtown 86 3. Of Students, 'Nizers, and Comrades: Youth, Internationalism, and the University College, Dar es Salaam 124 4. "Marriage Goes Metric": Negotiating Gender, Generation, and Wealth in a Changing Capital 166 Conclusion 206 Notes 219 Bibliography 253 Index 271

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