This book explores culture, memory, and creativity in acting and plays in Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, semi-nomadic Tuareg society in northern Mali. Rasmussen analyzes how Tuareg actors negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities, caught historically and currently between political violence and precarious peace.

• Cover
• Persons of Courage and Renown
• Persons of Courage and Renown: Tuareg Actors, Acting, Plays, and Cultural Memory in Northern Mali
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Arrivals, Departures, and Returns
  • Orientations: Remoteness, Connections, Dispersals, and Gatherings
  • Acting, Performance, and Culture: Preliminary Remarks
  • Organization of the Book
  • Notes
• Part I: The Actors, Verbal Arts, and Performance
  • Chapter 1
    • General Background on the Tuareg, the Kel Adagh, and the Town and Region of Kidal
      • The Town of Kidal
      • “When I Compose, This Gives Me the Desire to Live”: Atakor’s Story
      • Performance Venues, Media, and Cultural, Social, and Political Life in and around Kidal
      • Sum-Up of Preliminary Insights
  • Chapter 2
    • Situating Acting and Creativity in Culture, Place, and Memory
      • Creative Inspiration to Perform in the Space of Essuf/Tenere
      • Creativity as Emergent and Subjective
      • Sum-Up
      • Note
  • Chapter 3
    • The Poetics and Politics of Aesthetic Style and Genre and the Ibaraden Actors
      • Joking by Mahmoudan, the Witty Tailor
      • A Teachable Moment during a Visit and Saidi’s Brief Tale
      • Historical Perspectives on Performing Arts
      • Continuities, Changes, and Conflicts in Aesthetic Styles and in SocioPolitical Life
      • Actors’ Art as Resistance, Negotiation, Mediation, and Accommodation
      • Implications for Memory in Acting
      • Notes
  • Chapter 4
    • Acting and Cultural Translation
      • Broader Issues of the “Traditional,” the “Modern,” the Local, National, and Global in Performance
      • Promoting the Miss Kidal Beauty Contest
      • Evaluating Old and New Plays
      • Performance and Space
      • The Fusion of Ibaraden and Troubadour Imagery in Modern Acting and Issues of Power
      • Endangered but Resilient Acting and Performance: What Next?
• Part II: The Plays
  • Chapter 5
    • Rural-Urban and Nomadic-Sedentarized Encounters
      • “AIDS Exists”
      • The Wider Context
      • Implications: Selective Cultural Memory
  • Chapter 6
    • Disputed Gender, Relations between the Sexes, and Embodied Performance
      • The Urban Body and Body Politics in Media and Performance
      • Gender and Performance in Historical and Comparative Perspective
      • Note
  • Chapter 7
    • Youths and Elders
      • Bundles of Contradictions: Cultural Knowledge, Memory, and Authorship in Creative Dynamics between the Generations
      • Age in Tuareg Performance: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
      • Youths, Elders, and Intergenerational Social Relationships
  • Chapter 8
    • Religious Reflections and Social Dissonance
      • Sacred Spaces and Times
      • Additional Verbal Art Representations of the Coming of Islam, the Kel Essouk, and Essouk-Taddamekka
      • De-Sacralized Spaces and Times
      • Note
  • Conclusions
    • An Ethnographic Postscript
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • About the Author