Roots in Reverse: Senegalese Afro-Cuban Music and Tropical Cosmopolitanism

Description

Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation’s cultural history such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and diasporic identities. More than just a new form of musical enjoyment, Afro-Cuban music provided listeners with a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony. Review “Shain documents a host of diasporic interconnections on multiple continents, and the use of Cuban music in various African political and postcolonial projects.” (Robin D. Moore, University of Texas at Austin) “In Roots in Reverse, Richard M. Shain masterfully analyzes how music and debates about music delineate a field where the transforming appropriation of non-metropolitan musics stimulates the emergence of original modernities which combine rootedness and cosmopolitanism, and challenge colonial and postcolonial cultural domination. He demonstrates how Afro-Cuban genres as played by Senegalese musicians became the emblem of forms of local sociality, civility and sophistication which laid the ground for an idiosyncratic conception of cultural citizenship. Detailing the interactions between Senegalese and American musics, he eventually invites to re-think the “Black Atlantic” as a multi-layered space in which various diasporic imaginaries get entangled.” (Dr. Denis-Constant Martin, Centre Les Afriques dans le monde (LAM), Sciences-Po Bordeaux, France) About the Author RICHARD M. SHAIN teaches African, Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Thomas Jefferson University. He also taught at the university level in Nigeria and Senegal for nearly ten years.