Department of Music

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with hip hoppers in Dakar, Senegal, this talk outlines the historical trajectory of two distinct popular music genres – hip hop and mbalax – to complicate cultural hybridity as a dominant framework for understanding popular musical practices in Africa. I explore how members of the local hip hop scene understand particular practices of musical production as linked to particular, spatially defined experiences of modernity. Through self-conscious hip hop practices of sampling and musical quotation that re-insert indigenous music into a global musical framework, Senegalese youth distance themselves from what they understand as mbalax’s locally limiting hybridity. In doing so, they performatively re-situate themselves within an alternative, transnational modernity where Senegalese postcoloniality resonates with African American urbanity.

Catherine M. Appert, currently a Lecturer in Music at UVA, received the Ph.D. and M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.M. in piano performance from Rutgers University. She has conducted ethnographic research on hip hop in Senegal with support from Fulbright Hays and the American Council of Learned Societies with the Mellon Foundation. Her work centers on questions of globalization and diaspora, the ethnographic study of musical genre, and the intersections of music and memory. Catherine received the 2011 Charles Seeger Prize recognizing the best student paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her work appears inNative Tongues: An African Hip Hop Reader, the first published volume on African hip hop. In 2013 she will join the Department of Music at Cornell University as Assistant Professor of Music.