Panel 31: What Does it Mean to Be Cosmopolitan? Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Trans-cultural Quotation in African Urban Culture

Urban cultural production in sub-Saharan Africa often involves the borrowing of aesthetic and narrative elements from foreign, both African and non-African sources. In the age of digital media, the infrastructure of piracy (Larkin 2004) allows the massive circulation of all sorts of media products, which in turn influences new forms of “cosmopolitan” urban cultures. The result of these influences is a widespread use of trans-cultural quotations, whose utilization responds to different strategies and objectives. Tanzanian “Bongo Fleva” artists often use American hip hop stars' names to hide their ethnic affiliation while Congolese musicians can refer to the international “war on terror” to express local rivalries.

The use and the misuse of quotations can make the audience laugh and can transmit messages that the local political environment would not permit, allowing the audience to gain a deeper understanding of the social context. At the same time, in some occasion, those same quotations can also misguide the understanding of the text, making reference to registers and messages that have no specific relevance for the local context.

The aim of this panel is thus to analyze the ubiquity and the ambiguity of trans-cultural quotations and to think, in a comparative perspective, about processes of construction of cosmopolitanism in contemporary sub-Saharan African urban societies.

This panel is the result of the network established during the Cadbury Fellows’ workshop “Turning in to African Cities. Popular Culture and Urban Experience in sub-Saharan Africa”, organized by the Centre of West African Studies of Birmingham and the Institute of Anthropological Research in Africa of Leuven. Thus it has also the objective of perpetuating and consolidating this international and interdisciplinary network of study on urban popular culture in sub-Saharan Africa.