Pandemic Poetics: Analysing the Impact of the Covid-19 Experience on the Dar es Salaam Art Scene through Poetic Inquiry

Abstract (English)

I began my doctoral journey in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world not only seemed out of order, but actually was, which is also true for the African cultural economy. This paper analyses how individual artists and what I call ‘exogenous translocal cultural diplomacy organisations’ in Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam, have been affected by the pandemic. Drawing on concepts of new area studies (Derichs, Heryanto, and Abraham 2020; Freitag and von Oppen 2010; Houben and Rehbein 2010), critical ethnography (Nyamnjoh 2012; Wasamba 2015) and arts-based research (Faulkner 2020; Leavy 2019; Owton 2017) as well as on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2023, this paper presents bilingual and trilingual collective participant-voiced poems that use poetic inquiry to negotiate the effects of the pandemic at individual and institutional levels.

The findings indicate that artists, cultural workers and organisations such as the Chinese Confucius Institute and the German Goethe Institute, experienced devastating effects, some of which still affected the local arts community in 2023. The poetic texts presented in this paper respond to the call for epistemic transformation by showing how a more creative, artistically inspired and transdisciplinary approach, combined with the knowledge of a local language, can decolonise ethnographic fieldwork.

It shows that by using poetic inquiry, the artist-researcher can not only convey a collective emotional experience, but also allow for the existence of identities that go beyond conventional academic roles. Furthermore, it follows the call of postmodern ethnography to decentralise the monological voice of the author and to create polyphonic texts. By bridging the divide between academia and the arts, it also presents alternative ways of knowledge production.