Histoiry, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (USA)
EURIAS Laureate
Research project : " Tropical Cowboys : Youth, Popular Culture and Masculinity in Colonial Kinshasa "
In the 1950s, a certain idea of the (American) "West" swept across Kinshasa’s African townships like wild fire. It influenced youth socialization, the construction of masculinities, the emergence of popular cultures, and even political developments in Congo.
During the tumultuous decade of Congo’s decolonization, several bands of youth, which called themselves Bills (as in Buffalo Bill, their eponymous hero), formed in most townships in Kinshasa, especially in the far-flung fringes of the sprawling capital. They had one thing in common, their fascination with the cowboy movie genre, which had become the main staples in makeshift movie parlors across Kinshasa’s townships. Classic scenes of Indian attacks, turf battles among frontiersmen, ribald repartees, bawdy jokes, rambunctious female characters who nonetheless fall prey to lewd men, stories of betrayal and bravados, villains and heroes battling it out in the lawless frontier; those were some of the scenes that brewed indiscipline in the minds of those young viewers and prompted them to reenact in the tropics the hustle and bustle of the American West.
One of my main objectives with this project is to demonstrate that the study of popular cultures can illuminate how systemic social changes take place, how mass cultures are invested with a political capital, and how they can ultimately be co-opted by the state to help maintain the political and social status quo. My project is also rooted on the theoretical assumptions that masculinity is a social, normative, and multifarious construct that has enabled societies to create and police the boundaries between different gendered and generational spaces.