Subverting Value Chains Through Liberatory Cultural Production

Cultural De-commodification: Subverting Value Chains Through Liberatory Cultural Production

Luam Kidane Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal April, 2016

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

Abstract

Freedom is a perpetual process, which can neither be defined nor predetermined. Any attempt at freedom is therefore an improvisation, an experimentation. Cultural production can act as a site for this improvisation to take root: a viaduct from which experimentations in colour, sound, form, movement and letters allows for dialogue and explorations of liberation practices.

Liberatory cultural production is a process through which interventions, provocations, modifications, and proposals are made for the purposes of expressing, understanding, shaping, and interrogating political, cultural and social frameworks. This includes music, writing, movement, language, visual art, performance, as well as other forms of expression meant to inform and create how we relate to culture. These sites of cultural production which improvise freedom challenge the commodification of cultural production because they force a conceptualization of value outside of money, utility, exchange and labour. This thesis interrogates the relationship between value, liberation and cultural production through Marxist theory, Black Radical Thought, and a case study of Senegalese hip-hop from 1980-2012 in order to assert that cultural production which is a site for the improvisation of freedom has a liberatory value which subverts the law of value at the heart of the capitalist economy.

Résumé

La liberté est un processus perpetuel qui ne peut ni être définie ou prédéterminée. Ainsi toutes tentatives de liberté sont des improvisations, des expérimentations. La production culturelle peut agir comme un site pour que cette improvisation puisse prendre racine: un viaduc à partir de laquelle des expérimentations en couleur, son, de forme, de mouvement et en lettres permet un dialogue et l’exploration des pratiques de liberté. La production culturelle libératoire est un processus par lequel des interventions, des provocations, des modifications, et des propositions sont faites aux fins d'exprimer, la compréhension, l'élaboration et l'interrogation des cadres politiques, culturels et sociaux. Cela inclut la musique, l'écriture, le mouvement, la langue, l'art visuel, la performance, ainsi que d'autres formes d'expression destinés à informer et créer notre rapport à la culture. Ces sites de production culturelle qui improvisent la liberté défient la marchandisation de la production culturelle et de sa relation avec la valeur monétaire parce qu'ils forcent une conceptualisation de valeur en dehors de l’argent, l’utilité, l’échange et le travail.

Cette thèse interroge la relation entre la valeur, la libération et la production culturelle à travers la théorie marxiste, la pensée radicale noire, et une étude de cas du hip-hop Sénégalais de 1980-

2012 afin de faire valoir que la production culturelle qui se donne comme site pour l'improvisation de la liberté a une valeur libératoire qui subvertit la loi de la valeur au cœur de l'économie capitaliste.

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by acknowledging the work and sacrifices of my ancestors and my community who constructed the foundations for the imaginings of freedom which I continue to build upon.

I would like to express my gratitude to my two supervisors Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson and Dr.

Jenny Burman for their insights and support throughout the duration of my studies as a graduate student in the Art History and Communications department and in the writing of this thesis.

This thesis is dedicated to Zion, my mother and my first example of what living a life dedicated to the freedom of African peoples looks like, to Fanus, Tsegereda, Lucia, Rezan, Michael,

Solomon, Efrem, Haile, and Warren, the village who helped to raise me, to Hakima and Jamila, my family and constant creative inspirations, and to each friend who walks with me as a I continue to journey and learn.

Free the people.

Free the land.

May the borders erase.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... 7 Preface...... 9 Introduction...... 11 Chapter One: Becoming Jazz ...... 25 Chapter Two: Liberatory Value ...... 37 What is Value? ...... 47 The Great Debate ...... 51 Liberatory Value ...... 56 Chapter Three: Senegal, Cultural Production, and Freedom ...... 61 The State and Cultural Production ...... 61 How is Culture Valued in Senegal ...... 69 Negritude and Pan-Africanism ...... 71 The Liberatory Value of Hip Hop in Senegal ...... 75 Conclusion: On the Horizons of Victory ...... 85 Reference ...... 90

Preface

“I still do not recognize a necessary conflict between the sonnet and the bow and arrow,”

wrote June Jordan in 1986, “I do not accept that immersion into our collective quest for

things beautiful will [hinder] our own ability to honor the right of all human beings to

survive.” (Kuhn, 1995)

Luam

I was named by my grandmother born in a time of chaos she wanted to set an intention that I would be surrounded by serenity

Letentensae,

or Aday as I call her, was a woman who never ceased to marvel at the world around her.

She took the contradictions of life and saw the beauty in paradoxical results.

Aday was not the stuff of movies, not the word protesters chant out in unison. My grandmother will not be found in the Black sections of bookstores. she did not speak English or have streets named after her, to be commemorated in death.

Aday was the stuff of jazz songs, improvised to perfect pitch. In an article about a love supreme it was written that John Coltrane would repeat basic themes in all keys because “he [was]

9 consciously exhausting every path…” in a “…musical recitation of prayer by horn.” (Springer,

2013)

Letetensae was a love supreme and an artist at work, creating dangerously so her children could walk softly. She, an alchemist by birth, saw sites of survival as more than sites of fracture.1

I have been surrounded by people who have infused creativity and joy into their liberation practices. This thesis focuses on the liberatory value of cultural production because it is through song, photographs, paintings, poems, drum beats, ceremony and dancing that I have seen freedom dreams take flight, because it is through cultural production that I have experienced insurgent imagination take root, planting the seeds of autonomy, self-determination, and freedom for African peoples.

1 This is an excerpt from a keynote I delivered for SpeakSudan in March 2014. It was reprinted in the Feminist Wire in April 2014. 10

Introduction

As a daughter of an Eritrean freedom fighter I grew up learning about the struggle for independence in Eritrea and the strategies which the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) deployed in order to mobilize and inspire the 30 year struggle for independence from Ethiopia

(1970-1991). It was as part of these early learnings that I was first introduced to the idea that freedom is not an endpoint but rather a continual process that we are always building towards.

Since freedom has no end point as such, we have not reached freedom, and as a result, visions of freedom are, by necessity, improvisations or experimentations in what ‘could be’. (Muñoz, 2009;

Roberts, 2015) I discuss the proposition of freedom as an improvisation or experimentation in more detail in Chapter Two.

