Yair Hashachar
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Musicology, Graduate Student
- Cultural Studies, Music, Ethnomusicology, Hermeneutics, Semiotics, African Studies, and 46 moreAfrican Music, West African Music, Sociology of Music, Music and Politics, Critical Musicology, Cultural Musicology, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication, Postcolonial musicology, South African music, Political and Cultural Music History, Black Music and Politics, Historical Ethnomusicology, Sound studies, Jazz Studies, Anthropology of the Senses, Music Technology, Sound Recording, Music Production, Senegal, Mali, Cultural Semiotics, African American Studies, Decolonization, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Music, Popular Music, Digital Humanities, Software Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Guinea, Sufism, Pan Africanism, Sub-Saharan Africa, African History, West Africa, Black Internationalism, Decolonization (African History), Nationalism and Decolonization, Transnationalism, History of West Africa, Islam in Africa, African Diaspora Studies, French Imperialism in West Africa, and Transnational migrationedit
- I am an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian of Africa studying interrelations between music and pan-Africanismedit
This article seeks to reassess the role of pan-Africanism within the national imagination of postcolonial Guinea under the presidency of Ahmed Sékou Touré. By focusing on the interplay between transnational and national dynamics within... more
This article seeks to reassess the role of pan-Africanism within the national imagination of postcolonial Guinea under the presidency of Ahmed Sékou Touré. By focusing on the interplay between transnational and national dynamics within two cultural festivals – the First Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers in 1969 and the Guinean National Festival – pan-Africanism is recast as a constitutive component of Guinean nationalism, enduring long after independence. Through an analysis of political discourse, discourse about music and recorded music in the context of these festivals, and primarily about the participation of non-Guinean musicians, the essay identifies state-activated forms of pan-African cultural citizenship that serve the Guinean state in imagining itself as directed towards the broader political horizons of Africa. At the same time, it suggests that, under the nation-state, pan-Africanism was entangled with the nation-building project and national patriotism.
Research Interests:
This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968... more
This article revisits the cultural history of Guinea in the three decades following independence through focusing on the musical activity of Miriam Makeba, the exiled South African singer who resided in the country between the years 1968 and 1986. Recent scholarship has illuminated the vast investment of the Guinean state in developing modern national culture as part of the process of decolonisation as well as the limited freedom of expression, imposed by the state, that subjugated local cultural production. While these studies have concentrated primarily on Guinean cultural agents, this paper explores transnational dimensions within the cultural politics of Guinea. It highlights Makeba’s emplacement in Guinea in the context of nation building, Pan-Africanism, cold war politics and black transnational cultural exchanges. By focusing on the disparity between textual sources and musically embedded meanings extracted from Makeba’s music recorded in Guinea, this paper recasts Makeba as a conduit of African-American musical influences in the Guinean scene. By doing so, it uncovers cultural spaces that were not subordinated to official state ideology mediated through print culture, and thus have hitherto been unrecognised in mainstream historiography.
