The Zimdancehall Revolution

<p>Zimdancehall is a musical movement in Zimbabwe that has grown significantly since 2010. The <i>Zimdancehall Revolution</i> brings together critical essays on various aspects of Zimdancehall culture by scholars from diverse disciplines. Traditionally music critics and senior academics have not taken Zimdancehall seriously regarding it as vulgar transient bubble gum lacking depth and in short a fad. There were also allegations that the lyrics influenced factionalism incited violence and glorified drug use and unbridled promiscuity among the youth. This book affords this movement the protracted intellectual engagement that it deserves and argues that Zimdancehall is more than just a musical genre but an everyday culture a way of life. The genre���s close association with the ghetto is telling and enables critics to look at it as a social movement a revolution or a raw petulant and raging disturbance of peace by those who live their lives on the margins. Itis thus a violent irruption onto the public space by marginalised young people whose presence as artistes creating art from the margins simultaneously as victims and agents circulating in a geography that escapes the limits of nationalist ideological and physical territory in a way subverts communitarian prescriptions and allows young people entry into the world albeit in a painful tumultuous and violent way. The essays range from the mapping of the genre���s historical development to theoretical interventions in understanding the genre and its relationship with various aspects of the Zimbabwean society like politics gender religion language dance cultural values and other genres.</p>