In Abidjan USA, ethnomusicologist Daniel Reed links life story and performance analysis in order to investigate the mobile social and expressive worlds of Ivorian immigrants in the United States. The book makes an important contribution to research on performance, migration, and diaspora, going beyond one-dimensional representations of immigrants to bring to life the stories and creative expression of four charismatic performers. The book demonstrates that music and dance provide a powerful means for expressing layered, complex identities and experiences that are not adequately captured by singular ethnic or national labels.
Reed has been researching Ivorian performance since the 1990s. His first book, Dan Ge Performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Cote d’Ivoire, is an important study of the ongoing significance of masked dance performance in contemporary Ivorian life. Abidjan USA is based on nearly a decade of ethnographic research, building on Reed’s long-term engagement with Ivorian performers. Written in a reflexive and engaging style, the book foregrounds the voices and stories of four Ivorian immigrant performers, including Vado Diomande, Samba Diallo, Sogbety Diomande, and Dr. Djo Bi Irie Simon. For each artist, Reed provides an in-depth description and analysis of one of their performances, along with a detailed life story focused on their experiences as performers and as migrants. The book is accompanied by a multimedia website featuring video recordings of the performances discussed in the texts along with additional discussion and analysis.
Abidjan USA provides a valuable analysis of West African ballet performance as both a genre and a “nexus of discourses” that involves cooperation between different groups as well as intense competition. Reed shows that even though Ivorian ballet developed as a project of postcolonial nation-building, it has enabled performers to succeed in the transnational capitalist marketplace. A strength of the book is its analysis of the way performers have adapted and innovated within the ballet style in order to engage North American audiences. One important example is what Reed terms jembefication, or the growing prominence of the jembe in ballet performance. Additionally, Reed draws attention to the representational choices associated with ballet, and the way performers articulate multilayered identities, foregrounding ethnic, regional, national, pan-African, diasporic, or universalist notions of identity depending on the context.
The book also underscores issues of power and inequality in relation to performers’ transnational migration. Reed writes, “Human movement is not democratically distributed among contemporary global citizens any more than is the movement of capital – the single most critical impetus to movement of people themselves. The powerful have the means to stay put and move money; those without means move in pursuit of money” (5). Some additional discussion of these dynamics of inequality could have been integrated alongside the life stories which demonstrate the social, economic, and health challenges that the performers encountered. Some discussion of gendered aspects of performers’ migration would also enrich the analysis. As a whole, however, the book provides a powerful illustration of performers’ creativity and agency in responding to challenges; it shows that Ivorian performers’ experiences transcend straightforward labels and categories as they present their music and dance on North American stages, and build community in the context of displacement.
Overall, Abidjan USA offers a timely and significant contribution to scholarship on performance, migration, and mobility. Through rich ethnographic writing Reed demonstrates that performance provides a means to understand the layering of identities and senses of place in immigrant experience. In the context of growing anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States and around the world, more of this type of research on the lives and expressive cultures of immigrants is urgently needed.
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[Review length: 594 words • Review posted on June 14, 2017]