My desire to study cultural production as a site for transformation is informed by some of the tactics of the EPLF that I grew up hearing about. In particular, the EPLF used cultural production, specifically theatre, radio, and visual art, to build collective visions of freedom and conduct popular and political education. (Firebrace and Holland, 1985) My mother would relay to me how the EPLF, for instance, would take traditional fables and stage theatrical plays in which the main storyline would be amended to include revolutionary characters fighting for their self-determination. These stories of the EPLF and their use of theatre, visual art, and storytelling are my earliest memories of the possibilities of freedom that counter-hegemonic cultural production could nurture by acting as a site from which dialogue, collective imagining and the incubation and experimentation of freedom practices could take root.

In the summer of 2014 I conducted research in Dakar, Senegal, and while there I began to observe how embedded cultural production was in daily life. Graffiti of political figures, music recounting different phases of the Senegalese political processes to date, and storytelling through

11 dance and drumming painted the city of Dakar with vibrant colours, movements and sounds.

Reminded of how important cultural production was to the Eritrean peoples’ struggle for liberation, I began to research if cultural production had also been used in Senegal as a site to incite dialogue and open up the possibilities of freedom. From Indigenous forms of storytelling that kept the histories of Senegalese peoples alive, to the Négritude movement that began in the

1930s as part of a burgeoning movement for national independence for African countries, to, starting in the 1980s, the use of hip-hop as a medium to agitate for political change, it became clear that cultural production in Senegal did play a critical role in inciting dialogue and change.

(Tang, 2012; Gueye, 2013; Fredericks, 2014; Okolo, 1984) The people of Senegal ‘invest’ a lot into and ‘value’ the creation of culture, be it in through the biennial Dak'Art - Biennale de l'Art

Africain Contemporain, to the artist villages scattered across the country. What is the value that is ascribed to this production? Indeed, Senegal is by far not unique on the continent of Africa for its value of cultural process, for example, close by, and more famously, Burkina Faso, has become world renowned for its cultural production, particularly in film. (Turégano, 2011)

Therefore, as I was conducting my preliminary research, a question which kept surfacing was: what is the value of cultural production to the processes of freedom of African peoples? I argue that the value of cultural production which is concerned with being a site for the improvisation of freedom is outside of the exchange and commodification of culture. This leads me to ask does this value itself subvert capitalist frameworks and in itself contain freedom? This line of inquiry of understanding value outside of capitalist systems is important because capitalism formulates value based on labour, exchange and extraction, with a history in Africa of exploitation and underdevelopment. (Amin, 2011; Rodney, 2012; Nyerere, 1968) Indeed as Julius Nyerere argues, the focus on money as value, so central to capitalism, has created a skewed development

12 framework and aspirations in Africa. (Nyerere, 1967) Though I describe in detail how capitalist frameworks have negatively affected African development and exploited African peoples in

Chapter Two of this thesis, I will briefly elaborate here how capitalism has skewed development frameworks and aspirations in Africa. One of the problems of capitalism that Nyerere often identified was the exploitation of African peoples labour. Nyerere was a proponent of socialism because he believed that it would be the anecdote to the ails of capitalism. For Nyerere a “truly.

[sic] socialist state is one in which all people are workers and in which neither capitalism nor feudalism exists. It does not have two classes of people, a lower class composed of people who work for their living, and an upper class of people who live on the work of others.” (Nyerere,

1967) Julius Nyerere, as well as Samir Amin and Walter Rodney, believed that capitalism was a system that inherently exploited African peoples, knowledges, labour, and land. One could attempt to reform capitalist systems but it would, the three theorists argued, always require a class of people to be exploited in order for profit to be made. Because of this foundation, I wanted to investigate if it was possible to formulate value, outside of capitalist frameworks, which affirmed the self-determination and freedom of African peoples2 – a liberatory value, so to speak. The question of value, along with my experiences in Dakar over the last two years learning about the uses of cultural production to agitate, incite dialogue, and improvise freedom, came together to form this thesis. In this thesis I posit that cultural production which acts as a site for the improvisation and experimentation of freedom subverts the ‘law of value’.

The law of value is an explanation of how value is formulated, and governed, in capitalist systems. The law of value, as initially explained by Karl Marx, states that there are two

2 When I refer to African peoples throughout this thesis I mean both African people living on the continent and in the diaspora. 13 necessary components to understanding how value is attributed in a capitalist system. Those two components are commodification and exchange. (Marx, 1887; Yaffe, 2009) Building off of

Cuban post-revolution economic theory and praxis between 1959 and 1961, which focused on how to subvert rather than accommodate the law of value, I offer a conceptualization of the value of cultural production outside of exchange and commodification. (Yaffe, 2009) I call this alternative formulation of understanding value - liberatory value. As part of this thesis I conduct a case study of the Senegalese hip-hop movement from 1980-2012 to illustrate how cultural production can have liberatory value in practice. I focus on hip-hop, as opposed to any other form of cultural production, because in the last thirty years it has been one of the forms of cultural production at the forefront of the political expression of the Senegalese people and most particularly its youth, who make up the majority of the population. I chose the time period between 1980 and 2012 because it was during the 1980s that hip-hop both took root in Senegal as a popular expression of music, dance, and visual art and began to be deeply intertwined with organizing people who wanted to see the then president, Abdou Diouf, ousted. I end my study at

2012 because that is the year that hip-hop in Senegal was used a site for mass dialogue. This dialogue sparked a mass mobilization, an effort which eventually saw Abdoulaye Wade be replaced as president by Macky Sall, the current president of Senegal.

Hypothesis and Research Questions

Beginning with the idea that freedom is an action which cannot be defined or predetermined and so any attempt at freedom is an improvisation, an experimentation, my hypothesis at the start of this research was that cultural production can 1) act as a site for this improvisation to take root: a viaduct from which experimentations in colour, sound, form, movement and letters allows for dialogue and explorations of liberation practices and 2) be a process through which value is conceptualized outside of the laws that govern value in a capitalist economy. I specifically look at the forms and processes of cultural production in this thesis through which interventions, provocations, modifications, and proposals are made for the purposes of expressing, understanding, shaping, and interrogating political, cultural and social frameworks. This includes music, writing, movement, language, visual art, performance, as well as other forms of expression meant to inform and create how we relate to culture. As a result of my hypothesis this thesis is concerned with two primary areas of inquiry:

1. How can cultural production act as a site for the improvisation of freedom?

2. Can cultural production that improvises freedom challenge commodification and

exchange inherent in capitalist understandings of value?

