Conference Agenda

Wrestling is a compulsory ritual of manhood for young men of the Senegalese Jola ethnic group. Featuring signature rhythmic patterns, pre- and post-match dance styles, and friendly song competitions, it is also an intrinsically musical social field. Every young Jola man has personal songs made about his wrestling career, which not only reflect his strength and bravery but inspire him to embody those values. These songs accompany men through their lives, becoming markers of gendered reputations that persist long after their wrestling days are over. In this presentation, I demonstrate that wrestling music teaches young men to envoice Jola masculine aesthetics. Specifically, wrestlers learn to “sing hard” (kakijiyen laal) and “sing abundantly” (kakijiyen gnë), producing deep, resonant vocal timbres that both index and vocally enact masculine ideals of strength (sembe) and vigor (eser). In turn, singing collectively in a community of men feeds back to publicly affirm Jola masculine values and vocal aesthetics. In this sense, wrestling songs link individual lives and ways of vocalizing with broader cultural values. The heightened stakes of ritual performance ingrains these gendered vocal norms so powerfully that they carry forward into everyday speech contexts, teaching young Jolas that they must “speak like a man” and verbally “demonstrate rigor” at all times to generate respect. Based on interviews and observations of wrestling events during fifteen years of fieldwork in southern Senegal, this presentation contributes to voice studies as well as foundational research on athletics, ritual, and gender.

In this paper, I explore how the Beninese star Angelique Kidjo has developed philosophies and aesthetics that are both Afrocentric and eco-feminist over the course of her long career. Focusing in particular on two albums, Ayé (“Life,” 1994) and Mother Nature (2021), I draw on interviews with Kidjo and fieldwork in Benin to unpack her deepening ecomusicological vision. Notably, Kidjo wrote the material for Ayé when she was pregnant with her daughter Naïma, and the album reflects the ways that becoming a mother crystallized her identity as an artist-activist. She expresses this new positionality through the imagery of vodun Dan, the serpent who holds up the earth in the cosmology of southern Benin. I also discuss the ways that the album creates an Afrofuturistic sound world using innovative studio technologies. Kidjo’s album Mother Nature, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, finds her contemplating again the intersections of her own feminist position with the deepening environmental crisis, now through the sounds of contemporary Afrobeats music. I suggest that Kidjo is doing the work of an ìyálóde, a figure in Yoruba culture known as a “public mother,” a spiritually powerful, respected political agent who manages conflict, represents women in political affairs, and oversees the market. I place Kidjo’s work in conversation with African eco-feminism, including the Nigerian scholar Catherine Acholonu’s (1995) concept of “motherism,” which she calls an “Afrocentric alternative to feminism.” I seek to bring this discussion of gender and motherhood to bear on ecomusicological questions about nature, culture, and sound.

A recent more-than-human, multinaturalist turn in ethnomusicology attends to living, sounding beings, often positioning them non-hierarchically. Likewise, as Senegalese Islamic proverbs and stories consistently demonstrate, humans are part of a Divine community which includes animals, trees, and the ocean, among other creatures. But humans are considered unique in their place within Divine community because of their freedom of choice to disobey God, a choice which—Leopold Sedar Senghor said—makes the act of being human both “a question and a worry.” For humans imbued with this singular responsibility, listening and hearing are essential. Individuals must attend to the sounds of advice, social norms, and non-humans in the surrounding world, in order to fashion an ethical humanity where people live in community with each other, non-humans, and God. This paper explores the sonic constitution of Divine community in Senegal through proverbs, stories, and ethnographic work centered around the Islamic holiday of Tabaski (Eid al-Adha) in the urban capital of Dakar. In the days leading up to Tabaski, the city fills with the sounds of preparation, generosity, and sheep, followed by the sounds of slaughter and preservation, offering a temporal window in which to hear Divine community. This paper prods at the crafting of humanity within this community—as modern, sociable, and ethical—through the sonic.