Conclusion

An Africanist’s Query

“Is Afropolitanism the answer?,” asks art historian Salah Hassan, pairing this question with the phrase, “rethinking cosmopolitanism” in his Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Lecture at the 2013 annual meeting of the African Studies Association.1 Hassan’s title raises two related questions: What is the problem posed by “cosmopolitanism” that suggests Afropolitanism as the answer? And, if we entertain the idea of the Afropolitan as an answer—or, rather, as a way of “rethinking cosmopolitanism”—how might we understand this idea, this identity, this mode of being in the African world? In his talk, Hassan explores these questions through the contradictions and ambiguities of diaspora, with what he calls “the privileged Afropolitan . . . and his underprivileged counterpart.” He begins with the visual culture of a growing African cohort of “free-spirited and young diasporic artists” whose work is exhibited with greater and greater frequency in European metropoles (though without, he notes, eliciting substantive attention from art critics). He then turns to the experience of clandestine African migrants in Europe, whose precarious lives—characterized by what he calls a condition of “temporary permanency”—trouble the elite social position of the former group. Hassan appeals to the possibility of an “inter-African cosmopolitanism,” implying that Afropolitanism, to be usefully employed as a conceptual tool, must negotiate this gap between center and periphery—between the haves and have nots—in the experience of expatriate Africans.

In this book, I have addressed the Afropolitan from a primarily continental perspective, from a world conceived, lived, and perceived from the vantage of an expansive and dynamic urban Africa. Like Hassan’s diaspora, my account of urban African public culture has also drawn attention to manifest contradictions and ambiguities. This is an Afropolitan world structurally adjusted by neoliberal economic policy, institutionally shaped by postcolonial political projects, represented through paradigms of difference, and capitalized through cultural commoditization. And, it is a world in which religious practice connects global ecumenes to local lifeworlds; public culture draws on myriad diasporic affinities and exchanges; and aesthetic practices—exemplified, in this book, by music—artfully place modernity in a necessary and irreducible dialogue with tradition. By calling these structures, policies, processes, and practices Afropolitan I have not suggested a new totalizing narrative of African-ness. Rather, my intent has been to draw attention to common and coherent patterns of intersubjective negotiation within fields of experience—of which a totalizing “idea of Africa” is one—which bind African urbanites, like the Malian artists whose lives and works I have elucidated in this book, to a wider African world.

In both accounts of Afropolitanism, diasporic and continental, there is an emphasis on creative possibility in contexts of precarity and constraint, of claims to modes of being-in-the-world that artfully reimagine what it means to be urban, African, and worldly, even as such claims must contend with the inequities and exclusions of endemic poverty, corrupt governance, inadequate infrastructure, social prejudice, and what Hassan calls the “Eurocentric Western stronghold.” What these correspondences suggest is a conceptual approach to the Afropolitan that productively engages with multiple scales of place and domains of experience in the African world. Further, this extensive, postcolonial and diasporic Afropolitanism invites a more robust Africanist response to, in Hassan’s words, “the insufficiency of classic concepts of modernity.” To conclude the present text, I would like to return to the categorical concerns suggested by Hassan’s titular query: “Rethinking Cosmopolitanism: Is Afropolitanism the Answer?” What critical perspective does Afropolitanism bring to the cosmopolitan episteme? And, what does this conceptual relationship say about Afropolitanism as an idea, a worldview, and a structure of feeling? I contend that the challenge posed by Afropolitanism to a certain kind of cosmopolitanism—and to a certain idea of Africa—is essentially moral, an interrogation of normatively exclusive, essentialist, and divisive categories of being. And, I suggest that Afropolitanism is best understood as a diverse configuration of existential projects in a world embedded in and emergent from an increasingly urban and extroverted Africa. My hope is to locate the foregoing study of Bamako’s musical art world within a broader conceptual framework, in which the Afropolitan ethics of a particular music culture may register meaningfully in other places, among other communities within an urban Africa at large.

