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Paris Africain This page intentionally left blank Paris AFRICAIN Rhythms of the African Diaspora JAMES A. WINDERS PARIS AFRICAIN © James A.Winders, 2006. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-6004-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. “Portions of the text appeared as “Mobility and Cultural Identity,” in French Historical studies. Copyright 2006, The Society of French Historical Studies. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.” ISBN 978-1-349-52612-3 ISBN 978-0-230-60207-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230602076 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2006 10987654321 To my sister, Jane Winders Frank This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Part I Apparent Embrace: Les Années Quatre-Vingt 1 Sub-Saharan African Musicians in Paris and the Recent History of French Immigration 3 2 New Immigrants, New Music, 1981–1985 21 3 “La World Music” in Paris, 1985–1989 49 Part II No Longer Welcome? The Changed Climate of the 1990s 4 Anti-Immigrant Politics and Transformations of the Music Business, 1989–1996 79 5 High Expectations, Dashed Hopes: The Left and African Immigration, 1997–2002 105 Part III Millennial Mutations: African Parisians, Parisian Africans 6 Paris, Dakar, and Bamako: New Directions in Music and Migration 143 7 A New Politics of Space: Performance and Sociability 177 8 Culture and Citizenship for a New Century 199 Index 221 This page intentionally left blank Foreword “I want to know more about this,” you tell yourself, having encountered something that gets your attention in a new way. That’s how a topic of historical research can begin—yet another example of life happening to you while you happened to be making other plans. The topic of this book began in my ears. As a devoted listener who grew up with rock ‘n’ roll, I, like many music buffs during the 1970s, had developed a taste for reggae music. The distinctive music of Jamaica opened my ears for the first time to an example of a hybrid produced through the encounter of a postcolonial country’s music with Western pop (as I write these lines, I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Lively Up Yourself”). Eventually, I was to realize that I wanted to experience styles of contemporary popular music from as many countries and cultures as possible. By the late 1970s I was delving happily into music from South Africa, having been made aware of it through the anti-apartheid struggle I followed with great interest and sympathy. Friends who knew of my musical interests, including some who worked in record stores where I shopped regularly, were prone to call my attention to recordings they thought would appeal to me. By the mid-1980s, I was beginning to explore music from all parts of Africa. I found that some of my favorite new records were those of musicians from Central and West African countries, many of them French-speaking. I began to notice that quite a number of the recordings I admired had been produced in Paris. As a French historian, I sat up and took notice. As my collection of African recordings grew larger, I realized that Paris truly had established itself as a major center of African music, and I wanted to find out why and how this had happened. At this point (early 1990s), I wore two somewhat different hats. I was a French cultural/ intellectual historian preoccupied especially with twentieth-century topics, and also operated as a freelance music journalist, covering whatever genres or artists interested me. As I began to explore the topic that led to this book, my two roles merged into one. I decided that I needed to try to meet and interview the African musicians of Paris and those associated with their music. I envisioned a kind of oral history project, and hoped to make contact with as many interview subjects as possible. From music jour- nalism, I had learned how to contact musicians and music business people to set up interviews and had become more or less comfortable with my tape recorder. Thus, my project began, and I embarked on a long series of journeys to Paris, where each door that opened to me seemed to lead to a succession of other doors. As one person after another granted me an interview, almost invariably they generously supplied me x Foreword with suggestions of a host of other people with whom, they said, I should speak. I still remember the excitement and gratitude I felt many years ago as Jocelyne Béroard, singer with the hugely popular band Kassav’, booted up her laptop computer and pulled up a long list of fellow musicians and others for me to contact, along with their most up-to-date coordonnées. As I proceeded with this work, which introduced me more thoroughly than ever to the Paris region, I was operating in territory that the theoretical discussions and debates I had been immersed in for many years had designated as post-something or other (modern, colonial, etc.). Like many of my generation of scholars in the human- ities, I found linguistic, literary, and cultural theory exhilarating, and believed it chal- lenged the usual ways of doing things in such a discipline as history. And certainly the themes of difference and identity at work in so much of recent cultural theory have shaped my thinking in ways that helped lead me to this book’s topic. However, as soon as I began to consider African musicians making their way in contemporary Paris, I realized that the postmodern theoretical emphasis on visual representation and signification could not account adequately for those I wished to study. Their individual stories could not be reduced to the familiar postmodernist categories. The people I had the privilege to interview were quite remarkable. The musicians among them exuded the kind of spiritual sense of music’s power to overcome differ- ences that I had come to expect from other musicians I had known. The views they expressed befitted the cosmopolitanism of their lives. Embracing their adopted country of France and determined to continue with the lives they had fashioned there, they nevertheless remained proud of their African cultural roots. As I came to realize after further study, I had come into contact through my interview subjects with new models of citizenship and cultural identity. For me, this has become the most fasci- nating aspect of the contemporary currents of global migration. I will remain grate- ful to the people whose stories I have tried to weave into my narrative for leading me into fields of study (such as the history of immigration) I may otherwise never have explored. After completing this book, I returned to Paris in May 2006 wondering if I would find evidence of continued interest in African music. I did—at least an evidence of interest in the established stars of the heyday of Paris-based “world music.” Ads announced an upcoming Salif Keïta concert, for one thing. Also, although the concert was not announced in Libération—as once it might have been—I was alerted by the weekly Pariscope to a performance by Touré Kunda at New Morning. As discussed in chapter two, they were the first African band to “make it big” in Paris (ca. 1982–1983). Ismael and Sixu, the two original members (and twin brothers), formed the core of the group, augmented by seven other musicians. I arrived at the popular club hidden away in the back streets of the Tenth Arrondissement to find an over- flowing crowd. The band ran through their familiar hits from two decades ago, but the mostly young crowd did not seem to regard it as an exercise in nostalgia. They were happy to express their enjoyment of the music by dancing. I noticed a sprinkling of fellow geezers in the audience, probably the ones singing along with the choruses. But by far the crowd was composed of hip young people, multi-ethnic and taking for granted the new face of Paris. I stood next to a young man sporting a Kobe Bryant #8 Los Angeles Lakers jersey, its bright yellow lighting up the room. However difficult it Foreword xi may have become for new African musicians to break into the Paris scene, clearly the music fans of the city still held the prominent musicians of the 1980s in high esteem. New African restaurants were in evidence in several areas of Paris, including the lower Ninth Arrondissement, just north of the Grands Boulevards Métro stop on the Number 8 (Balard–Créteil) line. There, on the small rue de Montyon, Mamadou Coumdoul (profiled in chapter seven) moved his Paris–Dakar restaurant late in 2004. The new restaurant, renamed Le Nouveau Paris–Dakar, is bright and festive, decorated with Senegalese art and fabrics.

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