Abstract
This chapter presents a historical crossroads. It defines ‘colonial youth’ and ‘popular culture’ at the point of African and European engagement to ask what youth saw as the trends, issues, and cultural contexts that mattered to them. Here, Pan-African theory frames a Weberian view of popular culture to look at the masses versus the elite as applied to Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’ known as cultural aspects that provide access to power and prestige within the dominant society. Selective group experiences are presented to extrapolate general trends and differences across the continent. Colonial youth engaged as colonized and resistor representative of a cross-section of African societies’ negotiated experiences within the realities of European colonization. This chapter describes colonial youth’s changing times and how they defined popular culture through lived experiences.
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Abidogun, J.M. (2018). Youth and Popular Culture in Colonial Africa. In: Shanguhyia, M., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59426-6_20
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