Theoretical Frameworks and Methodology

The field of cultural studies has examined the intersections between cultural production and the specific characteristics of how value is formulated predominantly through the lens of what is termed the creative industries. Cultural production in the creative industries is commodified through the streamlining of “…the creation, production, and marketing of goods and services[.]” (Jaw, Chen & Chen, 2012, p. 256) For this reason, in an attempt to contribute to the important work of the scholars who have done work on capitalism vis-à-vis cultural production, I focus on creative industries literature in this thesis because it is an area in the field of contemporary cultural studies which has grappled with the specificities of how value is formed as it relates to cultural production. The creative industries formed as a distinct economic sector in the 1980s fashioned by the neo-liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a way to integrate ‘the arts’ into the capitalist economy. Performing arts, advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software (such as computer games), music, publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio all make up the creative industries. (Jaw, Chen & Chen, 2012).

Some cultural studies scholars, like Fay Yokomizo Akindes and Paul Gilroy, have written about cultural production vis-à-vis capitalism by focusing on how art forms, like music and graffiti, have been used to express communities’ discontent about capitalism as an economic model. The two scholars also point to the ways that cultural producers have attempted to suggest pathways for action that address the discontents that their art is amplifying. (Gilroy, 2005;

Gilroy, 1991; Akindes, 2001) For instance, Akindes, in a study of how hip-hop has acted as a site for liberation in Hawai'i, explores how artists have used hip-hop as a call to action for “economic

16 self-sufficiency and self-determination.” (Akindes, 2001, p. 91) Though the scholarly study of these artistic articulations of discontent with current economic and political models, and the calls for change that result, are important to building freedom struggles I want to add my work to discussions on the economic specificities behind how value is attributed to cultural production as a subversion in and of itself of capitalism. Though the political economy of cultural production and circulation is something that is discussed in cultural studies literature, there is a gap when it comes to attempting to name and explore the specific characteristics of the value of counter- hegemonic culture production that shifts power relations by providing a site for imagining and exploration in Africa. Paul Gilroy, a cultural studies scholar, in his discussions of music, processes of African identity formation, and resistance of African peoples to subjugation writes, through examples of the music of, among others, Bob Marley, Maxie Priest, and Monie Love, on the impact that cultural production has had on the formation of community for Africans. (Gilroy,

2005; Gilroy, 1991) A common thread throughout his work is the ways in which Africans in the diaspora not only survived but were able to maintain and create new cultural forms which acted as sites for imagining political alternatives that fought for the freedom of African peoples. For instance, when writing on both the revolutionary aspects as well as the commercialization of Bob

Marley and his music Gilroy points to how, pulling from Rasta traditions, the themes of Bob

Marley’s songs challenge capitalist renderings of labour because they recognize that coercion and alienation of labour are necessary components of capitalist systems. For instance, in ‘No

Woman, No Cry’ Bob Marley, according to Gilroy’s analysis, challenges capitalist values through a “…quiet defence of communal living and a muted critique of private property.”

(Gilroy, 2005, p. 239) Paul Gilroy’s work on music, and on African cultural production in general, is helpful to understanding some of the impacts that cultural production concerned with

17 the freedom of African peoples has had on understanding what can happen when value is outside of capitalist frameworks. However, he does not go into detail about the valuation of cultural production itself outside of capitalist normative frameworks of value. This specificity is what I am interested in exploring throughout this thesis.

Through discursive analysis and secondary text study I address this gap in current literature by drawing from Black Radical Thought, Marxist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies to analyse the relationship between value and cultural production which acts as a site from which the improvisation of freedom can take root. I use these theoretical frameworks because they make possible a discussion which can make explicit a link between cultural production, African peoples’ histories and practices of resistance, and the specific economic principles of value. Theorists in the field of Black Radical Thought, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies as found in the work of Stuart Hall, Kai Barrow, Fred Moten,

Robin Kelley, Edwidge Danticat, Ashon Crawley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Amilcar Cabral have explored the relationship between African cultural production, freedom imaginings, and resistance to oppression in African communities. However, outside of Fred

Moten, who utilizes Marxism in some of his work to discuss the relationship between commodities and Black performance (Moten, 2003), none of these theorists have attempted to unchain the question of value and commodification from the liberatory potentiality of cultural production. Authors like Kai Barrow, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Robin D.G. Kelley have focused on how liberatory cultural production can act as a site for freedom dreams and insurgent imagination to take root. (Barrow, 2001; Kelley, 2002, Gumbs 2012) Whereas authors like

Edwidge Danticat, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Amilcar Cabral have predominantly focused on mobilizing cultural production that addresses the ways that the colonial and post-colonial nation-

18 state oppress African peoples. (Danticat, 2011; Thiong’o1998; Cabral, 1974) The work by these authors has been critical in chronicling and analysing how the freedom dreams of African peoples have formed, been built, and also how they have been put into action. The liberatory potential of cultural practices relies upon (and lies in) those aspects of these practices, as described by Danticat, Thiong’o and Cabral, among others, that are not or cannot be subsumed under capitalist regimes of value. Furthermore, this task of unchaining value as understood in capitalist frameworks from the liberatory potential of cultural production allows us to explore a political ecology based in horizontalism, consensus, and mutual accountability because capitalism, and thus the coercion and hierarchy inherent in capitalism, is challenged. I expand on these arguments more fully in Chapter One and Chapter Two.

