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In the mid-20th century, African musicians took up Cuban music as their own and claimed it as a marker of black Atlantic connections and of cosmopolitanism untethered from European colonial relations. Today, Cuban/African bands popular in Africa in the 1960s and '70s have moved into the world music scene in Europe and North America, and world music producers and musicians have created new West African-Latin American collaborations expressly for this market niche.
World Music and the Black Atlantic follows two of these bands, Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism, and the industry and audiences that surround them-from musicians' homes in West Africa, to performances in Europe and North America, to record label offices in London.
World Music and the Black Atlantic examines the intensely transnational experiences of musicians, industry personnel, and audiences as they collaboratively produce, circulate, and consume music in a specific post-colonial era of globalization.
Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences work with and push against one another as they engage in personal collaborations imbued with histories of global travel and trade. They move between and combine Cuban and Malian melodies, Norwegian and Senegalese markets, and histories of slavery and independence as they work together to create international commodities. Understanding the unstable and dynamic ways these peoples, musics, markets, and histories intersect elucidates how world music actors assert their places within, and produce knowledge about, global markets, colonial histories, and the black Atlantic.
World Music and the Black Atlantic offers a nuanced view of a global industry that is informed and deeply marked by diverse transnational perspectives and histories of transatlantic exchange.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Industry
- Chapter 1 Setting the Scene: The World Music Industry
- Chapter 2 The Art of Representing the Other
- Part II Musicians
- Chapter 3 Cuban Music is African Music: Musicians and their Music
- Chapter 4 Musicians and the Industry
- Part III Audiences
- Chapter 5 Frames
- Chapter 6 Experiencing Pleasure
- Postlude
- Moving forward and looking back: Where are We? Where are We Going?
- Bibliography
About the author
Aleysia K. Whitmore is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. Her research focuses on the world music industry, globalization, and cultural policy. She has published articles in
Ethnomusicology and
MusiCultures, and she has taught popular music, world music, and classical music courses at Brown University, Boston College, the University of Miami, and the University of Colorado Denver. She holds a BMus from the University of Toronto and AM and PhD degrees in ethnomusicology from Brown University.
Summary
Examining the experiences of musicians, industry personnel, and audiences, World Music and the Black Atlantic offers a nuanced view of a global industry informed and marked by diverse transnational perspectives and histories of transatlantic exchange.
Additional text
Whitmore's analysis describes a new ethos untethered from simple oppositions between locals and cosmopolitans. For those wondering what happened to "world music," Whitmore's fine-grained ethnography looks at the emergence of "genre culture" and declares that world music is back, and it's here to stay.
