Popular Anxieties, Popular Expressions: An Introduction

Abstract

This chapter outlines the key objectives of the book. It contextualizes the newspaper column Whispers and introduces its writer Wahome Mutahi. The chapter argues that Mutahi’s writing is informed by a broader cultural and political aesthetic particularly keen on expanding the ‘bounds of the expressible’ through a number of popular and sometimes ‘subversive’ narrative forms. It explores his other literary endeavours such as novels and theatre productions and explains how these too informed his newspaper fiction. The fundamental argument this chapter makes is that at a time when the state had all but monopolized public sites of popular expression in the country, Whispers kept the Kenyan press porous, opening up spaces for the discussion of social and political issues that could only be ‘whispered’. This chapter also provides the structure of the book.

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49097-7_10