In order to infuse the conversation on value into the existing literature on African cultural production that centres social and political transformation, what Amilcar Cabral called revolutionary culture (Cabral, 1974) and I have termed liberatory cultural production, I turn specifically to Marxian scholars whose work on capitalism and capital have done important work to unearth the contradictions and assumptions of value as a political tool that is used to under- value and under-develop in order to exploit the underclass. In this thread I rely on the work of

Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, C.L.R James, Walter Rodney, Cedrick Robinson, Herbert Marcuse,

Samir Amin, Issa G. Shivji, Julius Nyerere and Ernesto Che Guevara to bring forward an understanding of how the law of value operates in a capitalist economy and to understand more clearly what its spheres of operation are in order to illustrate how I am conceptualizing the liberatory value of cultural production. In late 1950s and early 1960s Cuban proponents of a socialist economic system called the Budgetary Finance System, particularly forwarded by

Ernesto Che Guevara, were attempting to put into practise economic systems which subverted

19 the law of value. The Budgetary Finance System focused specifically on how to dismantle commodification and exchange, two necessary components of the law of value. (Yaffe, 2009)

Supporters of the Budgetary Finance System did this through experimentations that had them nationalizing industry, such as factories, in order to centralize them. Ernesto Che Guevara argued that the law of value within the centralized system of the Budgetary Finance System ceased to function because there was no exchange happening between different entities. This movement between two different entities is a necessary precondition for something to become commodified. (Yaffe, 2009; Appadurai, 2013). Though they were only partially successful in doing this what they did identify was that in order to subvert the law of value you have to shift the principles of commodification and exchange which are central to its functioning. I rely on

Hellen Yaffe’s book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, a text based on primary source documents and interviews, to gain an understanding of how Cubans worked to subvert the law of value. I then, at the end of Chapter Two and throughout Chapter Three, apply this work to a broader understanding of the potential subversive processes that liberatory cultural production in

Africa delinked from exchange and commodity can move forward.

I then move into the case study on the liberatory value of hip-hop in Senegal, the literature is predominantly focused on how hip-hop has been utilized as a site of mobilization against the Senegalese state. (Tang, 2012; Künzner, 2007; Fredericks, 2014; Gueye, 2013) For the case study I utilize frameworks of Negritude and Pan-Africanism to situate the cultural production traditions out of which hip-hop in Senegal has come, to gain a better understanding of why it is that the hip-hop movements in Senegal have largely mobilized in resistance to those holding power in the nation-state. Negritude was a movement which was based on the reclaiming of Black identity and as a call to have pride in that Black identity. (Okolo, 1994; Senghor, 1981)

It was a cultural movement which relied predominantly on literature. It also has a specific tie to

Senegal as one of its founders, Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first president of Senegal after it gained independence from France. I bring in literature on Pan-Africanism because it provides important critiques of Negritude as a movement which did not sufficiently address the material needs of African peoples. (Fanon, 1963; Okolo, 1984) By weaving the literature on Negritude and Pan-Africanism together I am able to better understand and frame how the reclaiming of

Black identity and the desire to affect the material needs of the people have influenced hip-hop movements in Senegal between 1980 and 2012. Building from the literature on Pan-Africanism,

Senegalese cultural production through hip-hop, and Negritude I am then able to propose what I believe has been the liberatory value of hip-hop in Senegal.

This thesis is situated in and impacts the fields of cultural studies, political economy, Black

Radical Thought, and Marxist theory. Through the conceptualization of liberatory value I pick up on the work by cultural studies theorists who call for cultural studies to once again become responsive to the needs of the people rather than simply being a theoretical exercise. (Hall, 1992;

Barrow, 2011; Cabral 1974) I move in and through Black Radical Thought to bring forth non- western critical theories of revolutionary change and apply these theories to the field of political economy in order to contribute to the work being done on how value can be understood outside of capitalist frameworks. The aim is not to create a strict definition of what liberatory cultural production is or how it is constituted. Rather, the aim of this thesis is to bring forward propositions and provocations that examine how radical movement building processes and cultural production move in, through, and with each other to nurture and manifest visions of freedom in African communities.

The arc of this thesis starts by situating why it is important that the field of cultural studies rejects the abstraction of theory from praxis. I then move to an analyses on how value is currently formulated in capitalist systems and how economic theorists have attempted to challenge those formulations of value. From this discussion on value I put forward how I am conceptualizing liberatory value and how hip-hop movements in Senegal have liberatory value. I end with discussing the political possibilities that conceptualizations of liberatory value can engender.

Working from the foundations built by the aforementioned theorists and cultural producers, Becoming Jazz, Chapter One of this thesis, outlines clearly why the cultural production that I am discussing in this thesis is political, understands the urgency of the times we are in as African communities, and how radical African cultural production is operationalized through negations of current oppressions as well as through visions of freedom. It is here that I set the groundwork for how as scholars in the field of cultural studies who are working from a radical African tradition we might understand the value of cultural production beyond aesthetic or theoretical valuation (Hall, 1992; Danticat, 2013; Gumbs 2012) I also in this first chapter begin to make the argument that the improvisations of freedom being incited by liberatory cultural production must seek to manifest in political formations that break from the norms of coercion and hierarchy rampant throughout the nation-state. I return to breaking from hierarchy and coercion in the Conclusion of the thesis to further discuss these ideas.

In chapter two, Liberatory Value, I pick up on the question of value at the end of

Becoming Jazz. I begin this chapter by providing a contextual background on the creative industries, as this is the predominant intersection of value and cultural production which is currently discussed in the literature of cultural studies. It is here that I identify the limitations of

22 the neo-liberal framework for understanding that the value of cultural production is tied to a price-tag. I also initiate a discussion which establishes the effects of capitalism in African communities globally. After this I discuss how value under capitalism is defined before putting forward what non-capitalist theories of value are through a Marxist body of knowledge. In the discussion of non-capitalist theories of value, that suggest that eliminating the idea of the commodity and the principle of exchange could subvert the law of value, I propose that African cultural production as a site for the improvisation of freedom has the potential to subvert these laws. I then position what other value might be attributed to cultural production by its nature as a site of freedom improvisation, which I have coined liberatory value.

