This book engages with contemporary cultural production in Africa, focusing on theatre in Sierra Leone as main case study. The author provides coverage of, and insights into, such themes as cultural globalisation, commodification, the global creative economy, culture and development, international relations and contemporary cultural production in Sierra Leone within the context of local and global flows of people, media, images, technologies, finance and ideas. Combining the analysis of theatre in Sierra Leone and its aesthetics with its policy, structural and institutional context, this book highlights in much detail and nuance the interconnectedness between the micro- and the macro-levels of cultural production, between the local and the global, and between aesthetics, politics, policy, governance structures and institutions. This book links the particular findings from the author’s fieldwork to larger issues of contemporary local cultural production within the context of globalisation, commodification and decolonisation; adds a postcolonial perspective to existing theories and approaches to cultural production, management and policy, which is still largely missing from the existing discourse; and also contributes to addressing the gap in the knowledge about the context of contemporary cultural productions in diverse African contexts. This book will be particularly useful for both theatre scholars with an interest in the political economy of theatre and, more broadly, those seeking to understand the nuanced challenges and opportunities faced by policymakers, artists and arts managers to embrace the cultural and creative industries in this context. It also offers excellent insights for policymakers who wish to improve their understanding and interventions beyond superficial ‘best practice’ snippets and simplified ‘success stories’.

Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted, and been constituted by, global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state-of-the-art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of "black America" on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada. Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the "New South Africa." They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls' fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations. Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

African dance is discussed here in its global as well as local contexts as a powerful vehicle of aesthetic and cultural exchange and influence.

This book presents critical perspectives on the impacts of globalization in Africa with particular reference to the crisis of development and governance, the crisis of peace and security, and the environmental crisis. It explores both global and local factors that exacerbate these crises, and seeks solutions to these challenges. With a strong slant on African experience and perspectives, the book reveals that globalization has presented Africa with both challenges and opportunities for governance and existence in an increasingly inter-connected planet.

What is the work of film in the age of transnational production? To answer that question, Randall Halle focuses on the film industry of Germany, one of Europe's largest film markets and one of the world's largest film-producing nations. In the 1990s Germany experienced an extreme transition from a state-subsidized mode of film production that was free of anxious concerns about profit and audience entertainment to a mode dominated by private interest and big capital. At the same time, the European Union began actively drawing together the national markets of Germany and other European nations, sublating their individual significances into a synergistic whole. This book studies these changes broadly, but also focuses on the transformations in their particular national context. It balances film politics and film aesthetics, tracing transformations in financing along with analyses of particular films to describe the effects on the film object itself. Halle concludes that we witness currently the emergence of a new transnational aesthetic, a fundamental shift in cultural production with ramifications for communal identifications, state cohesion, and national economies.

Against a background of rapid technological change, the impact of global communication on national cultures and societies has become a dynamic area of critical enquiry. International Communication and Globalization offers a timely overview of the rapidly expanding area of media and communication studies. Leading contributors offer a range of perspectives on the relationship between the process of globalization and international communication. Individual chapters examine the impact of market relations, deregulation and technology of Third World countries, as well as the ethics of the global communications industry. International Communication and Globalization makes an important intervention in

′This volume of one of the most comprehensive in the field. Its three themes are critical for the study of culture and globalization with its condensation of space, time and memory. Exploring the intersection between these three processes, the essays are learned, deeply researched and insightful, and the comparative range is impressive. The volume is certain to become a standard reference text for scholars and the general reader alike′ - Professor Stuart Hall, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, The Open University Heritage, memory and identity are closely connected keywords of our time, each endowed with considerable rhetorical power. Different human groups define certain objects and practices as ′heritage′; they envision heritage to reflect some form of collective memory, either lived or imagined; and they combine both to construct cultural identities. Today, the three terms raise conjoined issues of practice, policy and politics in an increasingly globalized world. Bringing together a truly global range of scholars, this volume explores heritage, memory and identity through a diverse set of subjects, including heritage sites, practices of memorialization, museums, sites of contestation, and human rights.

Cultural governance is currently regarded as a transversal element of public policy in Europe. This book brings together academics and policy practitioners to provide new insights into the field, exploring its contemporary dynamics, dilemmas and challenges. In light of the Cyprus Presidency in 2026, the authors reflect on the breadth and boundaries of cultural governance in a European perspective, the role of international institutions, such as UNESCO and the EU, and the frameworks and dilemmas of cultural governance as a dedicated practice. Particular attention is given to the relationship between culture and human creativity, to cultural rights and to climate breakdown, placing cultural governance at the heart of integrated public policy. As a key contribution that enriches the field of cultural policy, this book is essential reading for academics and offers guidance for concerted action for policymakers and legislators.

This work sets forth the argument that in the age of (neoliberal) globalization, black people around the world are ever-so slowly becoming “African-Americanized”. They are integrated and embourgeoised in the racial-class dialectic of black America by the material and ideological influences of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism as promulgated throughout the diaspora by two social class language games of the black American community: the black underclass (Hip-Hop culture), speaking for and representing black youth practical consciousness; and black American charismatic liberal/conservative bourgeois Protestant preachers like TD Jakes, Creflo Dollar, etc., speaking for and representing the black bourgeois (educated) professional and working classes. Although on the surface the practical consciousness and language of the two social class language games appear to diametrically oppose one another, the authors argue, given the two groups’ material wealth within the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism of corporate (neoliberal) America, they do not. Both groups have the same underlying practical consciousness, subjects/agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The divergences, where they exist, are due to their interpellation, embourgeoisement, and differentiation via different ideological apparatuses of the society: church and education, i.e., schools, for the latter; and prisons, the streets, and athletic and entertainment industries for the former. Contemporarily, in the age of globalization and neoliberalism, both groups have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination in black neoliberal America, and are antagonistically, converging the practical consciousness of the black or African diaspora towards their respective social class language games. We are suggesting that the socialization of other black people in the diaspora ought to be examined against and within the dialectical backdrop of this class power dynamic and the cultural and religious heritages of the black American people responsible for this phenomenon or process of convergence we are referring to as the “African-Americanization” of the black diaspora.

Globalization: The Reader addresses the big issues: communications and global media, political economy, cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity, new technologies, tourism, beliefs, and identity.