Mande Music in the Black Atlantic: Migration and the Affordances of World Music Record Production

Abstract

This multi-sited (or “patchwork”) ethnography (A.L. Tsing 2011, xi; Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020; Marcus 1995; A.L. Tsing 2015) examines how Mande music is remade in its circulation through world music industry networks of the Black Atlantic. I study how world music record producers work to reconcile ethical, aesthetic, and financial motivations in sound. Turning to Toumani Diabaté’s Kaira (1988), an influential world music album produced by ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán, I argue that this recording has been uniquely consequential in defining the sound of Mande music for Global North publics, and then I treat it as a case study to consider the ethics of cross-cultural record production. I show how Durán engages with a politics of invisibility to prioritize the careers of her collaborators, to cultivate ethnographic authority in her recording practice, and to create avenues for broad public appreciation of Mande music traditions, even as she effects alterations on the musical practices she proposes to reflect. Next, I illustrate how one Mande musician’s expressive practice is transformed by his migration to the Southern United States and by his interactions with the music industry in that context. Finally, I present a sonic exposition of twenty-six Mande music recordings that I myself produced as yet another frame in which to consider how Mande music is remade in circulation.