In chapter three, Senegal, Cultural Production, and Freedom I apply how I have theorized liberatory value through a case study of hip-hop movements in Senegal between the periods of 1980-2012. I begin by illustrating how the makings of African nationalist subjectivities are integral to understanding the articulation and implementation of the nation-state political frameworks that Senegal has been forming since its inception. This gives a background as to why it is that up to this point hip-hop movements in Senegal have largely mobilized in resistance to governments’ policies and practices. I then trace, firstly, the traditions of cultural production and political frameworks, specifically Negritude and Pan-Africanisms, which the hip- hop movement in Senegal has come out of and, secondly, the rise of hip-hop in Senegal starting from the 1980s. From there I propose that the liberatory value of hip-hop in Senegal is that it has acted as a site for the improvisation of freedom by being a continual process. I argue that the intent of Senegalese hip-hop to incite politicised dialogue which is a continual process of interaction as opposed to a particular political outcome defies the law of value by not having an

23 end point. An end-point is necessary for how exchange and commodity, two necessary components of the law of value, are understood in capitalist frameworks of value.

In the conclusion of this thesis, On the Horizons of Victory, I take up the question of where the liberatory value of cultural production can bring, or take, us? One place that I argue it takes us back to, cyclically, is the idea that freedom is a process which relies on the constant work of forming and reforming, a process that cannot exist without, and as such engenders, dialogue, collaboration, and accountability between peoples. So then, what is one potential becoming of this vision of freedom as improvisation and liberatory value? I propose that a break from hierarchy and coercion is one pathway that can be nurtured. Or in other words, anti- authoritarian political formations which are built through constellations of freedom movements committed to self-determination and autonomy. As an example of this I point to Ashanti principles of consensus and coalition as an example of one potential becoming. (Wiredu, 2000)

Ultimately, the provocations that I put forward in this last chapter, and throughout the thesis, are meant to invoke one thing – possibility. The work that I am interested in contributing to through this thesis is how we can conceptualize and enact cultural production to nurture possibilities of freedom in African communities.

Chapter 1: Becoming Jazz

You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz/When Bird was around he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed of my own spirit/This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ’cause you could die like an animal down here. – Abbey Lincoln (Moten, 2003, p. 23)

About one year ago I was reading a comment that Kiese Laymon, a Black cultural and literary critic and scholar, had written on a social media platform about an experience he had had while visiting a juvenile detention facility. (Laymon, 2014) He had gone to spend time with youth who had been incarcerated and to have conversations with them on varying topics. As he was leaving the youth were dapping him and saying thank you, that is except one youth who would not give him daps. The youth, after a prolonged silence, said he could not trust anyone who did not risk anything to love him. Love, he said, was easy to profess when nothing was at stake, but would that love be there when the stakes were high and the risks evident? Cultural production which risks for the purposes of inciting freedom processes and collective dialogue is what I am focusing on. What I mean here is that I want to focus on cultural production that has an intent and a purpose that cannot be delinked from expressions of freedom by African peoples.

There is an inherent risk to this because the freedom of African peoples necessitates the dismantling of global systems of oppression like white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.

(Kelly, 2002) Therefore, the question of what is at stake for the cultural production I am interested in is where I want to begin in order to situate the discussions within this thesis. I want to clearly outline in this section that the cultural production that I am discussing in this thesis is political, understands the urgency of the times we are in as African communities, and is

25 operationalized through negations of our current oppressions as well as through assertions of our visions of freedom.

In 1992 Stuart Hall posed an important question to the field of cultural studies when he wrote:

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. (p. 284-285)

What Hall is pointing to is the problematic abstraction of theory from praxis. He was pushing back at the perception that cultural studies is a purely theoretical endeavour devoid of any accountability to the communities which it interacts with and is in turn shaped by. Hall understood that in order for cultural studies to remain relevant and useful to oppressed communities it must interrogate its shortfalls and seek material transformation that impacted communities outside of academia.

Edwidge Danticat, in an interview she did in 2013 called All Immigrants Are Artists, also mediates on risk and love in her conceptualization of cultural production. Speaking of her experiences growing up as a Haitian immigrant in the United States of America she locates cultural production in the day to day, away from formalized spaces and rigid definitions. Cultural production is not something that happens distinct from everyday living, because Danticat understands the invention and sustaining of life by African peoples as an inherently artistic endeavour. She says of her experience as a Haitian immigrant that

…re-creating yourself this way, re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature. This brings art into the realm of what ordinary people do in order to survive. It takes away the notion that art is too lofty for the masses, and puts it in the day-to-day. (Fassler, 2013)

Danticat’s placement of cultural production in the realm of lived experience is formative because it recognizes and honours the subjectivity of artistic practice while holding that cultural production is rooted with and through the people. Thus, it locates the power to present something as a part of the realm of cultural production within the people. This allows for cultural production to be conceptualized as, for example: the art of survival as in Danticat’s case; a bowl which prior to being used in a libation may not have been understood as a cultural production but becomes so when embedded in process of cultural ceremony; and as more readily understood form of cultural production like songs, dancing, paintings, and poetry. This is foundational because the work that this conceptualization of cultural production does is to make it accessible to the very people it relates to and is created by. In National Liberation and Culture (1974), a foundational African text on the relationship between cultural production and decolonization,

Amilcar Cabral emphasizes how important it is for the liberation of African peoples to utilize cultural production as part of their resistance and as a way to nurture their imaginings of freedom because:

Culture, whatever may be the ideological or idealistic manifestation of its character, is …an essential element in the history of a people. It is, perhaps the product of history as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its physical base the forces of production and means of production. It plunges its roots into material reality of the soil of the environment in which it grows, and reflects the organic nature of society being all the same capable of being influenced by exterior factors. (Cabral, 1974, p. 13)

What Cabral is arguing is that cultural production is a necessary and key element of African freedom movements and to the self-determination of African peoples. To come back to the question of what is at stake, posed by the youth in the juvenile detention centre, the self- determination and freedom of African peoples is what is at stake for the manifestations of cultural production in which I am interested.

