Transnational Sharedness: Social Dynamics of Circulation and Appropriation in “Global” Music Genres
Alice Aterianus-Owanga
Abstract: This essay develops a transversal reading of publications on the transnational diffusion of popular music genres in the urban spaces of six continents. It aims to put into evidence the social forces that shape the circulation and appropriation of music genres in new contexts and places, as well as the production of locality and global sharedness that these processes involve. The article applies and furthers prior work by historians and anthropologists on the pitfalls of the notion of globalization and offers a situated, polycentric, and historicized lens for understanding the issues raised by the broad diffusion and appropriation of popular music. Discussing scholarship from the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, and popular music studies, the essay focuses on case studies of hip-hop/rap, jazz, salsa, and, to a lesser extent, electronic music. After the introduction, the first part of the essay provides an overview of how these studies redefined ideas developed in the 1990s about the “globalization” of music and examines a series of new concepts and approaches; the second part presents a down-to-earth discussion of the main forces and phenomena that shape the processes of musical diffusion and resignification examined in this literature.
Keywords: global music genres; transnationalism; cultural circulation; hip-hop/rap; salsa; jazz; connected history; appropriation
Alice Aterianus-Owanga is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at the University of Neuchâtel.
Aterianus-Owanga, Alice. 2023. “Transnational Sharedness: Social Dynamics of Circulation and Appropriation in ‘Global’ Music Genres.” Music Research Annual 4:1–28. ISSN 2563-7290
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Since the 1980s, scholars have treated music as one of the main symptoms of globalization and used it as a privileged lens to understand the cultural transfers produced by the growth of communication technologies in the twentieth century and the social phenomenon that the geographer David Harvey (1991) called “time-space compression.” Here, researchers in popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and the anthropology of music have produced a number of critical insights about key issues raised by the globalization of culture, such as the taken-for-granted notions of the “local” and the “global,” anxieties about cultural homogenization, or romantic celebrations of cultural diversity.
Two domains of research on music strongly contributed to challenging these commonplaces. First, a number of studies of so-called world music addressed important issues related to the global turn, such as the North-South inequalities reproduced by international music markets, the exoticizing representations that often underly the transnational circulation of music, and the music industries’ extraction or consumption of “other” aesthetics and sounds (Feld 1995, 2001; Martin 1996; Taylor 1997; Mallet 2002; White 2011). These studies often took a critical stance on capitalism inspired by Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno and used music as a privileged avenue to reconsider key themes related to globalization, such as the renewed interest in the “local” (Guilbault 1993; Erlmann 1998). They showed that studying the worldwide circulation of music was a fertile way of understanding the paradoxical effects of the postmodern era, with its unique combination of cultural homogenization and cultural diversification, which the ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann characterized by the observation that the “more people around the globe who purchase the exact same garment [or other cultural commodity], the more the commercial celebrates difference” (Erlmann 1996, 469).
Starting in the 1990s, a stream of research by anthropologists, historians, ethnomusicologists, and popular music studies scholars offered a second way to understand music’s globalization. As popular music styles traveled across six continents and were appropriated in varied ways by musicians and listeners, these scholars examined the processes underlying their circulation and hybridization. Here, jazz, salsa, and hip-hop became paradigmatic examples of “global music genres” and gave birth to specific fields of studies (Mitchell 2001; Basu and Lemelle 2006; Bohlman and Plastino 2016; Aterianus-Owanga, Milliot, and Noûs 2020). Contrary to sweeping generalizations about the “globalization” of music that came from the research on large corporations and international music markets, these scholars insisted on the alternative and plural routes of cultural globalization and on “the crucial importance of micro-histories and local dynamics in the formation and dispersal of the music” (Johnson 2019, 21).
In this essay, I propose a transversal reading of diverse publications about the diffusion of popular music genres in urban spaces around the world. My aim is to put into evidence the stages, actors, and social forces participating in the circulation of sounds to new contexts and places and their appropriation by musicians and listeners there. In doing so, I reflect on the various conceptual lenses scholars have proposed to overcome the commonplaces and simplifications surrounding what is often referred to as “globalization.” First, I ask: What actually makes a genre “global”? Is it that its music is spread and consumed throughout the world, or must that music also be adapted and given a variety of situated meanings, for different purposes, within different frames of interpretation? Furthermore, can we still, as social scientists, speak of “global genres” without reproducing the grand narrative of globalization that was built by and for the West, according to its structures of knowledge and conceptions of space and time? Finally, what alternative concepts are available to better grasp the entwined processes at play in the circulation of sounds and cultural forms around the world and to avoid the pitfalls of opposing a preexisting “local” with an overarching “global” force?
A number of theorists have discussed the challenges posed by the idea of music globalization (e.g., Turino 2000; Stokes 2004, 2018). In a book chapter discussing trends in the ways comparative musicologists, ethnomusicologists, postcolonial studies scholars, and globalization theorists have approached this topic, Martin Stokes (2018) underlined the daunting and probably unsolvable difficulties raised by the task of building a global history of music that would “decentre the West” (9–10) and avoid a teleological approach to the past. Similar critiques have been raised by anthropologists who denounce the “globalisation vulgate” (Friedman 2002, 25) and by historians of non-Western societies who address related issues (Cooper 2001; Chakrabarty 2009). Others have argued that the rhetoric used in this literature, such as characterization of globalization as “the dance of flows and fragments” (Cooper 2001, 193), has made theoretical work on this topic vacuous, and they have argued that this work is incapable of accounting for the fact that ethnic groups and other kinds of social formations continue to reproduce themselves within the boundaries of nation-states and regions—a process that globalization was thought to have demolished. While historians such as Frederick Cooper (2001) have called for seeking more discerning ways of analyzing long-distance forms of social interconnectivity, networks, or fields, others have argued that we must replace the overambitious rhetoric of the “global” with a more situated, humble, and polycentric perspective on processes of crossing borders and historical encounters, which they designate with terms such as histoires connectées (“connected histories,” Subrahmanyam 1997; Gruzinski 2001; Douki and Minard 2007) or l’histoire à parts égales (“history in equal parts,” Bertrand 2011).
This essay applies and furthers such perspectives. In so doing, it sheds light on processes of wide diffusion and long-distance connectivity within social worlds of music-making, their complementary construction of locality, and the reproduction therein of social systems of meaning. For that purpose, I use a twofold structure that couples an overview of how these studies redefined 1990s theories of music and globalization with a more down-to-earth discussion of the concrete forces and phenomena that influence the diffusion and resignification of music genres. The first part of this essay proposes preliminary insights about three major moments and conceptual approaches that have been employed in the research on the globalization of music genres—deterritorialization, appropriation, and translocality and transnationalism. The second part draws on examples, descriptions, and insights from the recent scholarly literature in this area to offer a modest and grounded perspective on what I will refer to as the concrete “levers” of circulation and appropriation (e.g., social practices and media technologies) by which genres travel to new social and political contexts. The discussion here is divided into four subsections. The first section deals with the ways human agents and social networks influence the movement of popular music genres and offers approaches that link various social scales, spaces, and classes. The second focuses on the role of “things”—nonhuman agents, technologies, and the materiality of music mediation—in the movement of music genres. The third section discusses the involvement of state policies in the circulation and appropriation of music, including the domains of cultural diplomacy, international programs, and national-level institutions. The last section concentrates on the issue of racial categorization and identification and focuses in particular on genres that are labeled as “Black” music. It shows how discourses on race and music in a given locale are shaped by pernicious ideological and historical constructions on supposed human races that infuse media depictions, audience, and music institutions there, as well as the ways musicians and listeners use music to assert Black consciousness and foster cultural memory, social recognition, and political action.1 Below, I primarily draw on studies of jazz, salsa, and hip-hop/rap2—popular music styles that began their transnational diffusion in the 1980s. In addition, I briefly discuss other genres, since they sometimes fed into the main ones that I discuss and often offer fruitful points of comparison. Jazz, salsa, and hip-hop/rap have a number of common features, including their diffusion to a large number of cities, industries, and media; the broad range of the scenes, appropriations, and subgenres that their diffusion generated; and the feeling of interconnectedness, shared values, and common belonging that they have produced among their many audiences—a sentiment expressed in terms like the “global hip-hop nation” (Ibrahim, Alim, and Pennycook 2008) or the idea of a worldwide community of salsa (Hutchinson 2015). Of course, there is a significant literature on other widely diffused popular music genres, though not all of these have the breadth of commodification, mediatic presence, and local appropriations that jazz, salsa, and hip-hop do.
The corpus of writings addressed in this paper is partly a result of my own expertise as a French anthropologist who studies Africa and its diaspora and my areas of specialization (hip-hop, the anthropology of popular music and dance, and the circulation of music and dance genres into, within, and out of Africa). I do not pretend to offer here an exhaustive review of the literature on jazz, salsa, and hip-hop/rap, which would be an impossible endeavor.3 Instead, I focus mostly on the reception and appropriation of popular music genres associated with Africa and its diasporas, while making connections with the literatures on societies that have similar postcolonial configurations or where a comparison will shed light on broader forces and phenomena involved in the globalization of music genres. I mainly discuss writings in French and in English from anthropology, ethnomusicology, and history,4 though I also engage research outside of these fields, since this topic lends itself to transdisciplinary conversations. I largely examine the work of scholars based in France and the Anglophone world, including African countries. Beyond their national or disciplinary affiliations, the authors discussed here have contributed to the field of hip-hop studies, salsa studies, or jazz studies.
