and rhythm into their performances. These musicians and their public never viewed Afro-Cuban music as “foreign,” a “Western” import. They were aware that the music arose out of the “forced migration” of Africans to the New World and that it incorporated many African elements. In playing, hearing, and dancing to it, they heard and felt their history and culture echoing from across the Atlantic Ocean. By embracing the music, they were reforging diasporic ties and proclaiming their autonomy from exclusively Western models of modernity.
PLACE(S) DE L’INDÉPENDANCE
Tracing the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in 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 shifting diasporic identities. The music also has provided new forms of enjoyment, a template for cultural citizenship, and a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony. It is all too easy when writing about popular music in Africa to overlook the essential truth that its primary purpose has been to provide pleasure. For some scholars of popular culture, incorporating pleasure into their analysis would be tantamount to arguing that popular music is frivolous and devoid of significant cultural and political content. In this book I argue that examining the ways the Senegalese have experienced pleasure is crucial to understanding how they have imagined modernity and defined cosmopolitanism. The Senegalese historically have responded to Afro-Cuban music on a number of levels. In talking about their attraction to this music, they emphasize how much it has stirred them physically and mesmerized them aurally and visually. By drawing on so many of their senses, it has led them to embody new codes of behavior and new modes of enjoyment. As a consequence, in listening to how the Senegalese have listened to Afro-Cuban music, we can trace the genealogies of a modern Senegalese sensibility.
While Afro-Cuban music has been a source of enjoyment for many Senegalese, it also has been a tool for moral instruction and a means for thinking about alternative varieties of citizenship from French colonial models. Since the 1930s the Senegalese have equated Afro-Cuban music with “modern” forms of sociality and leisure. Integrating women into previously all-male social domains was intrinsic to these new practices, as was patronizing cabarets and music clubs. Dancing to Cuban music with a partner of the opposite sex became for men and women a symbol of sophistication. Innovative patterns of consumption were even more important as Senegalese acquired the latest European male fashion and, by the 1950s, LPS of Cuban music. The new forms of sociality emphasized that being correcte was a path to modernity. Self-discipline, affability, tolerance, erudition, an elegant appearance, and a general air of savoir faire became characteristics of the well-ordered, morally grounded life. Changes in consumption relating to Afro-Cuban music enabled young Senegalese to claim “rights of difference” within the context of the Franco-Senegalese state.4 They appropriated power consumer goods from abroad, like shoes, shirts, jackets, sunglasses, pens, and Cuban records, to assert and create cultural spaces beyond French domination. Though grounded in cultural practices, these patterns of consumption had significant political ramifications. They solidified new ways of defining and actualizing themselves and helped lay the foundations for a Senegalese national culture in tune with but subtlety different from the official negritude version propagated by President Léopold Senghor.
THE ORAL AND THE AURAL: RESEARCHING THE HISTORY OF SENEGALESE POPULAR MUSIC
The Senegalese have valued Afro-Cuban music both for its artistic worth and for the sensibility and conduct linked with it. Because the music and its cultural complex have been intertwined with so many major social and cultural issues in the Senegalese past and present, any research methodology for studying its changing roles and meanings must be multidisciplinary and attuned to the multivocality of the nation’s Afro-Cuban music scene. Monographs on African popular music tend to either focus exclusively on recordings and musicians in a “maps and chaps” narrative or reduce music to its sociological and historical dimensions where context overrides content. Neither one of these approaches can account for Afro-Cuban music in Senegal. The story of this music has involved intellectuals, musicians, members of record collecting clubs, amateur dancers, music club habitués, broadcasters, club owners, impresarios, and world music executives. Its geographical expanse is equally vast, taking in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Peru, New York, Miami, Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, and a number of smaller Senegalese cities. Only a multifaceted research methodology can capture this complexity.
I began my fieldwork by immersing myself in the recorded music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Senegalese Afro-Cuban ensembles. The advent of CDs in the 1980s led to the reemergence of large amounts of previously unavailable music. Small record labels in Europe, especially in the Netherlands, Germany, and Greece, pioneered the re-release of Senegalese music. The owners of these labels traveled to Senegal, bought old discs or tapes, remastered them, and then repackaged them as CDs, often with excellent liner notes. Sometimes these re-releases were “pirated,” but in most cases the original musicians were compensated for their work.5 Without this newly available invaluable archive, it would have been almost impossible to conduct my research. The records in and of themselves constitute a treasure of oral histories. with proverbs, historical references, and interpretive “takes” on cultural change. Moreover, by the time I interacted with the musicians who made these recordings, I already had a rough understanding of their artistic development. I also had an extensive familiarity with recorded Latin music from the Caribbean and the United States. If I had been without this expertise, the Afro-Senegalese music community in Dakar would have dismissed me as an amateur who was not worth their time. With that knowledge came not only mutual esteem but also camaraderie. We all were initiated members of an exclusive club of enthusiasts and experts.
Attending concerts and recording sessions in New York was another valuable research activity. Before I began my research in Dakar, I was able to attend a performance by the Senegalese Afro-Cuban group Africando at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997. I also had the privilege of being present at some of their recording sessions for two of their albums and engaging in extensive conversations with one of the album’s arrangers, the Malian/Nigerian arranger and flutist Boncana Maïga, and with the late Senegalese producer Ibrahima Sylla. These experiences gave me a solid grounding for my work in Senegal years before I arrived in Dakar in the fall of 2002 to spend a year as a Fulbright professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University.
I originally conceived of my project as being based on a series of interviews I planned to do with Afro-Cuban musicians in Senegal. I thought these oral histories would supply me with everything I needed. I soon discovered I was wrong in two respects. I started off well enough in January 2003. Two of the most prominent salsa musicians in Dakar, Pape Fall and Mar Seck, readily agreed to be interviewed. They couldn’t have been more accommodating and were articulate and well informed. However, after this promising start my work ground to a halt. I made appointments with musicians, but they didn’t show up. I realized I had proceeded too rapidly. I needed to work at establishing a relationship of trust and respect with the musical community. Regularly attending their performances at clubs around Dakar, like Chez Iba, and visiting them during the day facilitated this. Over a period of four years and a number of research trips, I attended hundreds of these performances in a variety of venues, ranging from elegant private parties to working-class neighborhood bars. Participant observation became part of my research tool kit. The musicians turned out to be welcoming, frank, open, and eager to talk about their work and lives with insight and eloquence. They appreciated that I had become a semipermanent fixture in their world, as I was able to make annual research trips to Senegal for a number of years.
Once I had established myself in the Afro-Cuban musical community, I resumed my formal interviews. These interviews gave the musicians an opportunity to be taken seriously as artists, something they clearly relished (and merited). If an interview proved particularly fruitful, I would schedule several more sessions with that individual. As I created a place for myself among the musicians, I realized that I had too narrowly conceived my research. These artists were part of extensive overlapping networks in Dakar that went well