In both colonial and post-colonial African struggles for freedom one of the key terrains of struggle has been the nation-state. As such, manifestations of cultural production which seek to incite freedom processes have partly been shaped by their response to the nation-state. (Cabral,

1974; Thiong’o, 1998; Lubiana, 2002) This is true for when Africans were fighting European colonizers for independence and even now, when it is Africans who hold power in the nation- state. Cabral makes clear the link between maintaining domination and culture when he writes:

Indeed, to dominate a nation by force of arms is, above all, to take up arms to destroy or at least, to neutralize and paralyze its culture. For as long as a section of the populace is able to have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. (Cabral, 1974, p. 12)

Cabral makes the above point of how central cultural production is to both the domination and liberation of African peoples in reference to struggles against European colonialism. To understand more clearly the intersections between cultural production and the post-colonial nation-state, I turn to Ngũgĩ Thiong’o who extends Cabral’s argument to encompass the current realities of post-colonial Africa. In 1996 Thiong’o took up Cabral assertion about the importance of culture and the perpetuation of hegemony through culture in a series of lectures he delivered at

Oxford University titled Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the

Arts and the State in Africa. In the second lecture of the series, titled Enactments of Power: The

Politics of Performance Space, Thiong’o posited that there was an inherent tension between the state and cultural production, though Thiong’o uses the term performance to connote cultural production, because both are sites attempting to enact power. Thiong ’o acknowledges that this tension is starker in contexts of colonialism. However, he emphasizes that even in the advent of post-colonialism this tension between cultural production and the nation-state continues to exist.

I will come back to the particularities of this tension in the context of Senegal through a case

28 study of the relationship between hip-hop, the nation-state, and movement building in the third chapter of this thesis.

Speaking in the context of pan-African cultural production and artistic expression

Thiong’o explains this tension between the state and cultural production by postulating that

[t]he community learnt and passed on its moral codes and aesthetic judgements through narratives, dances, theatre, rituals, music, games, and sports. With the emergence of the state, the artist and the state became not only rivals in articulating the laws, moral or formal, that regulate life in society, but also rivals in determining the manner and circumstances of their delivery. (Thiong’o, 1998, p. 37)

Thus, since the nation-state’s function is to ascertain hegemonic control of the development and regulation of society, cultural production which is not deployed or sanctioned by it becomes an immediate threat which needs to be eliminated. “Colonial conquests resulted in clear-cut boundaries that defined the dominated space with controlled points of exit and entrance and the formation of a colonial state to run the occupied territory” (Thiong’o, 1998, p. 63) Liberatory cultural production puts into the open, by inciting insurgent imagination that seeks to erase borders and points of control, what the state wants behind closed doors - debates about autonomy, building communal relationships, and accountability. Kai Barrow terms the space created by the contradictions of having to navigate manifestations of self-determination and realities of oppression as “raw opposition”, a space that she calls for us to engage in order to

“...identify the nature of our raw opposition and build/create within the space between oppression and freedom.” (Barrow, 2011) Cabral and Barrow are in an interesting conversation here because

Barrow’s call for entering the space of raw opposition with clarity aligns with Cabral’s assertion that radical African cultural production is what helps root us in the space of raw opposition for the purposes of inciting freedom processes. In other words, Cabral argues that one of the radical potentials of cultural production in the struggle for power against the nation-state is exactly that,

29 the space of raw opposition is a site from which African communities can engage in dialogue and experimentation. There are moments which the Senegalese hip-hop movement between 1980-

2012, which I discuss in detail in Chapter Three, is an example of how cultural production has acted as a tool that African communities have used to enter into the space of raw opposition with clarity and to create sites from which the improvisations of freedom can take root.

Much of the theorization of liberatory African cultural production has had the nation-state as its referential point because, as illustrated earlier, the nation-state has been a key terrain for struggles for the freedom of African peoples. (Cabral, 1974; Thiong’o, 1998; Lubiana, 2002)

What I think this focus in the literature on the nation-state and cultural production has done is make the negations of oppressions the impetus for the creation of liberatory cultural production.

In other words, this focus makes oppression the referential point of the cultural production.

However, the sites for the improvisation of freedom which liberatory cultural production incites can also be conceptualized without making negations of oppressions the referential point.

(Douglas, 1977; Moten, 2015) Fred Moten gave a talk in September 2015 titled Blackness and

Nonperformance. In the talk he introduces the concept of antenormativity in relation to Black cultural production. The notion of antenormativity brings forward the idea that there are forms of

Black cultural production which can be in opposition to oppressions while not having the negation of these oppressions be the genesis of that cultural production. This concept is important because resistance to an oppression can be acknowledged while having the referential point of the cultural production be the visions and imaginings of freedom rather than the negation of oppression. I want to weave the work of Ashon Crawley who, in agreement with

Stuart Hall, writes about the importance of not abstracting cultural production from the people, into Moten’s notion of antenormativity. These two ideas take us to an important understanding of

30 freedom as a process, as opposed to an endpoint, which relies on the constant work of forming and reforming, a process that cannot exist without and as such engenders dialogue, collaboration, and accountability between peoples. I take up the potential liberatory results of this formulation of freedom on African political formations in the conclusion of this thesis but first, in this chapter, I want to focus on making clear why the abstraction of people from cultural production is problematic.

Ashon Crawley makes an intervention that I think supports the work of Moten and Hall in important ways. Crawley recounts an interaction he had on a night that he was out. He runs into someone at a bar who starts a discussion with him about a new recording he had heard of

Art Tatum playing the piano. The recording technology could record sound so perfectly, argued the person at the bar, that it was as if Art Tatum was playing live. Crawley’s recounting of the impressions this interaction left him with is worth quoting at length:

I began arguing rather forcefully against what the guy at the bar was saying about perfection and Art Tatum and his rather ridiculous assumptions. The technology he described seems to be nothing other than an enactment of a desire to possess and master without accounting for the underside of such declaration. It hallucinates the idea that the ‘original’ producers had particular intent that could be fully realizable. Rather than asking how does the technology become another occasion to produce failure beautifully, it gets taken up to say that it can reproduce without failure. More perfectly than even Art Tatum could’ve done I think the dude said.

