In the first three chapters I have drawn on a diverse collection of postapartheid novels to illustrate the extent to which Barber's theoretical model of African popular arts and popular culture provides a solution to the aesthetic conundrum (Dhlomo, 1977) that has beset the Africanlanguage literary tradition for the past hundred years. Barber's model is helpful because it focuses on everyday African culture and draws extensively on Bakhtin's (1981) and Lefebvre's (1947) studies of ordinary people and their everyday experiences which is the domain to which African-language literature addresses itself. In these first three chapters I argued that the conditions created for the development of African writing in the past hundred years, and the inability of Eurocentric literary models to excavate the hermeneutic world, particularly of African-language poetics inherited from the oral and the modern worlds, exemplify the nature of the many challenges and issues that exist in current discourses about expressive forms in African languages.

In the next three chapters I intend to apply Barber's model to other artistic productions, particularly black South African television serials. This will allow me to illustrate how the themes of these newer art forms are sourced from earlier oral forms, making them resonate with the popular discourses that animate everyday African culture.

Broader questions relate to how Barber's model of African arts and culture is able to bring the oral and written forms and the elitist and popular genres into a relationship with each other and locate the resultant eclectic culture in its socio-historical context. Barber's paradigm of popular arts and culture goes beyond literary boundaries as it is able to explore a wide range of cultural products, all the while focusing on what matters or what is of interest to people of all classes and views. It explores a range of discourses at the disposal of the producers and recipients which are recreated to articulate the concerns of the people. According to Hannerz (1997: 16) the model considers artists, writers, and academics as engaged in a conversation. It helps reveal how global influences and cultures produce international meanings that flow into or interact with the national culture. In addition, it is capable of explaining how popular culture and popular arts are able to counter internationalising influences by being critical or by being self-appointed guardians of traditional cultures.