Despite the passage of relatively uniform copyright legislation throughout East Africa and the formation of regional organizations meant to further standardize these laws, the protection of musical works in East African creative industries has varied significantly within and between Tanzania and Kenya. While enforcement remains weak throughout…[Read more]

This chapter describes a sonorous production of Islamic communitarian privacy in the public spaces of Kenya’s major coastal city. As a palpable alternative to a liberal-democratic social imaginary, this communitarian privacy bears a powerful resonance for struggles over notions of coastal Muslim citizenship in Kenya.

Sound and space—however one defines these terms—are phenomenologically and ontologically intertwined.

The Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the…[Read more]