And there seems to be, of course, the implication of an articulation of a critique of authenticity because if sound technology can ‘hear’ Art Tatum ‘play’ without his vivid thereness, then and of course, Art Tatum becomes inconsequential to the performance of Art Tatum. His materiality becomes discardable chaff that the wind can drive away, at best. And, if the computer can reproduce perfectly what it has captured and mastered? Well, then no one has the ability to be authentic. And I know anti-essentialism is all the rage with its being against claims for authenticity but I don’t even think the right questions are being posed. Like, what is perfection and how is it determined? If I said that Tatum’s breath was just as consequence to his performance as his fingered weight on keys? And what about the social field that was produced when Art Tatum played? (Crawley, 2015, p. 87)

Crawley’s intervention about Tatum’s breath and the consequences of that breath for the social

31 field it is already a part of and that it produces through that breath is critical. What Crawley is saying is that the sound of the piano is just one aspect of the artistic expression. Sound can be recorded but what about the other affective aspects, which require the person, that cannot be recorded? The work that Crawly is doing through this is to make explicit the link between liberatory cultural production and African peoples by making the argument that liberation cannot be a theoretical pursuit that removes, from the art form, the artist, the environment around the artist, and the peoples interacting with the art and artist. By definition a dialogue or movement for liberation cannot be had without African peoples. Liberatory cultural production both incites and acts as sites for this dialogue. This provocation is of particular importance because

Crawley’s insistence about the importance of breath alongside Moten’s notion of antenormativity makes it so that liberatory cultural production cannot be abstracted from the people because the work that it is doing, inciting dialogue and improvisations of freedom, necessitate people. Also, because liberatory cultural production engenders a people centred process for it to be viable as a site for the improvisations of freedom it must seek to manifest in political formations that break from the norms of coercion and hierarchy rampant throughout the nation-state. (Mbah & Igariwey,1997; Aguilar, 2012) When I write about the nation-state and its corresponding institutions I am referring to “…not only the system of formal governmental and economically influential entities of executive mandate, legislation, policy making, and regulation…but also what Tim Mitchell refers to as the ‘common ideological and cultural construct [that] occurs not merely as a subjective belief, incorporated in the thinking and action of individuals [but as] represented and reproduced in visible everyday forms.’” (Lubiano, 2002, p. 159)

Throughout colonialism the oppression of African peoples was the rationale for how governing structures were created. This spurred nationalist based movements which sought the liberation of African peoples through taking the nation-state. During the struggles for independence revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah were issuing warnings that independence in isolation could not guarantee the freedom of African peoples.

It is often said that national liberation is based on the right of every people to freely control its own destiny and that the objective of this liberation is national independence. Although we do not disagree with this vague and subjective way of expressing a complex reality, we prefer to be objective, since for us the basis of national liberation, whatever the formulas adopted on the level of international law, is the inalienable right of every people to have its own history, and the objective of national liberation is to regain this right usurped by imperialism, that is to say, to free the process of development of the national productive forces. (Cabral, 1966)

The key to the self-determination struggles, as stated above, would be for Africans to determine their own history. What Cabral could not have known at the time, though he hinted at it through his warnings, was the harmful trajectory that independence movements and their architects were to take over the next sixty years. (Mbah & Igariwey, 1997) Assassinations of key revolutionaries, among many others, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and Steve Biko coupled with a derailment of the ambition and action plan to root out imperialism led to a maintaining of institutions and government structures that simply shifted governance from one group of exploiters to another. (Mbah & Igariwey, 1997) Though formal colonialism may have ended the process of colonialism were still very much in practice: “[E]lectoralism in Africa is merely a diversionary tactic used to mask the transfer of power from one group of exploiters to the other.

The fact that countries such as Congo, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Malawi have lately installed multi-party electoralism is evidence that it leads to nothing really new” (Mbah &

Igariwey, 1997, p. 106) One might argue that while this, the metamorphosis of independence movements into neo-colonial strongholds, is true of the context of African struggles that this was

33 due to faulty implementation and not due to a fundamental flaw in the nation-state structure. In other words, had the warnings of Cabral been heeded the current state of African affairs would not merely be an extension of the colonial project. It is my contention that this type of argument wilfully ignores that state structures themselves are the manifestations of colonial and neo- colonial projects which attempt to attain power and retain it through hierarchy and coercion.

(Coulthard 2007; Mbah & Igariwey, 1997; Nail, 2013) Histories of singularity, hierarchical suppression, and practices of erasure are a necessary part of the nation-state structure and its corresponding institutions.

One example of how this rejection of hierarchy and coercion could manifest is through the Zapatista, a revolutionary movement for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples in

Chiapas, Mexico, theory of horizontalism. This theory offers the assembly as an alternative to the political parties of the nation-state. The main tenet of the assembly is that its gatherings occur on the basis of shared concerns rather than as a space solely for mediating opposition.

If there is any alternative at all to the problems posed by political parties, it must begin with a popular gathering of the people—in particular those who are disproportionally excluded from the party system. These assemblies are then connected to other assemblies through horizontal social networks. (Nail, 2013, p. 23)

These horizontal social networks within communities could then be linked with other communities around the globe through Encuentros (encounters), meetings of people and communities devoid of a centralized authority. (Nail, 2013) These Encuentros are non- hierarchical sites of global solidarity where various groups meet to support each other’s struggles. Because these sites are horizontal in structure they subvert the problems of contemporary solidarity movements, which are often instituted as unidirectional Global North solidarity with the Global South. (Nail, 2013) Furthermore “…the Encuentro is not a decision-

34 making apparatus. It is not a centralized program for the world to follow. No participants are bound by the authority of the Encuentro…the Encuentro is the medium (el medio) through which the minorities of the world gather. It is not an entity separate or above the groups that gather under its name. It is the open space where they gather in equality: horizontally.” (Nail, 2013, p.

25) Between and during various Encuentros, Puentes (bridges) are how ideas, actions, and words are communicated among struggles, communities, and peoples. In other words Puentes are:

[A] network of woven channels [or bridges] so that words [and actions] may travel all the roads that resist. The concept of the network discussed in the Second Declaration should be distinguished topologically as an “all channel network” (where everyone can connect horizontally with everyone else in a non-linear series: like a rhizome) in contrast to a “chain network” (where top-to-bottom communication is mediated hierarchically: like a tree) as well as a “star or hub network” (where actors are tied to a single central actor and must go through that node to communicate with others: like a tuber). The “all channel” network is the horizontal network. (Nail, 2013, p.25)

The theory of horizontalism from the Zapatistas is helpful in that it gives a concrete example of how a community of people are attempting to reject coercion and hierarchy. In the Conclusion I will return to the task of conceptualizing how, through mobilizing an example of Ashanti political principles, we can begin to imagine and put into practice political formations devoid of hierarchy and coercion.