Dismantling the “Global”: Three Decades of Research on the Circulation of Popular Music Genres
DETERRITORIALIZATION AND THE HOMOGENIZING PRESSURES OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETS
In the 1990s, scholars in popular music studies were among the first to advance new concepts for understanding the complex interweaving of power, culture, and music circulation generated in the twentieth century by the growth of the mass media, new communication technologies, and human mobilities. Pivotal here was the idea of the deterritorialization of cultural symbols and goods. Initially proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus ([1972] 1977), this word “deterritorialization” was used to describe the displacement of cultural artifacts and ideas outside of their initial systems of meaning, codification, or relations. In the years after Anti-Oedipus was published, this notion migrated to such a wide variety of discourses, including in particular the field of globalization studies, that the concept itself became deterritorialized. For example, Nèstor García Canclini used it in his book Hybrid Cultures (1995) to analyze contemporary art and the cultural industries in Latin America, and he criticized previous writings on this topic that assumed that “traditional” and “modern” forms of culture were necessarily antagonistic and contradictory. He advanced the idea of hybridity, through which he sought to make sense of the heterogenous “mixes” generated in Latin American societies by encounters with colonialism and neoliberal economies, where “the artisanal and the industrial, the refined and the popular, written and visual forms in mass media messages” combine in complex ways (xxxii). In his analysis, deterritorialization is understood as an erosion of the privileged links between territory and culture that—along with the breakup of the “collections that used to organize cultural systems” (207) and the emergence of “impure” genres—constituted one of the roots of hybridization.
The influential work of musicologist Keith Negus (1999) encouraged many scholars to adopt the idea of deterritorialization in music studies, where it was particularly important for research on the commodification of popular music. Defining deterritorialization as the process by which “different types of music move, or do not move, across national boundaries” (154), Negus showed how music label managers categorize music genres as either “domestic repertoire” or “international repertoire,” with the former defined by a strategy of territorial confinement and the latter stemming from “an attempt to deterritorialize artists and their music” (154). Analyzing the example of the failed transformation and commodification of a Japanese singer (Mari Hamada) into an international celebrity by a vice-president of the media conglomerate MCA International (159), he showed how the category of international repertoire is mainly based on a process of deterritorialization and the negation of place, wherein music can “be taken from anywhere and sold anywhere else” (154).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the marketing of so-called world music involves the commodification of place, locality, and cultural singularity. Here, record labels use a narrow selection of domestic repertoires or sounds to construct an image of alterity and the exotic. In related work, ethnomusicologists have used the notion of deterritorialization to understand how a variety of actors and institutions are needed to create the sonic texture of world music that audiences have come to expect (Meintjes 1990; Barnat 2019; Amico 2020). These processes of deterritorialization include a phenomenon that the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (1995) referred to as “schizophonia,” in which sound is separated from its original source, decontextualized, and reinterpreted to give it new meanings. With their insistence on the “territory/culture” and “center/periphery” binaries and an emphasis on structural forces in the music industries, approaches informed by the notion of deterritorialization remained highly influential in the disciplines of geography and the sociology of music, where this idea was used to explain how the intersection of place, culture, and music came to be reconfigured by the intensification of human mobility and commodity exchange in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Connell and Gibson 2004; Mazierska and Gregory 2015).
The notion of deterritorialization from the 1990s literature on world music largely focused on genres and aesthetics that were successful in music markets from the Global North. This work was criticized by ethnographers of music scenes and social spheres that had not entered the world market but were nevertheless “worldly,” hybrid, and highly connected. For example, ethnomusicologist Kenneth Bilby (1999) noted that the prevailing literature on world music centered on the pressures exerted on musicians by globalizing markets and was not relevant for the scene he observed in Surinam, which, like many other “hybrid” popular musics, had not yet caught the attention of the international music industry and was limited to a very small and clearly bounded market. He observed:
Obviously, global market forces of the kind that have created and dominated the world music industry in recent years do not explain the many cases of musical hybridization and indigenization in the past. Nor can it be assumed that the economic and cultural pressures associated with globalizing markets in the 1990s—at least the kinds of monolithic pressures often stressed in cultural imperialism models—always play a leading role in such processes today. (Bilby 1999, 261)
Highly influential, the rhetoric of deterritorialization in music echoed wider trends in the study of transnational phenomena, where local changes and cultural products were read in terms of overarching structures and analyzed “as a kind of reaction to systemic changes within the structure of global capitalism itself—changes imagined as operating in a space somehow beyond human agencies and desires” (Stokes 2018, 12). The approaches of such work can hardly be reconciled with the goal of creating a polyphonic history or a relational perspective on the social dynamics at play in the circulation of music genres. Over time, though, these approaches were supplemented by other conceptual backgrounds and perspectives, which examined opposed or reversed phenomena and questioned the many means by which foreign genres are appropriated, localized, or resignified in new places.
The Creative Texture of Local Appropriations
While the scholarship on deterritorialization emphasized the ways sounds are transformed and commodified so as to become audible and consumable in international music markets, research framed in terms of the idea of “appropriation” examined the specific forces that shaped the reception, interpretation, and adoption of sounds and music genres in new places, the continuous process of interaction among the various networks where music travels, and the meanings that these processes generate.
In the field of French ethnomusicology, a number of researchers insisted on the creative effects of music appropriation by studying the transformations that occur in the content of the music and dance itself (Andrieu and Olivier 2017). Denis-Constant Martin’s (2014) long-term research on the jazz scenes and popular music styles that travel between the Americas and South African cities led him to describe “appropriation” as the alpha and omega of music creation. For her part, Élina Djebbari (2020) built on Peter Manuel’s (1994) idea of “creative appropriation” to describe salsa music and dance in Benin as “a socio-musical process, involving the resignification of the borrowed idiom to serve as a symbol of a new social identity” (Manuel 1994, 274, quoted in Djebbari 2020, 127). Like other scholars of salsa in Africa (Shain 2002; Dorsch 2010; Carwile 2017), Djebbari described how a form of “cubanophilia” helped to create a distinctive culture of salsa in Benin, and how sonic or kinetic elements were added to local salsa music and dance practices, while connecting to broader regional, transnational, or transoceanic networks.
In a number of countries in Africa and Latin America, the reception and appropriation of salsa and other Afro-Latin music genres from the colonial era turned out to be powerful vectors of “cosmopolitanism,” which American ethnomusicologist Lise Waxer (2002) described as a “dynamic resource for negotiating and authenticating new cultural and social processes that cannot easily be contained within localist, regionalist, or nationalist models” (under “Introduction”). For many scholars, this notion of cosmopolitanism served as a fruitful lens to address the many ways that groups at varying levels of social scale (e.g., regions or nations) appropriate and become attached to a traveling music genre and to consider the feeling of transnational sharedness and common values that it shapes (Turino 2000; White 2002; Dorsch 2010). Also criticizing the globalization rhetoric, ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino (2003) used the case of music in Zimbabwe to show how the musical fabric of a cosmopolitan ethos need not be opposed to nationalist ideals, how the two may be co-constitutive, and how such forms of cosmopolitanism may produce an idea of modernity different from those found in the West and in colonial models.5 In contrast to the older literature on globalization, which assumed that new communication technologies and the “globalized” flow of cultural artifacts and peoples have made the influence of the nation-state irrelevant, studies of music appropriation demonstrate how nations and cross-border entities are co-constructed and how, in differing historical periods, the appropriation of traveling music genres contributed to the redefinition of regional and national belonging.
More recent research on the diffusion of punk and hip-hop confirmed this interpretation and offered evocative ways to consider how the appropriation of traveling music genres never merely mimics a foreign culture or integrates its music into new contexts in n simple and unchanged manner; rather, this work shows how musical appropriation is an interactive and open-ended process in which both the originators of a genre and those who adopt it mutually transform the music and the sense of place with which it is associated. Also known for his research in global metal studies (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011), ethnomusicologist Jeremy Wallach (2014) conducted research in Indonesia that traced the development of a highly committed punk scene there through the consumption of cultural artifacts and media. He shows how this scene coupled together cultural elements that outsiders might see as antagonistic (e.g., punkness and Indonesianness; metal and Islam), creating “resonance between punk political philosophy and Indonesian political history” (153). Responding to the challenge of coining new terminology to approach “the type of globalization” at play in the development of this scene, Wallach suggested the somewhat more emic term “indieglobalization” (163).
