Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

The Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy offers international perspectives on a wide range of issues in cultural management and cultural policy research and practice. Intangible cultural heritage refers to the practices, expressions, skills, knowledge, and cultural spaces that cultural communities use to represent, share, and pass down cultural identities. This issue explores the sustainability of intangible cultural heritage, increasingly at risk from contemporary, commercial, and political forces. With special focus on performing arts, the contributors cover issues pertaining to the intangible past including policies, management practices, juxtapositions of innovation and tradition, cultural integrity, cultural value, and relevant ethical questions.