Join Brad Weiss for a brownbag workshop and lecture on ethnography and popular culture in Africa. Weiss will discuss his forthcoming book, Street Dreams and Hip-Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in Urban Tanzania. The book explores the contemporary fluorescence of popular culture as an array of practices through which Tanzanians establish their place in an explicitly global and spectacular flow of images, objects, and persons. In the modes of fantasy that constitute their popular culture -- exemplified by such micro-institutions as kinyozi (small barbershops that serve as hubs for the circulation of a wide variety of media, consumer goods, and neighborhood gossip) -- urban Tanzanians imaginatively articulate and act upon a world remade.
Brad Weiss is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include the ethnography of Africa, the anthropology of the body, and community forms. He has conducted fieldwork in Tanzania for 20 years and is the author of two books and numerous articles on social and cultural transformation in East Africa. Weiss also serves as executive editor of the Journal of Religion in Africa.
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