Earlier publications explored related ideas. For example, research by anthropologist Ian Condry (2006) on hip-hop in Japan influenced a number of scholars who sought to deconstruct the local/global dichotomy in the field of global hip-hop studies (Mitchell 2001; Basu and Lemelle 2006; Charry 2012; Saucier 2012). Condry criticized the idea that scholars should search for the “Japanization” of hip-hop, which would assume presence of a preexisting “Japanese identity,” and its contrary albeit similarly problematic view in terms of “Americanization” of Japanese society through hip-hop. According to Condry, both viewpoints reproduce a vision of cultures as closed and bounded entities that meet, clash, or melt into one another, rather than as dynamic and interconnected webs of meanings. He argued that the “localization of cultural forms can…proceed simultaneously with an increasing global sharedness, thus showing that the opposition between local and global can be a false dichotomy that hides more than it reveals” (2). Condry insisted on the importance of investigating specific places (Japanese genba nightclubs) to observe the ongoing processes of interaction that create localization and global sharedness, as well as the plurality of actors and forces that they involve. In a similar vein, cultural studies scholar Tony Mitchell (2001) and other hip-hop scholars drew on the well-known notion of “glocalization” developed by sociologist Roland Robertson (1995) to understand the processes that occur when “local activities interact with the global form of rap and particular histories of different geographical scenes are constructed” (32). A related approach to the globalization of music genres developed around the term “Indigenization” (Bohlman and Plastino 2016). Stemming from Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) famous analysis of the Indianization of cricket during the colonial period, several studies used this notion to understand how foreign signs became enmeshed with new meanings, ideologies, languages, sounds, instruments, and symbols (e.g., Mitchell 2001; Osumare 2012).
Despite their opposition to the local/global dichotomy and their intention to provide more grounded approaches on globalization, publications released in the first decade of the twenty-first century about popular music genres such as hip-hop often used a rhetoric in which the global was a taken-for-granted idea and often assumed that the world was composed of flows and movements. More recent research in hip-hop studies has underlined how the extreme focus on local/global dialectics led to a “tendency to consider particular American forms of hip hop as ‘global,’ and other forms of hip hop as ‘local,’ [and] to reproduce hierarchies of space and taste” that depict American hip-hop as “the unmarked category against which ‘Other’ forms of hip hop are understood” (Schneidermann and Abraham 2017, 4). By highlighting the idea of appropriation, this scholarship risked negating the fact that these new music scenes or movements could also be understood ethnographically for their own historicity, emic meanings, and the plurality of influences and references they entail, rather than seeing them as extensions of existing networks, whose histories were to be traced from their American cradle.
Translocality and Transnationalism
The third moment and conceptual perspective associated with music and globalization is linked to migration studies. This work tends to study social fields and communities that involve human mobility and multiple socio-spatial anchors. It often draws on notions of the transnational and the translocal, as well as ideas from migration studies, to develop its readings of the circulation of music. Nevertheless, this perspective is not fully distinct from or opposed to the ones discussed in the previous sections, and the word “transnational” can be found in a wide range of studies of music’s globalization, though they do not always draw on the ideas from migration studies discussed in this section.
Although the term “transnational” has often been used in a loose manner, this concept was initially developed with a specific purpose—to overcome the shortcomings of approaches that were too tightly bound to nation-states and to better describe the activities or practices of migrants that are played out among two or more nations, attachments, or spaces (Basch, Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999). The concept of translocalism emerged later; it was developed to complement transnationalism and provide a situated approach to understanding the way mobile actors are anchored in multiple locations and the networks of places in which they circulate (Conradson and Mckay 2007; Brickell and Datta 2011; Greiner and Sakdapolrak 2013). Part of the larger project of building analytical models that are emancipated from nationalist presuppositions, the notion of the translocal goes further than that of the transnational, as it emphasizes the importance of dissolving other kinds of boundaries (e.g., regional, continental, oceanic) for understanding the many forms displacement can take (Aterianus-Owanga, Gaulier, and Navarro 2022). Scholars of translocalization continued the long-standing criticism of the aporias of globalization that historians have developed, and their work helps to reveal the “variety of processes which create cross-territorial linkages and flows” (Freitag and von Oppen 2010, 1).
Though the ideas of the transnational and translocal were used in the 1990s, in the past twenty years there has been a growth of these concepts in music research (Aparicio and Jàquez 2003; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Shipley 2013b; Gebesmair 2017). One example is the work of modern languages scholars Nadia Kiwan and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (2011), who have conducted influential research into the narratives, creations, and mobilities of musicians in locations across Africa and Europe. With ethnographic studies sited in Madagascar, Morocco, France, and the United Kingdom, they show the existence of intranational and regional migrations that have preceded the transnational mobilities of musicians in Europe, as well as the transcultural capital that they build along their journeys and use in the rest of their mobile careers. As applied in the field of music research, the transnational perspective has led scholars to consider, for example, the following: how local involvements and transnational ties emerge simultaneously among North African musicians migrating to London (Gibert 2011); the way migration and tourism shape the mechanics of circulation of Afro-Cuban repertoires in the Caribbean (Argyriadis 2010); the way the Senegalese rap scene is structured by the migration and (im)mobilities of rappers from multiple continents (Navarro 2019); and the musical creations, social engagements, and aspirations of diasporic Comorian popular musicians in France (Englert 2018). The transnational perspective has also helped to shed light on the superposition of different types of mobilities around music, such as the ways in which religion and music are intertwined (Shelemay 2011; Capone and Salzbrunn 2018), and the relationship between migration for marriage and migration for work as an artist (Despres 2011). This perspective has also been fruitful for revealing how worlds of music and dance emerge across continental boundaries, such as the growth of the salsa circuit (Menet 2020), its roots in migration and tourism (Ana 2019), and its commodified platforms and festivals (Kabir 2013).
In a similar vein, the growth of the field of sound studies helped scholars take as their unit of analysis the circulation of music over long distances and across the boundaries of nations, empires, continents, and other spatial units configured by area studies fields from the Western academy. Charlotte Grabli’s (2019, 2022) recent historical research on sonic urbanity focuses on the circulation of musicians, sounds, and ideologies among cities in the colonial empires of Central and Southern Africa. She highlights how in African cities, the emergence of recording technologies (and, later, radio) led to the diffusion of Afro-Atlantic music and the invention of new urban identities that transgressed colonial orders through an economy of urban leisure and festive life. Inspired by the conceptual framework of French sociologist Alain Tarrius (1993), who developed the notion of territoire circulatoire (“circulatory territory”), Grabli (2022) unveils hidden transimperial routes of circulation among the cities of Léopoldville (Kinshasa), Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), Nairobi, and Johannesburg, which were used by Congolese musicians who developed new musical sonorities and became the regions’ first mediatic celebrities. Here, the analysis of the circulation of sounds across empires and emerging nations unveils the existence of shared networks of influences, values, and commonalities built specifically through the medium of sound. In so doing, this work furthered perspective of transnationalism by refining our understanding of long-distance connectivity and helping to move music research beyond the prism of globalization.
* * *
The approaches I have briefly reviewed in this section did not develop in a cumulative fashion, but, when taken together, produced a growing critique of earlier discourses about cultural globalization. This work paved the way for contemporary scholars to analyze how varied social forces, spatial practices, and cultural references mingle together in the circulation of music genres—processes that allow music to serve as a tool for asserting contextualized social relationships and, at the same time, enable it to circulate in or identify with broader systems.6 The next section presents a reading of the literatures on the wide circulation of music genres. It identifies a series of processes and social forces that concretely support the creation of transnational sharedness and locality. In differing ways, each of the writings I discuss offers a partial answer to the fundamental question posed by anthropologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists in this area: How does music from one place circulate and make sense in new places? In four subsections, the next part of this essay analyzes a series of research topics (e.g., the concrete “levers” of musical circulation or a particular domain of practice and meaning), each of which involves specific methodological approaches and theoretical ideas. They have helped to answer this question and to move beyond the scholarly tropes used by previous generations of research on popular music, like the notions of culture and identity, the local/global dichotomy, and the unnuanced insistence on market imperialism.
Four Themes for Thinking about Music Circulations beyond Globalism
It is obvious, of course, that all of the genres that have “gone global,” such as jazz, salsa, or hip-hop/rap, have been shaped by a distinct context of historical events, have spread a unique group of meanings and codes, and have been informed by their own set of technological tools, ideological debates, or political moments. Yet some common features can be traced, and these help to identify the social levers involved in the dialectical processes of circulation, appropriation, and transnational sharedness that music genres create. This section examines the entangled forces of people, mediations, policies, and racial imagination that contribute to the wide circulation of music.
