Scholars of the emergence of the modern world have encouraged us to consider how that emergence has not occurred in a self-contained, exemplary, or singular way only within the West. They have argued, for example, that Western modernity emerged in ways critically shaped by its engagements with the non-West, from colonialism as provisioning the material, labor, and other resources that drove industrialization in Europe and the United States, to Western artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries drawing inspiration, sometimes unacknowledged, from vernacular artistic traditions around the world. They have reminded us that non-Western peoples have not only understood the modern in ways far from reducible to Western models and standards of accomplishment, but also sometimes in ways that explicitly interrogate such models and standards, in ways that principally entailed engagement with fellow non-Western peoples. Richard M. Shain’s Roots in Reverse: Senegalese Afro-Cuban Music and Tropical Cosmopolitanism considers anew these still underappreciated insights through a telling of the past and present of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal.
In the book’s introduction, “Sound Track for a Black Atlantic,” Shain argues that Senegalese people have used Afro-Cuban music to perform their aspirations of becoming a modern society. This understanding of the modern willfully circumvents French and other European colonial models by its embrace of a Black Atlantic musical tradition. In the first of six chapters, “Kora(son): Africa and Afro-Cuban Music,” Shain introduces this music in its Caribbean context as a point of departure into his exploration of the several genres that became rooted in Senegal. Son was one such genre. “Son’s success in serving as an artistic bridge between black and white Cubans helps explain some of its appeal to Africans in the 1920s and 1930s. They, too, were trying to reconcile the universalist ethos of the colonial European regimes with their more locally based cultures. Just as significantly, by the 1920s son music had become a sign of modernity in avant-garde circles, first in Havana and then in Europe” (8-9). The second chapter, “Havana/Paris/Dakar: Itineraries of Afro-Cuban Music,” describes the global movement of Afro-Cuban music in the 1920s, including to Paris, where Senegalese students discovered this music in the night clubs and other social spaces of the city. Shain argues for the importance of Afro-Cuban music in the development of the négritude movement. He describes one of its principal founders and future first President of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, as an enthusiastic aficionado of Afro-Cuban music in his days as a student in Paris. It was at the Afro-Cuban nightclubs of Paris that Senghor came to interact with many young Black Atlantic intellectuals like himself studying in the city, including Martinican Aimé Césaire, who would become another key founder of négritude. In addition to creating a space for these Black Atlantic intellectuals to engage each other, Afro-Cuban music in later years in Dakar shaped visions of négritude as understood and practiced by everyday Senegalese, if not by Senghor himself, who by this time as a renowned intellectual and president of Senegal came to privilege genres of Black Atlantic music with “greater cultural prestige” (namely jazz) and other aesthetic traditions over Afro-Cuban music as more appropriate idioms for the movement. Senghor viewed négritude as “a ‘high-culture,’ modernist project in dialogue with important contemporary trends in French literature and philosophical thought, like surrealism and phenomenology” (20). Shain also cites Senghor’s contempt of Fidel Castro as another reason for his more tempered attitude toward Afro-Cuban music later in his political life.
Chapter 3, “Son and Sociality: Afro-Cuban Music, Gender, and Cultural Citizenship, 1950s-1960s,” elaborates on these alternative visions of négritude as practiced by Senegalese citizens, often in ways unapproved of by the Senghorian state. It explores the record clubs in which young men in Dakar met to consume Afro-Cuban music and stage parties where—impeccably attired, and through studiedly proper interactions with young women—they performed cosmopolitan ideals about modern Senegalese citizenship. The fourth chapter, “From Sabor to Sabar: The Rise of Senegalese Afro-Cuban Orchestras, 1960s-1970s,” explores the Afro-Cuban musical ensembles that emerged during these decades, and that over time came to incorporate linguistic, musical ideational, instrumental, and other Senegalese elements in their compositions. Chapter 5, “ReSONances Senegalaises: Authenticity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Rise of Salsa M’balax, 1980s-1990s,” describes a brief decline in Afro-Cuban music in the face of questions surrounding its authenticity as “Senegalese” music and surrounding its fit in reflecting the attitudes and concerns of a newer generation. Afro-Cuban music’s decline largely coincided with this generation’s embrace particularly of m’balax. Shain also describes Afro-Cuban music’s resurgence, driven by a now older, politically powerful generation refusing to allow the music of its youth to simply slip away, as well as driven by its rearticulations with newer music such as in the form of salsa m’balax. Chapter 6, “Music Has No Borders”: The Global Marketing of a Local Musical Tradition, 1990s-2006,” explores a range of strategies through which Senegalese Afro-Cuban music has been promoted on the world music stage, including Afro-Senegalese performances of Afro-Cuban music in Cuba (“roots in reverse”). The concluding chapter, “Making Waves,” reprises the book’s key arguments, including the way in which the articulation of modern aspirations through Afro-Cuban music “has not been a monolithic project. Generational conflict, government cultural policy, Cold War politics, and an evolving Islam have splintered the modernity project into competing shards” (146).
Shain’s writing is fluid, informed and surehanded, drawing from a deep fund of experience as a scholar of Senegalese and Caribbean music. Analyzing interviews, recordings, audiovisual archives, and other data, he richly evokes a sense of how older generations of Senegalese aficionados and practitioners of Afro-Cuban music socialized with each other in record clubs, nightclubs, and similar spaces in their youth, and how the rules of modern civility, including gendered ones, governed their interactions with each other. He elicits a strong sense of this generation’s continued love of Afro-Cuban music as a musical metonym and instrument of Black Atlantic modernity in which Senegal is situated and through which this Senegal might come more fully into being. Precisely because of this skill in evoking this generation’s sense of yearning for the past and continued aspirations for Senegal’s future, and because his story proceeds nearly to the present day, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists may wonder about the more fully ethnographically situated terms in which Afro-Cuban music, m’balax, salsa m’balax, and other musical genres are performed and consumed in the physical spaces of Senegalese musical cultures today. But this is less a matter of oversight than of Shain’s focus and approach as a cultural historian. It does little to detract from Roots in Reverse as a fascinating, sophisticated, yet quite accessibly written work that contributes significantly to the literature on Senegalese and Cuban music; Black Atlantic modernities; and the felt and complex ways these have intersected with each other in the lives of Senegalese citizens.
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[Review length: 1134 words • Review posted on October 28, 2022]