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135 7 Trovador of the Black Atlantic: Laba Sosseh and the Africanization of Afro-Cuban Music Richard M. Shain The phrase “world music” originally arose in the 1980s as a marketing tool to clear a space for non-Western music in “First World” record/CD stores. Over time it entered academic discourse as a monolithic label for global cultural flows. According to this model, new communication technologies such as records and radios promote the global dissemination of Western music. This dissemination stimulates the creation of new music forms, and some of this exotic music finds its way to the industrial West where the media machine transforms it into a consumer good to be sold locally and internationally. Most writing on world music assumes that this model is universally applicable but with a few allowances for local cultural particularities and economic disparities. Few scholars of world music, however, consider the extent to which a Western spatial perspective shapes their global cultural atlas. Just as maps produced in Europe make Europe look larger and Africa smaller because they are drawn from a European vantage point, so, too, do advocates of the world music spatial model assume an asymmetrical dyadic relationship between “major” northern cultures and “minor” southern ones. As a result, researchers too often present world music as either a manifestation of “McDonaldization ” (Ritzer 2010, 1996) or as an example of an emerging global village. The life of the Senegambian Afro-Cuban singer Laba Sosseh challenges this rigid, Western vantage point and undermines many of the facile suppositions on world music scholarship. Sosseh, from the 1960s until his death on September 20, 2007, devoted his time to expanding musical exchanges between the two devel- 136 | Richard M. Shain oping regions of West Africa and the Caribbean by skirting the usual international circuits of cultural exchange. In the 1960s and 1970s he championed a more authentic Cuban style of performing Afro-Cuban music in Africa. In the 1980s he reversed direction by pioneering the spread of an Africanized salsa to the United States and the Caribbean. In his last years he attempted to introduce his style of Cuban music to Communist Cuba itself. Sosseh’s career charts an artistic trajectory outside the world music paradigms of globalization and imperialist culture. An assessment of his work leads to a spatial reorientation of dominant world music models and restores agency to non-Western performers. Sosseh’s success raises questions about the demographics of global music publics and the roles played by Western cultural influence and economic dominance in molding world musics. As Timothy Taylor persuasively points out in another chapter of this book, world music audiences, from a North American or British perspective, overlap with classical music publics, sometimes even poaching from them. The world music group, though small, is highly educated, cosmopolitan, and prosperous. Taylor’s insight illuminates the position that world music performers such as Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour have come to occupy in contemporary U.S. culture. N’Dour regularly appears in classical music halls such as the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall in New York, and is the subject of major articles in newspapers including the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. One of the record labels he has recorded for is a part of the Time/ Warner media empire, which has ensured that his work gains widespread exposure and respect. In 2004 he even won a Grammy Award for the “Best Contemporary World Music Album,” a rare honor for an African artist.1 Although it would be easy to see N’Dour’s ascendancy to world music stardom in North America as archetypal for an African performer,2 Sosseh’s career demonstrates that N’Dour’s audience has not been the only public for world music in North America. The anticipated audience for Sosseh’s music in the new world was not comprised of “armchair” middle-class travelers or cultural studies theorists. Instead, throughout the 1980s, his music targeted Spanish-speaking, working-class listeners who then made him a minor star on the New York–Miami salsa club circuit. While a class-bound Carnegie Hall perspective renders Sosseh invisible, his achievement in the Americas, from an African perspective, is comparable to N’Dour’s and perhaps even more remarkable.3 Sosseh’s career also contradicts the argument that economic structures of dominance always determine the direction and nature of transnational cultural flows and that pervasive Western influence is always at the heart of world musics. Although...

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