Music Makers on the Move: Musical Biographies in Context
Early in the history of popular music studies, scholars engaged in empirical research on the pathways that individuals, groups, or networks used to spread and appropriate music. This work revealed the way sounds and genres were displaced over large areas, resignified in new places, and entangled with specific historical forces, social hierarchies, and the agency of individuals. In the field of jazz studies, for example, sociologist Stéphane Dorin (2010) described how, in colonial-era India, the progressive and incomplete integration of jazz in the cultural landscape of Calcutta was mainly achieved by Anglo-Indian musicians. Situated between the colonizers and a tiny Indian elite, the marginal status of these performers allowed them to act as mediators who contributed “more than any other social group to the transmission of cultural forms” (125). Using a related approach, historian Robin D. G. Kelley (2012b) examined the life stories of four jazz musicians who traveled between the United States and Africa to understand how their music produced a sense of freedom, liberation, and modernity in the context of global jazz history. Highlighting the creative conversations and tensions that developed between African and African American musicians and the forms of mobility that they practiced, Kelley shows how jazz served as a tool of social imagination during the period of decolonization. In these studies, attention to the life stories and mobilities of specific musicians served as a core means of comprehending the construction of popular genres and their appropriation for new meanings and purposes. It also avoided the tendency to read the music genres through the lenses promoted by the music industries.
In related research, the work of ethnomusicologist Carol Muller (1996; Muller and Benjamin 2011) on South African jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin highlighted the ways jazz music was entangled with the history of “coloured” cultural life during the pre-apartheid and apartheid eras.7 Exploring Benjamin’s period of exile from her home country and the intersection of race, class, and gender in her career, Muller shows how Benjamin created a distinctive musical style, navigated her gendered and Cape Town coloured identities,8 and negotiated between differing forms of musical etiquette and ideas about genre, such as “American jazz” and “African jazz.” Similarly, historian Richard Shain (2011) analyzed the career of the Afro-Cuban musician Laba Sosseh and unveiled geographies and encounters that would be invisible to approaches that focus only on market imperialism in world music. In the 1970s, Sosseh’s musical career advocated for the “authentic” performance of Afro-Cuban music in West Africa, while his later work brought his style of Africanized salsa to the US, Cuba, and the rest of the Caribbean. Shain argues that Sosseh’s story “contradicts the argument that economic structures of dominance always determine the direction and nature of transnational cultural flows” (136) and unveils how South-South cultural exchanges also shaped the content, messages, and encounters developed around transnational genres such as salsa. The cases of Benjamin and Sosseh illustrate how the appropriation of traveling genres in new places (jazz in South Africa and salsa in Senegal) should not be seen in terms of unidirectional routes from a place of origin to a host country but are better understood as rhizomatic, never-ending interactional dialogues made of multidirectional mobilities, which sometimes led artists from the Global South to transform the transnational world of music.
Perspectives developed about the varied appropriations of rap music have similarly relied on the analysis of rappers’ life stories and musics to understand the displacement, reception, and recreation of rap aesthetics in new social and political contexts. Both bio-ethnographies of key hip-hop figures and the testimonies of the artists themselves have played a crucial part in the development of hip-hop studies in the US (Spady, Alim, and Meghelli 2006; Spady 2013). They have served as a way to map the diasporic roots and routes of this genre, write emic, postcolonial histories, and recognize rappers’ role as cultural theorists (Alim 2009).9 In the field of global hip-hop studies, a focus on life stories and the work of individual artists has permitted scholars to understand the migratory routes by which hip-hop has traveled (Fernandes 2011) and the crucial importance of key, cosmopolitan individuals in translating foreign products into local words and meanings (Shipley 2013a). This biographic perspective sheds light on the ways individuals adopt hip-hop forms of music-making for various ends: to subvert social or generational hierarchies (Moulard-Kouka 2008; Niang 2013), to engage in religious practices against sorcery or pursue religious careers (Aterianus-Owanga 2017b; Degorce 2017), or to incorporate neoliberal ideologies of entrepreneurship into their identities (Künzler 2016).
In all of these studies, attention to life stories has allowed scholars to both overcome the pitfall of viewing abstract social structures as a force that determines the encounters between the “local” and the “global” and to understand the social hierarchies that concretely shape how individuals integrate foreign genres into their lifeworlds. In their collective methodological reflection on musical life stories, the research group Musmond (Le Menestrel 2020) argued that scholars should follow artists’ mobilities across differing networks, markets, musical genres, and hierarchies to help to overcome ubiquitous but problematic concepts advanced in the anthropology of globalization—such as cultural hybridity or globalization itself—and to provide nuanced and microethnographic insights into the ways musicians adjust to and negotiate the constraints they experience during their journeys in music (Le Menestrel 2020). In this context, the collaborative study by ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault and the Trinidadian saxophonist Roy Cape (Guilbault and Cape 2014) proves the value of mixing biographical storytelling with anthropological analysis to shed light on overlooked actors of various music worlds and the collective fabric of musical experiences and circulations found there.
For sure, studies that focus on musical lives will only tell part of the story if they do not correlate their biographical descriptions with the historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts in which their subjects’ lives evolve, the structural constraints they face, and the other agents and entities with whom they interact. Alert to this concern, jazz scholar Everett Taylor Atkins (1997) has warned researchers that oral histories of single individuals can easily turn into hagiography or legend. Research dealing with rap music has likewise argued that focusing on the life stories of successful musicians can produce studies that lead their readers to confuse the exceptional case with the norm, overlook the underlying structures and artistic collaborators that have allowed their success, or overestimate the ideal of “resistance” involved in the work of those artists (Baker 2005; Hammou 2016). To avoid these kinds of problems, scholars have suggested that we must view music worlds as collaborative ecosystems or “art worlds” (Becker [1982] 2008) and understand the ways in which differing agents, relationships, and institutions shape the creation of new music networks through the inclusion of foreign music genres. For example, the work of sociologist Karim Hammou (2016) has recounted how, in the 1990s, the commodification of rap music in France and that genre’s formation as a segment of the country’s musical market came about through processes of commodification that involved not only artists but also journalists and music industries executives, such as label managers and press attachés. Attention to the voices and practices of these diverse actors in the French mediatic and political landscape underlines the ambivalent status of rap music in France, where commodification is not synonymous with a fully fledged legitimation (Hammou 2016).
Other studies have examined musical intermediaries and cultural brokers in the history of music globalization, including the role of journalists and the media in the shaping of South African jazz (Titlestad 2005), the ways traveling intellectuals and elites spread Black music in the Pacific (Webb-Gannon, Webb, and Solis 2018), or the roles of cultural entrepreneurs in shaping the economy of West African hip-hop and its festivals (Mbaye 2011; Navarro 2018). Such studies often added nuance to the categories used in earlier descriptions of music worlds. For example, ethnomusicologist Geoffrey Baker (2005) criticized early research on hip-hop in Cuba that failed to describe the complex web of relationships through which hip-hop was “nationalized” there and that either used a simplistic rhetoric of antagonism between resistance and co-optation or considered the state as a monolithic entity. Contrariwise, Baker insisted that the “nationalization” of rap was the result of efforts of key intermediaries to attract support from the state and to “ground the idea of rap as a positive force for change and as ‘Revolutionary culture’ among the rappers themselves” (380). The appropriation of this movement was then “negotiated on a variety of levels rather than being imposed from above, constituting not a top-down process but a consensus forged through discussions among practitioners, key cultural intermediaries, and state officials” (395), as well as foreigners. In all of this work, understanding the life stories, interindividual networks, and collaborative worlds of musicians and cultural brokers represented a core means that scholars have used to examine the social dynamics by which the “inside” and the “outside” of a music scene are mediated and the complex power relations that they entail.
The Materiality of Music Circulations: Technologies, Mediations, Bodies
A second dimension of music circulation and appropriation lies in its materiality—the technologies and media that concretely support the movement of music genres and the relationships and meanings generated around these nonhuman agents and the “sensate phenomena” they entail (Wallach 2014, 150).
A concern with the materiality of music has always been present in the background of research on the circulation of music genres. This is especially true in the discipline of ethnomusicology, where, since its inception, scholars have studied organology and, more recently, the role recording technologies have played in both the diffusion of music and in the history of the discipline itself (Shelemay 1991). Studies of the introduction of cylinder and disc phonographs, radio, and cassettes (Manuel 1995) or digital technologies (De Beukelaer and Eisenberg 2020) have offered fruitful ways of analyzing the appropriation of music genres as they travel to new places and the social changes that they meet there. For example, Waxer’s (2002) work on the localization of salsa in Cali, Colombia, underlines the pivotal importance of discs for the construction of collective memory there and the assertion of that city as a new center for the consumption and performance of salsa. Recounting the long history of recordings predominating over live music in Cali, Waxer describes the emergence of viejotecas—Sunday afternoon dances that used for their music recordings of old Cuban mambos and other genres that had been popular during the 1940s and 1950s. In a context of unprecedented urban growth, the destruction of historical buildings, economic expansion, the introduction of transnational flows of capital, and other forms of historical rupture in the city, music consumption, music listening, and other embodied practices developed around recordings of Caribbean music “provided a cultural terrain that has helped people to maintain and situate themselves during continued struggles over urban space” (under “Introduction”).
