Séance du 14 mars 2022, de 14h30 à 16h30
Bâtiment EHESS-Condorcet, salle gradinée, 1er étage, 2 cours des humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers
– Dina Ligaga (Wits University)
Mapping the politics of everyday life in Kenya through radio drama
Abstract
The idea of everyday life in this paper stems from the content of the radio plays I engage with. These are plays that dwell on themes of mostly marriage, life, sex, and romance, while their settings are almost always the domestic space. As I hope to show, the plays in their narrativization of everyday life, deal with everyday realities of life. This article hopes to highlight these engagements and nuances of radio drama, while locating the radio plays within the larger contextual landscape and soundscape of Kenya. Methodologically, the analyses focus semiotically on the plays’ engagements with sounds and references, while also more broadly looks at the contextual politics within which the plays are set. In the background to the study is a constant examination of the broadcasting world, and what the broader institutional decisions made about programmes like Radio Theatre (which is the show upon which all the plays are drawn) meant for the products that were produced time and space. These variations in themes and emphases are products of time as well as the politics of the day.