In 2007, the government agency BCA was transformed into an executive agency TaSUBa. TaSUBa is expected to be more business-oriented, to deliver public services in a more effective and efficient manner. But the transformation process has brought contradictory trends in governance to the surface. In Digital Drama, I reinterpret anthropologist Victor Turner‘s concept of liminality to explain these changes. Rather than being a state of betwixt and between, neither here nor there, I look at liminality as a state of being both here and there, then and now. It is a state of between where cultural elements from the past and the present, local and foreign, coexist. I introduce the term state of creolization to analyze this cultural hybridity in relation to global asymmetries and center-periphery relations, thus building on the work of social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz. Liminality and state of creolization are key concepts throughout Digital Drama. Here you can see some visual expressions of the mixed coexistence of temporally and spatially distributed cultural phenomena discussed in the book.
Photo 1: New promotional poster placed at the TaSUBa entrance
Photo 2: Discarded old entrance sign with government identity
Photo 3: New official sign marking the entrance of the future
Photo 4: New web site for TaSUBa at www.tasuba.ac.tz
Photo 5: Temporarily coexisting with old web site for BCA at www.sanaabagamoyo.com
Photo 6: Web site for TaSUBa Theatre at https://tasubatheatre.weebly.com/ with yet another identity
Photo 7: Liminality of traditional culture in a modern setting
Photo 8: Creolization through Pan-Africanism and cosmopolitanism
This material is an accompaniment to Digital Drama: Teaching and Learning Art and Media in Tanzania.