Similar dynamics occurred in Africa, where recordings were often the most important means by which foreign genres diffused into new contexts. In the early twentieth century, for example, musicians in South Africa were first exposed to jazz through recordings of ragtime and other early jazz genres, which they copied (Ballantine 2012), as well as through radio and films that transmitted the aesthetics, styles, and sounds that came to represent Black urbanity and a form of modernity distinct from that of the country’s colonizers (Coplan and Wright 1985; Titlestad 2005). Later on, Afro-Cuban musics were distributed in African colonial cities through the G.V. disc series. Produced by the Gramophone Company (later renamed EMI) for the African market, records of Afro-Cuban music had a huge influence on the emergence of urban popular music across the continent (Shain 2002; White 2002; Dorsch 2010; Djebbari 2020). In the 1980s and 1990s, hip-hop came to Africa and the rest of the Southern hemisphere, and the story of its diffusion often centers on Africans who traveled to the US and Europe and brought back videocassettes, CDs, and magazines for friends and relatives, spreading the sounds and aesthetics of hip-hop to neighborhoods in African cities. In many countries, hip-hop culture first emerged through the reception and appropriation of style (Spady et al. 2006) in forms of expression such as clothing, other kinds of material culture, and bodily practices (Perullo 2005; Milliot and Noûs 2020), and this often occurred before the music was used to convey local concerns and before artists rapped in their “native tongue” (Saucier 2012).
As Waxer (2002) has noted, scholars in the fields of media studies and communication studies have a far longer history of theorizing the materiality of music and its processes of mediation than do ethnomusicology or the anthropology of music.10 In this context, work in the anthropology of media, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Actor Network Theory (ANT) in the early 2000s led to an increased interest in the role of mediation in the global spread of popular music genres (Piekut 2014; Hennion and Levaux 2021). During the 1990s, sociologist Antoine Hennion ([1993] 2015) profoundly reconfigured our understanding of the materiality of music by developing a form of social theory that reintegrated nonhuman elements and mediators into the analysis of musical experience.11 In the field of music and globalization, research by anthropologist Basile Zimmerman (2015) on electronic music in China used ANT to shed light on the ways that technological artifacts from the West were appropriated by Chinese DJs. Drawing on approaches from STS, he describes how technologies such as computers, software, and interface devices like keyboards impose a series of rules and constraints that partly determine the cultural meanings and activities of their Chinese users; at the same time, he shows how these technologies give birth to new forms of creativity, as DJs who are not trained in these technologies use them in ways their inventors did not initially intend. Zimmerman argues that we should think of the co-construction of technologies by engineers and musicians and the contexts of appropriation in which they occur in terms of what he calls “waves” (i.e., materials, tools, and their constraining dimensions) and “forms” (i.e., their cultural interpretations).
In the 2010s, there was an explosion of work in anthropology and other fields that employed ethnographic methods to examine the transformation of music production, diffusion, and consumption generated by the emergence of new technologies such as music streaming platforms, digital audio files shared through smartphones and USB flash drives, or new tools of music production (see Born 2022). Building on her long-standing interest in musical creativity in Africa, ethnomusicologist Emmanuelle Olivier put together a team of researchers to explore the globalization of African music in the digital age. As part of this project, Maël Péneau (forthcoming) combines approaches from musicology with ideas from STS in a paper—drawing on a PhD dissertation—on Senegalese beatmakers to explain how these creators appropriated the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer to create a sonic texture called “marimbalax,” which became emblematic of both the Senegalese genre mbalax and also of Senegalese hip-hop. Péneau shows how beatmakers progressively free themselves from the limits of existing technologies by writing new software for the DX7. In the process, they gain ownership of the technology, for instance by adapting existing sound databanks—as furnished with applications for music digital production or bought in specialized websites—and inserting elements stemming from their musical environment.12
By analyzing the infrastructure of musical mediation and the material connections that they involve, a number of recent studies of digital music in the Global South show how people, institutions, and communities participate in the dynamic reproduction of cultural meanings and in shifting power relationships. Often using ethnographic methods (Devine and Boudreault-Fournier 2021; Born 2022), some of these studies unsettle the normative theoretical framework regularly employed by scholars interested in the materiality of music. In this context, Gavin Steingo’s (2018) research on electronic house music in South Africa engages ideas from ANT on the power of nonhuman agents. Based on long-term fieldwork on the electronic music genre known as kwaito in the township of Soweto, he shows how technical accidents, which are ubiquitous in electronic music-making, help to define the values and affordances of musical objects and actors there. Steingo suggests that this context of musical fragility “does not lend itself easily to [the] dominant theorizations” of ANT (569), where “anything malleable or relational” (554) is celebrated. In contrast, Soweto musicians maintain the “relative autonomy” of the different technological components they use (hard drive, keyboards, computer monitors, screen) (557), in order to be able to mix them in different mishmashes depending on moments, rather than relying on a solid network of interdependent components. Steingo argues that for this reason, it is necessary to “develop new ideas capable of accounting for objects, relations, and mobility in precarious situations” (570), where the relative stability and autonomy of objects affords more flexibility and mobility, not less.
Taken together, these examples show how music genres, actors, and media serve as components in a network that deeply impacts the circulation of music, the situated knowledge such networks involve, and the complex or discontinuous relationships they create, replace, or transform in specific situations. Ethnographic attention to the emic definitions of technologies reveals the diverse ontologies of music and sound that such networks involve and the theoretical gaps that still must be bridged if we are to understand contextualized practices without reproducing superseded ideas, such as “global technologies” meeting “local cultures,” or imposing normative frames of interpretation.
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Although it may seem that the material turn in the research on the globalization of popular music genres emerged on its own, this work can actually be considered as part of a larger movement of scholars reflecting on the embodied nature of musical experience, the wider turn toward the affective and the sensory in anthropology (Feld 1990; Csordas 1993; Stoller 1997), and a renewed emphasis on ethnographic methods there (Pink 2009). Indeed, a number of studies show that the body, affect, and the senses play a central role in the resignification of musical meaning that occurs when genres circulate to and are anchored in new places. In this context, the dialogue between music scholars and dance scholars has been particularly important. Their interactions have helped to break down boundaries that compartmentalize our understandings of expressive culture and provide new insights into the webs of mediation and meaning that shape the significance of traveling music genres and the feeling of transnational sharedness that they generate.
One example is the work of ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson (2015) on salsa around the world. In it, she coined the term “kinetopias” to address the “dialectical relationship between localities and movement practices that are mediated through the body” (15) and to examine how one’s understanding of place is defined through movement, and vice versa. Considering kinetopias as “both conceptual and physical spaces”—and as both places and dances—her work shows how salsa scenes “produce local understandings of the world through bodily movement” (15–16). In related work, the scholarship on tango has revealed the complicated intersection of affect, passion, and power that plays out through the transnational circulation of this music genre from Argentina to differing cities in the Western world. Anthropologist and dance historian Marta Savigliano (1995), for example, has examined the structures of machismo, colonialism, patriarchy, and exoticism generated by the commodification of tango and what she calls its “economy of passion” in the cities of the Northern hemisphere, while sociologist Kathy Davis (2015) has unraveled the ambiguous negotiations of power that occur when people separated by the North/South divide and inequalities generated by relations of gender, class, and race get caught up together on the dance floor and undergo deeply moving affective experiences. In an evocative book on the passion for American dance forms and jazz music in interwar Paris, historian Sophie Jacotot (2013) explores related themes, as do other works on the diffusion of “exotic dances” in that city (e.g., Décoret-Ahiha 2004). Jacotot highlights how the dansomanie (“dansomania”) that arose in Paris’s festive nightlife led to encounters between classes and races that did not usually interact and also led to new ways for dancers to consider Black aesthetics and their own bodies. The result was an ambiguous oscillation between exotic fascination and racist disgust in which French media and other forms of public discourse rejected the new dances, even as they were deeply incorporated into the nightlife habits of everyday citizens.
In music and dance studies, as well as in anthropology, the analysis of the embodied aspect of music appropriation has helped scholars avoid monolithic narratives and simplified representations of the contradictory voices, feelings, and moralities that emerge around the adoption of foreign aesthetics. Here, dance scholars remind us to avoid reductive homologies between music and dance and pay close attention to the distinct ways these two forms of expressive culture may circulate. Examining the transmission of tango from Argentina to France, sociologist Christophe Apprill (2015) argues that music and dance circulations should be approached using different theoretical lenses, since auditors and dancers experience music in differing ways, each involving its own forms of participation, spatiality, and relationality between individuals. While the ontology of music emphasizes space, an attention to instrumentation, and the act of listening, dance highlights physicality, ephemerality, and practice. As a consequence, “dance does not flow like music”: “the ontology of music and dance determines the conditions of appropriation, and therefore, distinct scales of magnitude in terms of their globalization” (Apprill 2015, para. 36).13 Apprill suggests that, in the case of dance, the notion of mediation advanced by Hennion to understand music should be replaced by the idea of “engagement,” which is a better lens for comprehending the body’s involvement in dance. While dance and music circulate in differing ways and rely on distinctive forms of ontology, further dialogues between music scholars and dance scholars can help us avoid logocentric approaches to music and prevent us from relying too heavily on semiotic theories, which can obscure the differences between these expressive forms. Embarking on such dialogues will allow us to account for the embodied and affective means through which foreign musics and dances are anchored in local hierarchies, social boundaries, and cultural representations.
