CCS special seminar Tim Mangin RHB141 from 4-6pm Tuesday 9 October – all welcome
Cosmopolitanism in Senegal: Jazz and Rap
This paper explores how Senegalese local popular culture thrives not in spite of transnational influences and processes, but as a result of them. Popular music scholars and social scientists have increasingly begun to study the impact of popular African diasporic musics in Africa such as jazz and Latin musics in West, South, and Central Africa. However, the meaning and role of black U.S. pop musics in identity formations in Francophone West Africa has received less attention. This paper addresses this problem by examining how Senegalese have used diasporic musics since the 1940s as one way to assert their modern cosmopolitan identities. Based on fieldwork conducted in Saint Louis and Dakar, Senegal, I explore how jazz and rap have become vitally cultural expressive practices for negotiating national and black identities.
Tim Mangin, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University, studies transnationalism and cosmopolitanism in African diasporic popular musics and culture. His masters thesis explores collaborations between DJs, rappers, visual artists, dancers, and jazz musicians in underground hip hop clubs in New York City and his dissertation is an ethnography of mbalax, the popular music of Senegal.
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