Where the Cosmopolitan Meets Africa

“What is an Afropolitan?,” asks Hassan at the outset of his lecture. One of the answers he provides is simple enough: “Where the cosmopolitan meets Africa.” It is a definition rooted in Afropolitanism’s amalgamated morphology: a word composed of two sociospatial signs, “cosmopolitanism” and “Africa,” forming a whole that is both the sum of its parts and an implicit critique of those parts. On the one hand, the combining form “Afro-” unsettles as it displaces the cosmos of a universalist cosmopolitanism. Strongly tied to the Kantian ideal of a unified and peaceful world, the “planetary yearnings” of the cosmopolitan are not, in the words of cultural geographer Tariq Jazeel, “geographically innocent.” Such yearnings, Jazeel writes, “normalize universality as an extension of Eurocentric modernity” (2011, 78). In other words, the means by which such cosmopolitans address, make claims on, and engage with the world—through the language of global politics, human rights, transnational finance, tourism, humanitarian aid, intellectual property, and so on—assume a hegemonic Western subject position (Hassan’s Eurocentric Western stronghold).2 This echoes Achille Mbembe’s recent critique of Universalism (which he opposes to his own more nuanced, post-imperial definition of cosmopolitanism), associated with sentiments of Eurocentric nationalism in postcolonial France. “Universalism à la française is not the equivalent of cosmopolitanism,” he writes. “In large part, the phraseology of universalism has always served to conceal the nationalist ideology and its centralizing cultural model: Parisianism” (2010, 105–6).

Indeed, for many postcolonial subjects, the cosmopolitan universal is not easily distinguished from its metropolitan particular, the Mother City of the imperial world. In other words, a universalist conception of cosmopolitanism is strongly tied to a colonial world order. Or, to take the object of Mbembe’s critique, however inclusive La Françafrique (the idea of a privileged socioeconomic and political relationship between France and its former African colonies) might be, it will always have Paris at its center. The underlying postcolonial métropolitanisme of the cosmopolitan means that even relativistic efforts to reclaim and decenter the cosmopolitan by multiplying it are fraught with essentialist and, potentially, neocolonialist danger. As Jazeel puts it, “Attempts to pluralize our understandings of cosmopolitanism ultimately serve to reinstantiate the liberalism, rationalities and taxonomies of thought that are tethered to the concept’s irredeemably European and universalizing set of values and human normativities” (2011, 77).

Suggestions to qualify such cosmopolitanisms, and thereby link the Eurocentric cosmos to a host of fragmented Others, have also met with cautionary criticism. For anthropologist Charles Briggs, “Hybrid, vernacular, or rooted cosmopolitanisms are no more resistant to dangerous essentialisms—or to elitism and paternalism—than purification practices are” (2005, 95). In other words, to acknowledge the qualified—and, thus, partial—cosmopolitanisms of subaltern communities without, to borrow a phrase from Dipesh Chakrabarty, “provincializing Europe” (2000), or, in Mbembe’s terms, “decolonizing oneself” (French, se décoloniser), is to merely reinforce existing dichotomies. What is required, Briggs argues, is not a politics of qualification, but of embedding; what he calls a “cosmocular critical practice” that locates “the vernacularisms embedded in existing cosmopolitanisms as well as the cosmopolitan underpinnings of existing vernacularisms” (2005, 95; emphasis in the original). It is precisely in this sense of embedded criticism that the “Afro-” of Afropolitanism disturbs and disputes cosmopolitan universality and, in doing so, extends the Du Boisian project of engaging the world and its history from an African vantage (Du Bois [1946] 2003). It does not dispel difference—the Afropolitan is no more “geographically innocent” than the cosmopolitan—but it does engender a new relationality predicated on an-Other’s perspective, experience, and mode of being in the world, that of the Afropolitan.

Yet, like the Eurocentric cosmos, the idea of Africa is also unsettled by its global extension. The essentialization of Africa takes many forms, but it follows a common logic (Agawu 2003; Mudimbe 1988): Africa is considered to be an authentic, pure and coherent source of contemporary cultural complexity; it is bound to a rural and traditional ethos; it displaces difference with narratives of changing-sameness; and it continues to conjure fantasies of exoticism and savage desires, caught, as it has been for at least the past 500 years, in the hegemonic gravity of the Western cosmos. From the perspective of the Afropolis—which is to say, many of the fastest-growing urban centers and diasporic enclaves on the planet—this idea of Africa, as a mode of identification and a category of analysis, must be reconceived. There is a need, in other words, to better theorize an increasingly urban, demographically young, internally diverse, widely dispersed, highly productive, intensely creative, and always already modern African World.

From Afropolitanism to Afropositivism

As a categorical intervention, Afropolitanism rejects the moralizing imperatives of a normative Eurocentric cosmos and an essentialist African ethos. As a cosmocular critical practice, Afropolitanism embraces the manifold moral perspectives that urban Africans actively adopt and adapt in fashioning their lifeworlds. That these lifeworlds encompass common challenges, concerns, styles, and sensibilities has been noted by several observers of contemporary Africa over the past two decades. Arguing for a paradigmatic shift in understandings of contemporary African-ness in the early 1990s, Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, “There is no doubt that now . . . an African identity is coming into being” (1992, 174). The basis of such an identity is not, he argues, the reductive ontologies of “race, a common historical experience, [or] a shared metaphysics,” but “the project of a continental fraternity and sorority.” It is a project, he claims, of shared cultural and institutional interests. Writing as an exponent of this “continental identity,” Appiah further states:

Listening in to these lifeworlds, and in dialogue with other scholars of contemporary African expressive culture, I add that these Afropolitans also share a widespread and well-established investment in popular cultural production, performance, and circulation (Barber 1997); they share a sensitivity to and engagement with the politics and poetics of diasporic soundscapes (Monson 2000; Olaniyan 2004); they share a critical awareness of the global currents of an audibly African expressive culture (Ebron 2002; Meintjes 2003); and their artists contribute, in myriad ways, to the (re)production of urban African social life (Perullo 2011; White 2008) and its place in an uneven global order (Erlmann 1999; Weiss 2009) through novel generic innovations (Feld 2012; Shipley 2013), as continental as they are diasporic (Charry 2012).

The stories and sounds related and resounded in this book offer ethnographic substance to this project of socially and sonically signifying an emergent Afropolitanism. Throughout, I have elaborated the multiple moralities and ethical projects expressed through the lives and works of Bamako artists, eschewing reductive typologies that reinscribe “local” and “global,” “traditional” and “modern,” “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” dichotomies (to which the “African” is too often either the embodiment or exception). In each chapter, I have emphasized a distinct (though not exclusive) social position, exploring the intersubjective, spatial, historical, and, given the aural orientation of the text, sonic parameters of enactment for that particular mode of being: urban, professional, aesthetic, religious, economic, and political. Social positions, I have argued, mobilize moral worldviews. They represent ideological orientations that systematize discourse and agency in everyday life. Being variably co-present, subject to shifts in moral interest and concern, social positions are also conditional. In thickly describing these contingent categories of a modular habitus, I have considered the way Afropolitan artists reflect on, represent, and reinterpret their social positions, often in the course of musical performance. This is where my analysis of the Afropolitan in Bamako turns from the social positions of moral personhood to the existential projects ethical agency, from strategies of social being to the tactics of self-fashioning.

This turn toward ethics returns us to the contradictions and ambiguities of the Afropolitan lifeworld. Interfering with and impeding ethical agency in cities like Bamako is an extensive and intensive sense of wildness, a condition defined as much by precarity, by hazard and insecurity, as by provisionality, what Hassan identifies as a permanent experience of the temporary (“temporary permanency”). As witnessed within the Bamako art world, this is the wildness of an inhospitable urbanity, a maligned professional status, a contested spirituality, an exploitative economy, and a corrupt and divisive politics. It is a wildness that fuels so much of the so-called Afro-pessimism that pervades accounts of contemporary Africa. Yet, the stories of Afropolitan artistry I have related in the foregoing pages testify, again and again, to a remarkable and persistent ingenuity, even amid endemic abuse and instability. As such, I present this study in the spirit of what historian Gregory Mann calls “Afropositivism”: “a real, empirical and ethical commitment to perceiving African societies . . . as lived, by Africans, now” (2013). Sustained attention to what I have called an “Afropolitan ethics” moves critical inquiry beyond anxious accounts of simply “getting by” and “making do” against all odds to encompass dynamic and transformative potentials of intersubjective agency across multiple domains of place and practice. Such tactical enactments of multiple modes of being across the social space of the African city constitute the empirical core of this work. My particular ethnomusicological intervention has been to argue that such transformative social dynamism resounds in the vibrant urban African music cultures that have garnered increasing attention from academics, journalists, and cultural critics attentive to Africa’s twenty-first-century lifeworlds.

Back to Bamako, and Beyond

And, Bamako is a remarkably musical city. Through voice, instrument, loudspeaker, and earphone, Bamako sounds. To relate the moralities and ethics of Bamako’s urban ethos without recourse the musical, to the urbanely organized sounds of this soundly organized urbanity (to paraphrase Blacking 1973), is, in my opinion, scarcely conceivable. Thus, each chapter of this book may be read as a particular take on a broader theme: the way musical sounds suffuse and produce a complex and coherent Afropolitanism. In Bamako, there is music in the social and material space of the city, giving voice—intoned and inscribed—to the possibilities and constraints of everyday life; in the work of urban artists, amplifying the dynamism of political and professional projects and personae; in performance, embodying an intimate coupling of ethics and aesthetics; in religion, invoking the sacred morality of an increasingly profane public; in the economy, resounding the contradictions of capital in artful counterpoint; and in politics, communicating—through circulating sounds and stifling silences—the ambiguous state of the postcolonial nation. Music is, in other words, a pronounced and privileged sign of a variegated and vital Afropolitan ethics, in Bamako and beyond. As other Afropoles resound, broadcasting their being and becoming to an increasingly African world, we would be wise to listen in, and, wiser still, to learn from what we hear.