Senegal is well known for leading the charge on the négritude movement, and for being a central voice in the construction of Black modernities since the 1960s independence era. While its relationship to US Black American musical movements such as jazz, soul and later hip-hop has been eagerly investigated, Senegal’s connection to Latin American and Caribbean genres requires greater attention. Richard Shain’s Roots in Reverse is a love letter to Senegal’s Afro-Cuban music scene, an undervalued part of the popular cultural landscape both in scholarship on diasporic musical circuits and within Senegal itself. His approach demonstrates the genre and its advocates as a key component of the country’s cultural character by way of a detailed history of the development, neglect and rebirth of the scene from the 1930s to the present. He enlists a wealth of evidence: the structures of the Senegalese and global music industries; oral histories and interviews with former band members; analysis of Cuban and Senegalese instruments; the gendered dynamics of dance spaces; and collective affects including nostalgia to theorize the impact of this musical movement.
The book’s main argument is that artists who fought for Afro-Cuban music modelled a version of Senegalese modernity ‘on their own terms’ inspired by what was familiarly ‘African’ from Cuba, while also striking a balance with the kind of style, sophistication and creative flexibility they sought as a model of progressive society. Comparing the scene to other diaspora-inspired colonial-era and postcolonial phenomena across the continent, he posits that the artists ‘were using Afro-Cuban music to fuse elements of “traditional” Wolof/Serer/Tukolor cultures with French bourgeois mores to devise a new standard of behavior for a modern Senegal’ (p. 35). The book also puts forward a secondary argument about Senegalese exceptionalism with regards to the viability of artistic livelihoods. Despite the lack of state support enjoyed by musicians in Mali and Guinea-Conakry, Senegalese artists were able to keep an ostensibly ‘foreign’ music scene alive.
Shain offers ‘salsa cosmopolitanism’ and ‘tropical cosmopolitanism’ as a contemporaneous peer to the elite cosmopolitanism of the Western-facing middle class and the vernacular cosmopolitanism of the Murid religious diaspora. He demonstrates the underestimated scale of this alternative space, which has had a major impact on the population yet has had to fight against becoming a politically irrelevant colonial-era relic as new indigenization movements capture the Senegalese public’s attention with the emergence of popular neo-traditional genres such as mbalax. He shows this by providing a history of major Afro-Cuban groups, such as Star Band de Dakar, Orchestra Baobab and Africando, reminding readers that highly celebrated Senegalese figures such as Youssou N'Dour emerged from this scene.
In his discussion of the Senegalese affinity for some Afro-Cuban genres and not others, Shain argues that rumba – centred on drumming and associated with Blackness and the lower class – has been summarily dismissed by Senegalese musicians and audiences looking for a suitable model of modernity, sophistication and style. But his interpretation of these colonial ideas of Cuban music, reproduced by Senegalese in the name of sophistication, requires a more sustained analysis of the global links and circulation of racialized ideas of performance and taste. Furthermore, the book takes a celebratory tone on the discourses of ‘mixing’ and métissage present in Senegal, France and Cuba in a way that is, at times, unproblematized. Shain takes ‘mixing’ for granted as a goal synonymous with progress and modernity. His analysis of more contemporary events, however, relies less on essentialist tropes and more on a historical and material explanation to account for affinity and popularity. He shows, for example, how the popularity of Afro-Cuban music drew university students to Spanish after President Senghor required them to learn a language other than French. Ironically, Senghor’s initial appreciation of Afro-Cuban music as a student in Paris later turned to animosity as an extension of his dismissal of Castro’s revolution.
Roots in Reverse offers many historical gems about the music industry and the political construction of postcolonial Senegal that can serve Black Atlantic debates about expressive culture. It provides a framework for understanding the rich landscape of Senegalese youth’s love for kizomba, zouk and a range of music and dance. These scenes continue to link soundscapes in the digital worlds and nightclubs in contemporary Senegal, which draw from Francophone and Lusophone Africa, to the hemispheric Americas. Shain’s careful attention to the often undervalued and misinterpreted Afro-Cuban movement in Senegal humbles the canonized titans of Black Atlantic music geographies. We come to learn that music producer Nick Gold’s interest in pre-revolutionary Cuban music began in Senegal, and then led to his wildly celebrated Buena Vista Social Club project.
Shain’s book takes a refreshing approach to the construction of national cultural identity, demonstrating how what is ‘Senegalese’ is an ongoing conversation with the diaspora, West African regional actors and global musical trends, as well as a constant evaluation of ‘the indigenous’ or ‘authentic’ both in Senegal and in Cuba. At every step, he details how new cultural moments in what is trendy, revolutionary or stale are dependent on the broader political, economic and social context, yet are always on an unpredictable trajectory.
