Social Science Research Council

"Sound and Subjectivity: Music, Moderninty and Mògòya in Postcolonial Bamako"

This study examines the social formation of personhood through music and listening in postcolonial Bamako, Mali. By attending to the performance and perception of music in Bamako neighborhoods, I investigate how postcolonial modernity manifests in the everyday lives of city residents. Among Mande peoples, the largest cultural-linguistic group in Bamako, “personhood” translates as “mògòya” and describes a state of being in which individuals are recognized to be competent members of society. In Mali today, “postcolonial modernity” refers to social, political and economic tensions between ideals of community, prosperity, development and nationalism and realities of violence, poverty, neo-liberalism and globalization. Music represents a salient medium through which the personal impact of postcolonial modernity may be empirically observed and analyzed.

In this project, I explore how musical practices express and inform mògòya through ethnographic and historical analysis of place, performance, perception, and language. My study of music and mògòya in postcolonial Bamako situates ethnographic analysis of musical practice within a socio-political history of Mali from 1946 to the present. Specifically, I will apply histories of post-war urban growth in Mali to questions of how urbanization has affected, and continues to affect, the everyday lives of Bamako residents as articulated in and through musical practice. This study will contribute to a developing anthropology and history of sound and listening by engaging with the ideologies and realities of postcolonial modernity in an urban African context. In Bamako today, multiple lived modernities are being felt, imagined and embodied through music. Embedded in these auditory practices are the desires and fears of uncertain, though no less resonant, postcolonial futures.