The chapters in this collection derive from a conference held at Birkbeck College and the School of Oriental and African Studies in January 1991, under the auspices of the Centre of African Studies, University of London and the Department of African Languages and Cultures, SOAS. The impetus for the conference emerged from a growing sense of convergence between African, American and European scholars of African popular culture, history, music, oral literature and political anthropology, on the nexus between popular expression and power relations.

In examining that nexus the participants emphasised differing contexts and interpretations both of the question of power and of marginality. Assumptions differed among participants about the implications of the notion of power as it was to be deployed in our discussions. Aware of the definitional and connotational complexities of the term (see, for example, Fardon 1985, introduction and essays by others therein) participants tended to refer to the ability or potential of one party to be able to influence or affect the actions, words, and occasionally, beliefs and emotions of another. In deploying the term, however, it related sometimes to the capacities of constitutional authority in government, sometimes to the capacity of an individual over other individuals and sometimes to the relation between cultural forms as dominant and dominated.