Music as Cultural Text : Performance Traditions in West Africa and its Diasporas

African music’s most distinctive feature is the urbatextuality that transpires through its diversity and plural functions and the specific geographical, cultural, religious, linguistic, political, economic, and social contexts from which it evolves. This music and its circum-Atlantic offspring are characterized by wisdom, subtlety, resilience, and creativity. They are cultural texts marked by an openness to other customs and societies since they maintain authenticity that does not foreclose hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and other global human sensibilities. These elements have made West African music a transnational commodity and a source of inspiration and survival both on the continent and in the black diaspora. Such patterns characterize Pan-African musical traditions that thrive in several spaces where both plurality and authenticity are welcome. These characteristics are apparent in rich, complex, and vibrant musical cultures such as rap in Senegal, France, and Burkina Faso, Malian traditional music in Canada and France, hip-life and hip-hop in Ghana, Christian songs in Ghana and Nigeria, and ngoyaan, Cape Verdean cabo, and zouk in Senegal. African music’s distinctive features are also noticeable in Niger’s guitar-playing traditions and Tuareg oral poetry as well as in Senegambian blues that influenced their African American offspring whose imprints they bear. By exploring all these elements, the chapters in this book pay homage to the heterogeneity, memories, hope, pain, and humanity in the music of Africa and the black diaspora.