Essay Collections and Papers

Performing Community: Essays on Ugandan Oral Folklore (Photo and design: Adrian Nielsen and Emma Johannessen)

Performing Change: Identity, Ownership and Tradition in Ugandan Oral Culture (Photo and design: Adrian Nielsen and Emma Johannessen)

So far the Folklore project has published two collections of essays, and a third is forthcoming.

Performing Community: Essays on Ugandan Oral Culture

 The project's first collection of essays is Performing Community: Essays on Ugandan Oral Culture (eds. Dominica Dipio, Lene Johannessen and Stuart Sillars, Oslo: Novus, 2009). The collection gathers research findings from the first phase of the project, presented at the “Project Symposium” at Makerere University in January of 2008. The essays are representative of the methodological and theoretical scope of the project, and gesture toward the various areas of emphasis that emerge from the project, and which are developed further in the second publication (see below). Performing Community was launched in Bergen in November 2008.

Book Description: Ugandan culture is rich in traditions of oral performance, celebrating rituals of belonging, transformation and resolution. The essays in this book, produced as the first fruits of a collaboration with the University of Bergen, explore the range of these forms. They seek not only to describe and record, but to analyse the various forms in the ways that they address the problems and challenges of the modern state.

Varied in approach and technique, they offer an insistent and reflective probing into the relations between individual and community, tradition and modernity, and African and western outlooks. Together, the volume also contributes to the changing study of oral culture, raising issues that are applicable to oracy within cultures of many kinds, throughout the world. Through its detailed focus on specific oral forms, Performing Community consequently achieves a far greater relevance in the study of oracy, and its engagement with the pressing needs of the modern world.

Read review in The independent  here

Performing Change: Identity, Ownership and Tradition in Ugandan Oral Culture

The second essay collection, following on from the first, is Performing Change: Identity, Ownership and Tradition in Ugandan Oral Culture (eds. Dominica Dipio, Lene Johannessen, Stuart Sillars, Oslo: Novus, 2009). The book was launched at Makerere University in January 2010, and was received with as much interest as the first.

Book description: How do oral forms that have existed for generations reinvent themselves to remain valid in a high-tech world, in which communication is affected through cellphone and email? Who owns a song that has grown over decades, in and through the voices of a community? And what are the intellectual copyrights of a street performer when his act is posted on YouTube? These are some of the questions raised by the authors of this, the second collection of essays produced by scholars from Makerere University, as part of a continuing research project with the University of Bergen.

Other writers explore issues of gender, in forms such as marriage songs and praise poetry, or the appropriation of stories of heroic women to offer role models to young women making their way in competitive fields of activity in the new African economy. In addressing these and other issues, the writers in this collection present and preserve aspects of an oral culture of great richness and diversity, showing its continuity in the fact of the threats, and the opportunities, of unprecedented social change.

Performing Change was presented in conjunction with the symposium at Makerere in January 2010 where working papers for the third and forthcoming collection were presented. Full coverage of this event, as well as an overview of the research presented during the two-day workshop can be read here

Way forward:

The team of researchers will moreover edit the research papers that develop from the sub-projects into a book(s) or online publications; develop study material in folklore for the various levels of education in Uganda; archive research done in folklore in Uganda and disseminate them through effective media; and develop and advance theories in the area of folklores on the basis of the data collected.