Music Politics and Policies, within and beyond the Nation-State
Mobile genres and their medias travel and evolve in interaction with a broader environment of state ideologies and cultural policies, which the diverse agents operating in a given music world implement, transmit, negotiate, or transgress. The domain of politics and cultural policy has been a key area of research for scholars of the globalization of popular music genres, and two topics have been central here—cultural diplomacy and the institutionalization of music through national and international programs.
Research on the use of music in cultural diplomacy has sought to understand how music mobilities are entangled with state programs, used as a form of soft power and to promote state ideologies during international conflicts (Gienow-Hecht 2009; Mikkonen and Suutari 2017; Ramel and Prévost-Thomas 2018). In a recent book, musicologist Mark Katz (2019) reviewed the evolution of these programs in American geopolitical history, including the incorporation of hip-hop in its cultural diplomacy, which was pursued in a timid fashion and slowly increased over time. These state programs, which began in 1941, were initially carried out by the Division of Cultural Relations to help counter threats to national security like European fascism and promote a positive image of the country abroad. During the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Division of Cultural Relations sent American jazz artists to foreign countries to perform concerts and participate in artistic gatherings. These programs reflected a deep contradiction in American life: while the programs employed Black artists such as Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie to serve as cultural ambassadors and depict America as an inclusive democracy, the brutality of segregation, in law and in fact, raged throughout the country. Hip-hop entered US cultural diplomacy programs at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when 9/11, terrorism, and the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq generated a surge of popular interest in international relations and there was an increased need to restore the country’s image on the world stage. Katz’s engaged ethnography of the hip-hop cultural diplomacy program underlines the “subversive complicity” of American hip-hop artists in US state politics (Grosfoguel 1997, 68, quoted in Katz 2019, 130) and the way in which some of them chose to take advantage of state agencies to defend their interests and artistic visions. As other research on hip-hop in American cultural diplomacy has shown, the ideal of musical universality upon which these programs rely often generates tensions and exacerbated the hierarchical power relations that structure local scenes’ access to international markets (Salois 2015).
American cultural diplomacy played an important role in publicizing the country’s jazz and hip-hop artists around the world and promoting the idea that those genres can enhance cross-cultural dialogue and peacemaking, and the US is not the only nation-state to employ music in this way. Many countries use such programs to improve their image abroad and serve other interests. Cultural exchanges between African countries and the Soviet bloc were common during the Cold War (Gilbert 2007), and these kinds of programs were also used to forge strong bonds between Cuba and Africa (Djebbari 2015). Cultural diplomacy was also prevalent in the relationships between France and its former colonies. Continuing the earlier efforts of French missionaries and colonial administrators to establish local orchestras and art groups there (Thioub and Benga 1999; Aterianus-Owanga 2013, 52–64), France developed a number of cultural centers (the so-called centres culturels français [CCFs]) during the postcolonial period. While musical institutions were used in earlier times to spread colonial propaganda and diminish anticolonial sentiments among African elites (Cuomo 2020), these organizations mutated after decolonization to become important sites of artistic professionalization (Amico and Despres 2016) and for confrontations between the expectations of international markets and the hopes of local artists who sought career opportunities in the North (Cuomo 2020). In the 1990s, these organizations hosted the first rap events in West and Central Africa, and later they supported hip-hop festivals. In so doing, these institutions helped to legitimate African hip-hop as an authentic form of cultural production and spread standards of its evaluation by hosting exchanges with representatives of the transnational music industries (Aterianus-Owanga 2017a). The work of anthropologist Anna Cuomo (2020) on the “underground” hip-hop scene of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, underlined how the CCF there, which was later renamed L’Institut français, organized rap competitions and events to support a generation of rappers who contributed to the dissemination of francophonie (French language and culture). The CCF used rap as a form of soft power to promote a representation of France as the vehicle for freedom of speech and human rights, and, paradoxically, it supported some artists’ critiques of local governance and neocolonial dynamics on the continent. As Baker (2005) has noted in a different context, ethnographic work is uniquely equipped to reveal the diverse agents that gather around cultural institutions and the internal contradictions and fractures that emerge among these agents.
It is not only international cultural programs of Western countries that shape the way music is circulated and appropriated. Government policy within the nation and national media can also play a role here, for instance by representing music as a foreign threat to the country’s culture. In Japan, the early reception of jazz was tinted with anxieties that this music would lead to a wider Americanization there (Atkins 1997). Even though jazz became popular in Japan in the 1930s, a series of official proclamations were made to ban this music during the Second World War. While this did not prevent Japanese jazz musicians and aficionados from maintaining their activities, critics in the media and government partly shaped the representation of this genre, and they did so in the context of other debates occurring in the country at that time, illustrating how the introduction of a foreign music genre can shape the way a nation, its boundaries, and its relationship to the rest of the world are imagined.
Ghana offers a very different example of the ideological and political shaping of the reception of foreign music genres. Highlife music is a complex mix of local styles of performance, oral music traditions, and genres principally spread by US or British colonizers.14 Across the span of the twentieth century, the production and evolution of highlife was the result of a series of musical hybrids that were superimposed on top of one another, and state cultural policy and official ideologies had a major influence on these processes (Collins 2005). The project of Africanization led by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and the subsequent cultural policies he developed understood highlife in the country as an important support for anticolonial struggle, a means of constructing a transethnic national identity, and one part of a larger, pan-African music genre, which drew on elements from musical styles in neighboring countries. During the 1960s, highlife hybridized with soul music and other American styles and was shaped by the independence movements and political currents of the time. In the 1980s, the reception of hip-hop in Ghana and its incorporation into highlife has in certain respects continued this history of hybridization. However, anthropologist Jesse Shipley (2013a) has shown that this latter wave of hybridization occurred in a new and very different political context, one marked by the authoritarian regime of the president Jerry John Rawlings and tensions among factors including strong state centralization, the privatization of government institutions, and the growth of the market economy. In other countries, the emergence of hip-hop scenes occurred through private actors and outside of government institutions, but Shipley illustrates how Ghanaian state institutions fostered the Indigenization of hip-hop there in ways that were sometimes intentional and sometimes unintentional. Shipley focuses particular attention on the role of Ghana’s National Theatre, where rap competitions in local languages, which began in 1994, “supported the transformation of rap into a locally acceptable form” (53).15
Much could be said on this topic about the progressive institutionalization of hip-hop and its representation as part of France’s national patrimony, which has been analyzed by several scholars. For example, starting in the 1990s, French hip-hop became the target of urban policy makers and the territorial division of the Ministry of Culture, which sought to pacify the banlieues (suburban spaces associated with the lower classes and minorities) and promote hip-hop as an alternative to urban violence (Lafargue de Grangeneuve 2008). This process included an attempt at what might be called the anesthetizing of hip-hop by encouraging the removal of violent images and disruptive themes from its lyrics and connecting it to “legitimate” aesthetics. This led to what sociologists Nathalie Heinich and Roberta Shapiro (2012) described as a process of “artification,” by which hip-hop forms were domesticated. Other research shows how artists progressively responded to this process with tactics of adaptation, resistance, or complicity and how all of this resulted in new aesthetics and the inclusion of new expressive forms in their practice, such as contemporary dance and ballet (Shapiro 2004; Milliot 2006; McCarren 2013). This transformation was not unilateral, and the vocabulary, taxonomies, and structures of the cultural institutions themselves ended up being transformed by this process (Lafargue de Grangeneuve 2008).
Hip-hop’s transformation into a “cultural good” and recognized “art” occurred through the action of public institutions, intellectuals, scholars, specialized media, and museums, but for the most part, UNESCO has not been involved in the legitimation of this music. Nevertheless, UNESCO has engaged with other genres, and other international cultural institutions also influenced the ways that popular music genres are perceived. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the period before UNESCO’s cultural programs became so prominent, Pan-African festivals were pivotal on the African continent (Apter 2005; Malaquais and Vincent 2016; Murphy 2016; Edjabe and Adesokan 2019). They served to enhance both public and political recognition of popular music genres and orient the definition of cultural forms according to certain ideological paradigms. In 2003, UNESCO began work to establish lists of expressive forms that it would consider to be part of humanity’s “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH), and this has affected the way that music genres are labeled and the policies that shape their circulation (Norton and Matsumoto 2018; Broclain, Haug, and Patrix 2019). In fact, “this new regime of ‘intangible heritage’ seems to have become the dominant paradigm” in many states (Broclain et al. 2019, 3). For tango, for example, inclusion on UNESCO’s ICH list led to an opportunistic recuperation of this popular music and dance genre in Argentina, both by the government and by a proliferation of independent actors and events that used the label with their own interpretation (Broclain 2012).
In sum, the scholarship in this area shows how the diffusion of transnationally connected music genres was boosted or used strategically by nation-states to promote their image abroad through cultural diplomacy programs. States also transformed global genres to serve the ideologies of national or regional institutions. In many cases, the introduction of these foreign popular music genres into a country contributed to the transformation of political conditions and structures, as well as to changes in the aesthetics and conventions of those genres. In many ways, music and politics informed one another, in both their form and their content.
