Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 From Primitive to Popular Culture: Why Kant Never Made It to Africa
- Part One Politics of Culture in Habitual Customs and Practices
- Part Two Politics of Culture in Popular Representations: Films and Performances
- 7 Reclaiming the Past or Assimilationist Rebellion? Transforming the Self in Contemporary American Cinema
- 8 Neither Bold nor Beautiful: Investigating the Impact of Western Soap Operas on Kenya
- 9 The Lions in the Jungle: Representations of Africa and Africans in American Cinema
- 10 Sexuality in Caribbean Performance: Homoeroticism and the African Body in Trinidad
- 11 Family Health Awareness in Popular Yorùbá Arts
- Part Three Politics of Culture in Popular Texts
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
8 - Neither Bold nor Beautiful: Investigating the Impact of Western Soap Operas on Kenya
from Part Two - Politics of Culture in Popular Representations: Films and Performances
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 From Primitive to Popular Culture: Why Kant Never Made It to Africa
- Part One Politics of Culture in Habitual Customs and Practices
- Part Two Politics of Culture in Popular Representations: Films and Performances
- 7 Reclaiming the Past or Assimilationist Rebellion? Transforming the Self in Contemporary American Cinema
- 8 Neither Bold nor Beautiful: Investigating the Impact of Western Soap Operas on Kenya
- 9 The Lions in the Jungle: Representations of Africa and Africans in American Cinema
- 10 Sexuality in Caribbean Performance: Homoeroticism and the African Body in Trinidad
- 11 Family Health Awareness in Popular Yorùbá Arts
- Part Three Politics of Culture in Popular Texts
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Summary
Introduction
In this chapter, I treat The Bold and the Beautiful as a device, as a social force or agent of change—an apparatus that reorganizes domestic and public space, introduces new tastes and nuances, and provides possibilities of rearranging family relations, redefining love, and reorienting gender relations in societies. This soap is an example of a device that the West uses to stir up social change in the South, whether intentionally or unintentionally. I believe that the discussion of this soap opens up the discursive spaces in which various taboo subjects such as love and sex, marriage and divorce, gender equality and equity, class, and power in Kenya can be discussed. This soap represents alternative areas in which debates on key social and moral questions regarding Western influence in Africa can be held, using Kenya as a case study. I demonstrate that soaps such as The Bold and the Beautiful have contributed extensively to the founding of democratic public and private spheres while undermining local cultural traits. Soaps elicit creative tension, inscribing certain behavior patterns, ideas, and values in the minds of the viewers while simultaneously critiquing discourses of the “normal” in societal perceptions of love and sexuality, marriage and divorce, and gender relations in general. My investigations and my conversations with a cross-section of Kenyans with regard to their viewing of The Bold and the Beautiful revealed that the soap has significantly impacted on Kenya's social and cultural spaces.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Africans and the Politics of Popular Culture , pp. 185 - 213Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009