Research Interest
I am interested in exploring the intersection of political culture and everyday aesthetics, with particular attention to how these dynamics shape participatory imaginaries and contest public space in postcolonial Africa. My work seeks to understand how people creatively engage with political structures and cultural narratives through aesthetic forms—such as performance, literature, and digital culture—to assert agency, negotiate power, and imagine alternative futures.
Abstract:
The narrative surrounding the University Theatre for Development movement (University TfD) in “post-socialist Tanzania” presents a much more complicated but compelling story of how popular theatre forms respond to and deconstruct official/dominant narratives in nation-building projects in Africa. Frameworks of resistance, appropriation, and co-option do not fully capture the complexity of power dynamics on the way actors of nation-building in "post-socialist Tanzania" relate and engage in the University TfD. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that emphasises the cultural, historical, and political recontextualisation of the University TfD, this project interrogates the nature of power relations between actors of nation-building from below within University TfD. The project's goal is to decentre state narratives which often single out and elevate the state and political elites in the success story of nation-building and boards in narratives of non-state actors and their contributions in the success story of nation-building.