Cosmopolitan Skills and the Dakar by Night. Engaging the Metropolis from its “Elsewheres” : conférence donnée à l'Université Columbia (NYC, mai 2011) (original) (raw)
Related papers
One must arrive at night. The plane flies over the Cap-Vert peninsula 1 a first time and begins a slow turn, flirting with the dark waters of the Ocean. Dakar then appears, emerging from darkness. The city shows its "true" colors: neither the Panafrican green-yellow-red, nor the Islamic green, but an electric and fluorescent candy pink glowing from the Casino du Cap-Vert -one of Dakar's most popular nightclubs. Unavoidable source of light and color in the dark, it captures the eye of the impatient passenger. This is a rather provocative way to set the Dakar scene while some commentators are currently debating about the rise of a theologico-moralistic conservatism in Senegal. As many agree to say, Dakar by night is thereby quite widely heralded as emblematic of the yombe-life 2 -the site of the falsification of an "authentically African/Senegalese Self". Within urban Senegalese popular culture, the yombe-life is what is not "really senegalese", what drives one appart from the "true values" and deludes the "malades de la boussole" ("All magnetized West", as the french writer Erik Orsenna puts it) following the model of an "Evil imported from the West/Elsewhere" ["mal venu d'ailleurs"].
Dakar by Night: Engaging with a Cosmopolitanism by Contrast
Migration, Urbanity and Cosmopolitanism in a Globalized World, 2021
Drawing on 20 years of anthropological research in Dakar, this study aims at bringing to light some ways of being-in-town that organize towards desires for being-in-the-world. It relies on a simple and yet substantial premise: a very large number of urban Senegalese youths express a strong willingness to move North, or West, while only a small minority is able to achieve such an expectation. The questioning focuses on those who actually stay, but whose modes of sticking here are deeply influenced by their longings for a larger world. Such configurations can be understood through the concrete urban cosmopolitan experiences they convey, which rely on inherently relational terms, that is: being cosmopolitan ‘rather than…’, citizen of the world ‘rather than…’, and so on. This relative, relational and contrastive cosmopolitanism emerges in the wake of constant non-travelers’ paths into the city, as compared to “frequent travelers” moving around the world. Empirically, these issues are addressed from the standpoint of the contrasted uses of urban temporalities, the nocturnal one in particular. The Dakar-by-night is thus engaged as a scene revealing the cosmopolitical dynamics that inhabit, cross or impregnate the metropolis.
Draft paper - Senegal and the 1966 "First World Festival of Negro Art and Culture" in Dakar
This paper examines the urban transformations of Dakar between 1963 – 1966 before the First World Festival of Negro Art and Culture using the archives of the newspaper Dakar Matin. The paper’s main finding is that Dakar’s transformations in the premices of the Festival were mostly based on the State’s concern to shape a touristic city. First, these touristic concerns brought about the construction of international infrastructures in Dakar, especially in the sectors of transportation, trade and housing. Second, the concerns led State’s to increase its control over local behaviours and even repress marginalized people in the city center since they were seen as threats to the capital’s touristic reputation. In the end, dicourses on urban modernit interact with perceptions of modern nation-state, in the Weberian sense.
Constructing Dakar: Assimilation, Association and Power in French African Urban Development
The Graduate History Review (formerly Preteritus), 2009
Founded in Senegal in 1857, the French West African capital of Dakar visually projected France's assimilationist vision of colonial power. This paper addresses the current scholarship on French African urban development by offering an introductory analysis of the interaction and convergence of assimilation and association in Dakar before 1914. It questions the impact this interplay had on the French understanding of assimilation as a category of colonial power. The impact of both cultural theories on African city-dwellers is also examined to highlight how this population responded to and transformed French colonial planning ideology.
Fashioning Dakar’s Urban Society: Sartorial Code-Mixing in Senegal
Sociologus: Volume 69, Issue 2, 2019
Fashion constitutes a vital part of material culture and is an expression of sociocultural and aesthetical practices in Senegal. Manifold features have shaped sartorial styles for centuries, with sartorial mastery interweaving local techniques and global trends up to today. Tied to a long history of bodily adornment and of the importance of textiles, fashionable clothing plays a crucial role in indicating status and various forms of belonging. The widely used concepts of sañse and métissage refer to the centrality of fashion in everyday life and to the cultural tendency to integrate and combine various ideas, materials and styles. In this paper, I suggest that fashion in urban contexts not only serves as a means of and for social distinction but also works as a social adhesive when analysing fashion through the prism of métissage. Hence, ‘sartorial code-mixing’ has become a decisive feature of urban fashion and, like language and music, has a role in the formation of an open-minded ...
Inside Dakar’s Musée Dynamique: reflections on culture and the state in postcolonial Senegal
World art, 2019
, a conference was held in Dakar to mark the 50 th anniversary of the First World Festival of Negro Arts which had been held in the city from 1-24 April 1966. The conference closed with the public reading of a declaration that the organizers would later publish in the Senegalese daily newspaper, Le Soleil ('Déclaration finale' 2016). One of its main demands was the restitution of the former Musée Dynamique to the Ministry for Culture. This was unsurprising, as the destiny of the museum had been a bone of contention between the government and key figures in the Senegalese cultural scene ever since the building was abruptly closed in December 1988 and handed over to the judiciary as the new home for Senegal's Supreme Court. Senegalese President Léopold Senghor had envisaged the 1966 festival as a celebration of Negritude, his concept of an essentialised blackness centred on emotion, rhythm and spontaneity. The Musée Dynamique, specially constructed for the event, hosted the festival centrepiece, an exhibition, entitled Negro Art, which featured over 600 objects of 'traditional' African art, borrowed from major museum collections in Europe and North America, from private collectors, and also from traditional kingdoms across the African continent. The objects had been chosen on the basis of aesthetic criteria and were designed to illustrate the richness of Africa's cultural heritage. For two decades, the museum lived on as the most tangible legacy of the 1966 festival: after the museum's closure in 1988, however, it became the most visible symbol of the decline of President Senghor's cultural programme and the occupation, appropriation and interpretation of buildings. London: Routledge.
Cities for people or the reason for social radicalization? Dakar’s special case
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2018
In West Africa, in particular Dakar, Senegal, due to the lack of coherent programs of control of chaotic urbanization, in the popular neighborhoods without any kind of infrastructure, a series of profound crises emerged in the last 15-20 years have led to an unprecedented increase in the differences between urban development levels and, implicitly, social segregation and radicalism. The issue of housing has a major impact on the welfare of the citizen, especially from a social point of view. The home is a private space necessary for personal security and isolation from the world, a space of relaxation and everyday life, one that should provide the necessary comfort for every individual.