Transnational Race Scapes and the Racial Imagination of Popular Music Genres
A final area of research on the transnational sharedness that traveling music genres convey is the issue of racial categorization and identifications. In this section, I understand “race” as a social and historical construct that has concrete effects on social structures and people’s lives, and my thinking on this topic has been informed by the work of South African scholar Crain Soudien (2004). Soudien has developed a notion he calls the “race scape” to understand how race has remained the “almost unchallenged lens through which South African difference is understood” (110). Widely applicable beyond its original context, this idea helps scholars think about the historically specific ways that race is constructed in particular places, the meanings that it is given there, and its interaction with wider racial imaginaries. The literature I discuss in this section emphasizes two kinds of relationship between music and race. First, scholars have studied the way racialized imaginings of otherness organize music markets and the forms of commodification and reception they entail. Second, scholars have explored how genres such as jazz and hip-hop supported struggles against anti-Black racism and colonialism and, as a result, were used to assert Black or African modernities.
Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman’s 2002 edited book Music and the Racial Imagination made an important contribution to this literature by helping scholars come to grips with the persistence and reinvention of race in contemporary worlds of music. In their introduction, they argue that ethnomusicology’s commitment to the notion of culture developed as a “response to pernicious theories of race” (4) but also led to a lack of critical perspective on ways that ideas about race shape music. Defining the “racial imagination” as “the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity” (5), they showed that the “world music” genre, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and its pretense of hybrid authenticity reproduced and fetishized doctrines of sameness and difference rooted in long-standing ideas about race in the Western unconscious.
Contemporaneous with or after the publication of Radano and Bohlman’s book, music scholars have, in differing ways, tackled the entanglement of racial imaginaries with the production, reception, and commodification of music (Mahon 2019). Situated case studies by ethnomusicologists and anthropologists showed, for example, how the production of an “African” sound in South African music was bound up with local conceptions of race, class, and ethnicity (Meintjes 2003). Another investigated how music was used to construct a national identity in multicultural Colombia by modifying the musical traditions of Black communities and regions and absorbing them into a wider national music (Wade 2000). Meanwhile, studies of the global diffusion of hip-hop have explored the interactions between traveling music genres and local configurations of race and Blackness, a scholarly project that grew with the development of global hip-hop studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Haupt 2001; Fernandes 2003; Basu and Lemelle 2006; Condry 2007; Perry 2008).
In earlier sections of this essay, I focused on phenomena that applied to all genres of globalizing music, but here I focus on one issue discussed by scholars of hip-hop—“transnational Blackness” (Marable and Agard-Jones 2008). While my focus narrows to one musical style, the processes I am analyzing have analogies and similarities with other genres where music and race co-penetrate. Here, I show how the phenomenon of transnational Blackness allowed hip-hop to circulate to and resonate in a wide range of new, often postcolonial, contexts, creating a sense of global sharedness, and mixing with local imaginations of race and class.
In examining this topic, it is important to remember that the construction of hip-hop in the United States as a defiantly Black music and its association with certain (stereotypic) representations of African American populations itself partly resulted from the inspiration that rappers and figures in Black nationalist political movements took from each other (Decker 1993). Further, this vision of hip-hop as a Black music was also shaped by interactions among hip-hop culture, the media, record labels, and other parts of the US music industry, where music genres are often segmented along racial lines (Brackett 2016). Rap’s integration into other sectors of the music industry tended to obscure the genre’s multicultural origins in New York (Rivera 2003), and some critics have claimed that rap’s diffusion relied on the commodification of exoticizing and voyeuristic representations of an imagined Black street culture for White and upper-class audiences (Samuel 1991; Kelley 2012a).
Over the courses of its diffusion, this vision of rap as racialized music and its use as a tool for affirming Black nationalism gave rise to varied appropriations and understandings of Blackness. A 2008 essay by Marc D. Perry made an important contribution to research on the coupled transnationalization of hip-hop and Blackness by comparing the ways that hip-hop was appropriated in Cuba, Brazil, and South Africa. He demonstrated that in all three contexts, young rappers used hip-hop to define ideas about the Black self and discuss local experiences of racialization (Perry 2008); conversely, he explained that these young rappers from different cities around the world contributed to the production of images and discourses that imagined a global Black hip-hop community (see also Basu and Lemelle 2006).
As the literature on this topic developed, other case studies deepened our understanding of the local racial categorizations and political struggles that were produced in parallel to the growth of hip-hop as a global movement (Pardue 2004; Helenon 2006; Perry 2016; Webb-Gannon, Webb, and Solis 2018), which was itself part of the longer history of Black identification and re-Africanization through music.16 The cases described in East Africa by anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi (2009) provided other good examples of dialogues between transnational Blackness and local African struggles generated around the reception of hip-hop. Ntarangwi looks at the work of the group Kalamashaka, a pioneer of Kenyan Swahili rap. For the youth of Dandora’s slums, Kalamashaka represented a “cool” alternative to crime and street life, denounced colonialism, and expressed young people’s disillusionment with independence, corruption, and the violence of the slums. In the group’s lyrics and also in the name they gave to the East African rappers’ collective they created (Ukooflani Mau Mau), they referenced the Mau Mau revolutionary nationalist movement that rose up against the British occupation between 1952 and 1960. By introducing their album Ni Wakati with a speech by Malcolm X that references the Mau Mau, Kalamashaka linked local and global icons of Black political struggles, sonically uniting the transhistorical conversations between Africa and the Americas—and illustrating how they inspired one another.
While rap and hip-hop used iconic symbols and ideological discourses to encourage audiences to identify with a global Blackness, the music also became a lever for wider movements of cultural revitalization and African cultural nationalism. For some rappers, denouncing the misdeeds of colonization and proclaiming a Black or African pride led them to revalorize Indigenous knowledge, languages, and local religions, which were brandished as proof of a reconquered Africanity (Niang 2018). In the wake of the appropriation of rap in the 1990s, for example, certain artists in Gabon sought to “return to their roots” and re-Africanize their culture through Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism (Aterianus-Owanga 2017a). These ambitions were manifested in rap music and also in the new relationships to Indigenous religions and local initiation societies that some rappers of this generation asserted. Here, reinventing local traditions and connecting them to global Blackness was a means of being legitimated by older musicians, local media, and cultural institutions; at the same time, rap artists that included traditional or Africanized elements in their music drew the interest of world music markets, French cultural institutions, and an international audience (Navarro 2018; Cuomo 2020). This process constituted a strategic alignment of different expectations, such as those of rappers, journalists, international festival programmers, and local cultural workers, resulting in what Karim Hammou (2023), drawing on classical work by sociologist Herbert Blumer, referred to as “joint action.”
In this context, scholars have shown that the experience and understanding of race expressed through hip-hop and other genres labeled as “Black” was in each place imbricated in its specific historical contexts and the ideologies used there to manage race, class, gender, and space. In South Africa, media scholar Adam Haupt (2001) showed how the pioneering rap groups of Cape Town, such as Prophets of da City, used rap music to convey “a sense of the tension which coloured subjects feel with regard to conceptualisations of blackness” (181). In songs such as “Black Noise,” this group articulates the sense of insecurity and stigmatization of people identified as coloured by apartheid regulations, the instability of their social position, and their feeling of “not being Black enough.” At the same time, their discourse both draws on and transgresses Black consciousness and South African conceptions of race to condemn the traps of racism and racial categorizations. Haupt’s analysis proves the necessity of approaching racial discourses and the racial imagination in a nuanced manner and accounting for the ways Black nationalist discourse in hip-hop “retrieve[d] positive black subjectivities in post-apartheid South Africa” (181), which incidentally led to destabilizing essentialist understandings of Blackness.
In France, anthropologist Paul Silverstein (2020) showed that the identity politics of hard-core rappers responded to the “shifting political and ideological landscape of race” (49), which manifested through a language of Whiteness in politics and through discourses that tended to treat the nation as a set of conflicting communities. According to Silverstein, hard-core rappers built a ghetto-centric imaginary based on the invocation of a transatlantic hip-hop brotherhood in order to imagine and shape a sense of solidarity and belonging to place—one that takes “immediate precedence over their sense of belonging to the French nation” (53) and its discriminatory policies. Continuing Paul Gilroy’s (1993) analysis of cultural forms in the Black Atlantic, Silverstein argues that French rappers experience what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called “double consciousness” ([1903] 1989, 5) and reckons that this “derives less from a notion of race as a naturalised set of somatic qualities than from their common cité [to be understood here as similar to ghetto] upbringing and their cultural markers as cailleras [scum]” (56). Other recent research underlines how French rap was built by mediatic discourses over the past two decades as the emblem of a racialized masculinity that remains stigmatized, despite the normalization of rap’s presence in mainstream media in France. Communication scholar Marion Dalibert (2018) shows how French media coverage of hip-hop focused on the music of White rappers from the upper-middle classes and female artists, while giving less attention to non-White rappers. In this way, the media depreciated non-White and/or working-class rappers, whom they believed convey a virilist, sexist, and homophobic masculinity.
