| In 1966, just six years after gaining independence, Senegal made a bold international statement by hosting a pan-African arts festival of unprecedented proportions. The World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) broke new ground by musically performing, rather than merely discussing, new postcolonial interpretations of pan-African cultural solidarity. After a four-decade hiatus, Senegal recently hosted a reprise of its legendary festival, in December 2010. The cultural memory of the unprecedented 1966 festival reverberated strongly at the 2010 edition, as past and present interpretations of musical blackness and conflicting imaginations of "Africa" collided in real time. Both the literal and mental cacophony of the festival's overlapping performances created a unique environment in which competing ideals of "blackness" were forced to confront each other. My project studies exactly how music gave both editions of FESMAN such explosive power, and how and why the cultural memory of the festival's premier contributed to African popular music's rise in the global imagination to become one of the most complex signifiers of "Africa" for the postcolonial era. |
