Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Hauke Dorsch
(Universitaet Mainz)
Ibrahima Wane (Cheikh Anta Diop University)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Arts and Culture
- Location:
- Chrystal McMillan, Seminar Room 2
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The transatlantic circulation of music is an important means for identity construction in both Africa and the Americas. The constant re-emergence of the public debate on this musical exchange, interpreting it as either break with tradition, or return to the source, is the subject of this panel.
Long Abstract:
Since the early 20th Century, popular music from the Americas is present in many African cities. African musicians used and use it as source of inspiration and performed Cuban, Jamaican, US American and other songs. Some observers criticized the effects of this musical encounter in Africa as a rupture with tradition, as a sign of lacking pride in and loss of knowledge of local musical genres. Only recently, academics and other observers preferred to celebrate it as self-conscious appropriation or nostrification, appreciating the change, but still claiming a clear-cut division between African and Western genres. Others however, among them many African urban musicians, offered a different interpretation stressing the African 'roots' of many so-called occidental popular music genres, focusing on connections rather that disruptions. Thus, African musicians claimed African origins of the rumba, the blues, reggae, rap, or house music. Interestingly, with the arrival of each new style these debates return.
This panel invites scholars to discuss how they address the tension between the different claims of either a clear-cut division or else an ongoing transatlantic hybridization of musical styles. We want to ask why this claim of transatlantic musical 'kinship' is so important to the actors involved. How do we address local claims of 'ownership' of global genres? How do we respond to competing claims of ownership of music? Should scholars contribute to a dialogue on origins, which is obviously so important to many actors?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The Brazilian "choro" is the national music of Brazil. It developed in the city parks of Rio de Janeiro during the 1800s.. The music is a hybridization of African-based rhythms and European musical forms. The origin included the purchase of Western African slaves for Brazilian rice plantations.
Paper long abstract:
The Brazilian "choro" is the national music of Brazil. It is a hybridization of African rhythms and European forms. Rice plantation owners from Brazil bought slaves from western Africa, and taught them how to play guitar. The owners would pride themselves on having the best "slave bands". Upon learning of the slave owners' trips to the big cities to invest their fortunes, the slaves, in turn, started migrating to the big cities for better jobs. It is in Rio de Janeiro where the "choro" music began to take root in the 1800s. The music and musicians traversed from the plantations to the cities and through upper and lower class societies.
Due to the development of a mixed-race society in Brazil, those of African descent suffered more discrimination. Perhaps the most significant composer and musician, Pixinguinha, was an African-Brazilian. He and his group, the Oito Batutas, suffered discrimination just to play their native music for their fellow countrymen. In fact, they were fighting to promote their future national music style, one that was truly Brazilian, and that also included the hybridization of their African rhythmical roots. In the year 2000, Brazilian President Cardosa proclaimed April 23 (Pixinguinha's birthday) as the National Day of Choro.
This presentation will include a powerpoint presentation and one compact disc selection of this author, performing a significant "choro" along with guitar.
Paper short abstract:
Recent African music genres go beyond hybridization in their eclectic way of fusing different influences and become a potential force of innovation. They are reversing established notions of transatlantic artistic relations and thus reconfiguring Africa's role, from 'roots' to role model.
Paper long abstract:
The attention towards 'hybrid' musical styles and their recognition as research objects in the late 1990s was an important step for anthropology and similar fields. In the case of African hip hop for example, there is an overwhelming number of works investigating its hybridization or appropriation in several parts of the continent.
My paper advocates the exploration of even more recent genres of African popular music. Based on examples from my field research in Lagos between 2015 and 2018, I would like to show that the way contemporary Nigerian musicians deal with their influences is characterized by a postmodern eclecticism that goes far beyond such 'hybrid' styles mentioned above. They make use of a multitude of rhythms, melodies, sounds and quotes from different spatial and temporal contexts, thus creating new styles, such as the contemporary 'afrobeats' genre. With this multitude of influences, the individual origins of these often fade into the background, for example the discussion about African roots of American genres like hip hop.
Nevertheless, exchange with 'the West' remains one of the most important spheres of influence for West African musicians, but under different conditions: Whereas in the past two or three decades, new music was mostly imported, the emphasis is now on export, sparking new discourses, in which African elements of new genres are not just historic 'roots' - they are the present and potential future, innovating 'Western' music, which brings about new aspirations and expectations, and the potential to renegotiate power in a globalized music market.
Paper short abstract:
A bluesman and a Congolese musician create an African chronotope on the backdrop of transcultural London, challenging the history of blues as well as the idea of music ownership. The paper engages in the music encounter through audiovisual media, relating this discourse to current academic views.
Paper long abstract:
The paper will reflect on a specific case study wherein an African-American bluesman and a Congolese musician compose and record from scratch an original album in three days in a squatted studio in London. A shared sense of belonging to Africa releases an outstanding transcultural power, allowing the two artists to overcome the cultural diversities of two very different musical languages and to elaborate a common discourse by focusing on discovered and imagined connections between their life histories and mindscapes.
The musicians insist upon a presumed derivation of blues progression's dominant 7th chords from Central Congo Mutwuashi music. Rather than a return to the source, the protagonists conceive their musical encounter as the expression of a unique African music language that bridges over oceans and centuries of oppression, displacement, and oblivion. Such a multifaceted, rhizomatic idea overflows oppositions like traditional/modern music, original/imitated, Western/local as well as monolithic views of cultural lineage and historical origins. These diasporic African music creators see history as "contingent rather than teleological" (Reddell 2013: 91), closely resounding cultural claims coming from postmodern and postcolonial scholars like Mbembe and Eshun.
This musical experiment manifests the strong presence of a wide net of interconnections between Africa and its Diaspora across the Black Atlantic - like Pan-Africanism, Rastafari, African American human right activism, anti-regime African protests. The researcher engages with the artists through participatory filmmaking, embedding non-linear narratives coming from fieldwork protagonists as integrated research methodologies and theoretical frames.
Paper short abstract:
From "Beninese salsa" to a hybrid genre called "salgota", the paper will address the contemporary processes pertaining to the "creative appropriation" (Manuel 1994) of salsa in Benin and therefore question the complex phenomenon of "roots in reverse" (Shain 2002) across the Black Atlantic.
Paper long abstract:
In today West Africa, a salsa scene is currently developing, following on the global popularity of this social dance form worldwide. This phenomenon has been preceded by the appropriation of Cuban music on the continent from the 1930s, especially invested as a main creative resource for the constitution of modern African musics around the 1960s. "Salsa comes from here," assert many salsa musicians and dancers I met in Benin. By saying this, they mainly refer to the role of the slave trade to claim the Beninese origins of salsa. However, they use several musical and choreographic transformative processes aimed at the local appropriation of salsa, from the definition of a "Beninese salsa" to the creation of a hybrid genre called "salgota". At the same time, they also engage with the transnational community of salsa aficionados worldwide, through the use of videos on the Internet or in the frame of the Benin International Salsa Festival.
The paper will then analyse the empirical implications of the claims of a Beninese ownership of salsa: how has this transnational dance practice been given a local meaning and visibility? How are the music and the dance transformed in the process of producing a Beninese salsa? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archives research, the paper will address the contemporary processes pertaining to the "creative appropriation" (Manuel 1994) of salsa in Benin and therefore question the complex phenomenon of "roots in reverse" (Shain 2002) across the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993).