In sum, studies of local appropriations of hip-hop in Africa and its diaspora emphasize the twofold nature of Blackness in rap and the tensions raised by the racial imagination there. On the one hand, scholars have shown how the music serves as a tool for antiracist political action in postcolonial (or post-apartheid) contexts, where race oppression and class oppression are entangled. On the other hand, ideas about race shape the way this music is taken up by the music industries, music markets, and music audiences, who have othered non-White bodies and African cultures. The way that the media and the music industries categorize this music and promote ideas of authenticity uncovers how rap activated and renewed situated forms of boundary-making around race, class, and space, revealing the local texture of race scapes and the dynamic changes that occurred as the music traveled through transnational media and other forms of cultural exchange.
Conclusion: Ideas for a Connected History of Music Circulation
This essay has gathered a series of empirical and analytical insights that scholars have developed about the spread of popular music genres around the world. In so doing, it shed a light on the entangled, dialectical relationship between localization and global sharedness at play as music genres travel. The appropriation of salsa, jazz, soul, or hip-hop in various social worlds has resulted in an interactional process of resonance and cross-fertilization. In all of this, foreign genres are integrated into new urban or national scenes, transnational communities, networks, or imaginaries and are invented or maintained around shared practices, values, and aesthetics.
Early scholarship in this area insisted on the role of music markets and economics in the process of the musical diffusion. Above I have explored four other kinds of social forces that shape the dialectic fixation and connectedness created around popular music genres. Here, we have seen how people, technologies and other material mediations, cultural policies and politics, and race scapes informed the circulation of music, the meanings and relationships they gave rise to in varied locales, and the shared knowledge or ideas they spread. This literature sheds light on the question I raised in the introduction regarding the notion of “global genres.” If the breadth of diffusion, number of local appropriations, and sharing of influences across many locales by musics like hip-hop, salsa, and jazz has led past scholars to refer to them as “global” genres, the overarching trend in the contemporary literature has been to nuance this idea of the “global” and propose alternative concepts that can help avoid the pitfalls inherent in the notion of globalization. Rather than imagining global genres and world music, the literature has shed light on the specific forms of transnational travel, routes, histories, imaginaries, and encounters generated by peculiar assemblages of agents, technologies, policies, and racial imaginaries, as well as the contextualized ways people live and understand their belonging in social systems that cross borders, national and otherwise. This work invites us to think in terms of connected histories and of the transnational sharedness supported by music circulations, rather than of global genres. Just as historians insisted on a shift from “global history” to “connected histories” to produce an understanding of the past that would decenter dominant narratives and embrace multiple voices and places (Subrahmanyam 1997; Gruzinski 2001; Douki and Minard 2007), studies developed around the circulation of music genres underline the necessity of pluralizing our understanding of the circulation of these cultural forms, their meanings, and the places they link together. In so doing, we can follow the connections, encounters, and imagined solidarities that these genres generate while remaining careful to avoid any totalizing gaze, ethnocentric reading, or erasure of the idiosyncratic ways these music genres have been taken up and the forms of transnational sharedness they support.
Acknowledgments
I express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their insightful comments. I also thank the editor in charge of my paper, Marie Buscatto, as well as the journal’s general editors, Jocelyne Guilbault and Harris M. Berger, for their comments on the manuscript. The period during which I wrote this essay was punctuated by moves across continents and academic positions (more precisely, between Switzerland and South Africa), which undoubtedly inspired my reflection on this topic.
NOTES
1 For the sake of organization, I have separated my discussion into four sections, but in individual case studies, the topics that these sections address separately are often tightly interconnected. While these topics are ubiquitous in the anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical literatures, they are not the only ones found there. Due to space constraints, I have not devoted sections to other dimensions of transnational connectedness, such as gender and religion, although I address them briefly in individual passages.
2 In this essay, I regularly use both the term “rap” and the term “hip-hop.” The expressions are not equivalent, but they do have overlapping meanings. Rap is one of the expressive genres found in the broader world of hip-hop culture, which also includes DJing, graffiti, breakdancing, and fashion. The term hip-hop is often understood as a specific culture with its own set of values and codes. Today, it encompasses music genres other than rap (e.g., rhythm and blues), and rap itself has ramified into a variety of subgenres (e.g., dirty south, trap, drill, cloud). In many of the case studies discussed in this essay, rap music traveled along with hip-hop culture, and in some of these, the term “rap” has been used interchangeably with the term “hip-hop.” For this reason, I use both expressions in this study.
3 The number of publications on hip-hop alone is enormous. In a recent special issue of the journal Ethnographiques.org, Virginie Milliot, Camille Noûs, and I gave a sense of the sheer breadth of this literature by observing that since 2019 alone, the database WorldCat records 496 books that use “hip-hop” as a keyword, including 56 PhD dissertations (Aterianus-Owanga, Milliot, and Noûs 2020).
4 The rigidity of linguistic barriers and the organization of academic fields and networks around nation-states or language has perpetuated a disconnection between French- and English-language scholarship. I hope this essay will contribute, in a modest way, to the abolition of these boundaries.
5 In the literatures discussed in this essay, the notion of modernity is used to refer to a wide variety of time periods, ideologies, and concepts. Despite these differences, some common themes can be found in the way that this term is employed. In the context of the scholarship on Africa, it is often used to refer to social transformations generated by colonial encounters, such as urbanization, bureaucratization, the emergence of nation-states, industrialization, and the rise of new technologies, values, and art forms. If there is no consensus on the beginning or end of the modern period or whether modernity’s putatively revolutionary impact on social life was real or not, contemporary anthropologists and historians agree that non-Western encounters with European modernity generated various paths of cultural, political, and societal transformation and that monolithic visions of modernity or modernization must be deconstructed.
6 This essay focuses specifically on the literature on the globalization of popular music genres. For an overview on music and globalization in general at particular moments during the past twenty years, see Stokes (2004, 2014, 2018).
7 The word “coloured”here refers to a racial categorization specific to South African history. In this context, the term was used to refer to people of “mixed” racial origins, which might include those descending from Cape slaves, the Khoisan population, peoples of African and Asian background, and European settlers. Coloured identity was sometimes described in the social science literature as a kind of cultural creolization (Erasmus 2001). The definition of colouredness was also marked by the memory of forced removals in segregated areas (Buire 2010) and held an intermediate status in the apartheid racial hierarchy, one that was distinct from both the dominant White minority and the majority African population (Adhikari 2005).
8 Muller also examines the ways that Benjamin’s status as a woman marginalized her in the world of jazz. For related work on the topic of the marginalization of women in jazz, see Buscatto ([2007] 2022).
9 James G. Spady coined the term “hiphopography” to describe the involvement of hip-hop artists themselves in the development of research questions, ethnographic investigations, and production of life stories, or other kinds of research outputs. For a recent discussion of this methodological approach in global hip-hop studies, see Williams and Singh (2023).
10 It is important to note that prior to this time, two important works on karaoke—one in ethnomusicology and one in popular music studies—addressed the role of technology in the translation and adaptation of music in new contexts. See Keil (1984) and Hosokawa and Mitsui (2001).
11 Georgina Born and Tia DeNora were also crucial in theorizing the materiality of music. Exploring issues in music production, reception, and diffusion, they offered new ideas about musical ontology that illustrated the materiality of cultural objects (Born 2005) and shed light on the affective and aesthetic dimension of music experience (DeNora 2000).
12 Earlier studies of digital mediation in African hip-hop examined the transformation of power relations in the public sphere generated by the use of social media (Clark 2014), the memorial and archival practices that such social media use may involve (Aterianus-Owanga 2016), and the uncertainty raised by digital media’s ubiquitous replication (Shipley 2013b).
13 Unless otherwise indicated all translation are mine. The original French source reads: “L’ontologie de la musique et de la danse détermine les conditions d’appropriation, et par conséquent, des échelles de grandeur distinctes pour ce qui est de leur mondialisation.”
14 These genres included “regimental brass-band music of European and West Indian soldiers, classical and ballroom music of western style dance orchestras, the harmonies of Christian mission hymns, the guitar (and accordion) music of foreign seamen…and the ragtime and musical comedies of American and British vaudeville, minstrelsy and music hall” (Collins 2005, 17).
15 Other studies of hip-hop on the African continent (e.g., Englert 2008; Aterianus-Owanga and Moulard 2016) offer evocative examples of how state policies and elite domination have shaped the adoption of hip-hop in various countries and its inclusion in national music industries.
16 Before hip-hop, other genres were also important for the development of transnational Black identity. For example, jazz was pivotal for the construction of positive representations of Black subjectivities in South Africa (Coplan and Wright 1985) and other African countries. Starting in the 1960s, funk and soul music spread slogans of Black pride in the continent (Malaquais 2008), and reggae later created connections among Jamaica, Africa, and the rest of the world that involved a shared sense of Blackness (Schumann 2009; Bonacci 2014).
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