But first the propositions and provocations that Moten’s antenormativity and Crawley’s breath bring forward bring me to a question that I want to explore further: what is the value of the conceptualization of cultural production that I am putting forward to African communities?

I am a writer. And my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational nor naive. Because art takes us, and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond costs, into bearing witness to the world as it is, and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. (Morrison, 2013)

This proposal of value beyond price and cost that Morrison is pointing to is precisely what I will be exploring in the next chapter, including understanding how systems of capitalism feature, or not, in this questions of value. The following chapter will take up these questions in order to set the groundwork for how I am conceptualizing liberatory value, and to put forward the proposition that the cultural production I am invoking has liberatory value.

Chapter 2: Liberatory Value

What is value? What is value outside of capitalist models of exchange? What is liberatory value and what determines it? These are the guiding questions that will take us through this chapter. By utilizing the work of Black Marxists and Black political economists, as well as

Cuban revolutionary economic models and debates, I will highlight why cultural production which is given value through price, as in the creative industries, is a limited understanding of the value attributed by African peoples to liberatory cultural production. I propose a framework for understanding liberatory cultural production as itself a subversion of the law of value, the governing mechanism for how value is attributed in capitalist economies. These discussions are important precursors to my discussion of what liberatory value is and whether the cultural production I am referring to has liberatory value.

Let us start with exploring the circumstances in which we are currently steeped: first, the relationship between African peoples and capitalism, and secondly, the consolidation of the culture of capitalism through what has been commonly termed in the fields of cultural studies and political economy as ‘creative industries’. The work of Walter Rodney, Cedrick J. Robinson,

Issa G. Shivji and Samir Amin is particularly useful in helping to situate the ways in which capitalism has exploited and continues to exploit African peoples. These aforementioned theorists are embedded in intellectual histories which are interested in the decolonization of

Africa, particularly by understanding and undermining the place of Africa in the global economic system. Samir Amin contends that capitalism is “…itself inseparable from the European conquest of the world. It is inseparable from the Eurocentric ideology which is, by definition, a non-universal form of civilization.” (2011, p. 52) The exploitative power relations which capitalism engenders, Rodney and Amin argue, can be understood by analysing the knowledge- 37 power nexus that arises when African peoples are coerced into a capitalist system that; (1) was built through, and still relies, on the exploitation of labour and resources; (2) relies on a universal methodology that disqualifies and subordinates any dissenting or alternative economic models

(there is no alternative to free market and deregulation in liberal economic discourse); and (3) situates African peoples and communities in a subordinate position through development policies like Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP). (Rodney, 2012; Amin, 2011)

The relationship between African peoples and capitalism is defined by exploitation, extraction and insistent subjugation. One of the ways that this exploitation was carried out was through abstracting the labour of African peoples. One of the most devastating ways that this was operationalized was through the Transatlantic Slave Trade where the African worker, abstracted into labour by systems of white supremacy, became treated as a commodity. Cedrick J. Robinson argues that

slavery was the specific historical institution through which the Black worker had been introduced into the modern world system. However, it was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance of Black men, women, and children had for…development. It was as labour (Robinson, 2000, p. 199)

Through this commodification, inexplicable violence was justified by the presupposition that abstracted labour could not be fully human and as such the African person was not fully human.

(Robinson, 2000) Though it is outside of the scope of this paper to discuss this at length, it is important to note that the attempted commodification of African peoples is only one way through which African peoples were dehumanized. There are also other ideological factors which interlocked with the economics of capitalism to further cement the dehumanization of African peoples. Along this thread, Walter Mignolo argues “…that what you see and feel from different colonial places is the colonial matrix of power of which the economy is only one component:

38 domination precedes accumulation, and domination needs a cultural model or a colonial matrix that legitimizes and naturalizes exploitation” (Mignolo, 2014, p.115)

What this commodification of the African worker made possible is that “…African labor power as slave labor was integrated into the composition of…industrial capitalism, thus sustaining…[a] European world market within which the accumulation of capital was garnered for the further development of industrial production.” (Robinson, p. 113) These integrations of oppression continued into the twentieth century through occupations of land, imperialist extractions of raw resources and labour, and through implementation of trade policies which adversely affected African peoples and communities. (Rodney, 2012) Throughout the twentieth century establishment and implementation of financial policies which sought to continue the economic extraction of resources and labour from African communities, like Structural

Adjustment Programs, financial policies championed by the International Monetary Fund and the

World Bank, began to proliferate. (Shivji, 2009) Since the late 1980s the advent of neo-liberal trade policies which solidified private wealth and industry created solely for profit have formed what Issa G. Shivji terms the second scramble for Africa.

The first scramble for Africa was of course the colonial carving up of the continent; the first phase of the second scramble was what Nkrumah called neo-colonialism…and Nyerere defined as ‘Africans fighting Africans’. The second phase of the second scramble is what we are witnessing today under so-called globalisation. The local manifestation of globalisation is the neoliberal package enforced by imperialism through the triad of the International Monetary Fund-World Bank-World Trade Organisation and donor policies and conditionalities on aid, debt, and trade. (Shivji, 2009, p. 203)

These global policies that aimed to regulate trade and financial flows between African communities and the Global North, as well as direct national economies and development from the outside, were mutations of colonial era policies, which were necessary to maintain in order for advanced capitalist societies to continue to exist and grow. (Amin, 2011)

The creative industries grew out of these neo-liberal policies of privatization, exploitation and profit which took root in the 1980s. (Miller, 2009) As Miller argues: “The neo-liberal bequest of creativity has…comprehensively challenged the idea of [creative production] as removed from industry.” (2009, p. 94) I will spend some time analysing the creative industries because in the field of cultural studies the predominant lens through which the intersections of value and cultural production are studied is through creative industries.

The creative industries form an economic sector which is a part of neo-liberal economic frameworks. Cultural production in the creative industries is commodified through the streamlining of “…the creation, production, and marketing of goods and services[.]” (Jaw, Chen

& Chen, 2012, p. 256)

According to this definition from the DCMS…[Department for Culture, Media and Sport of the British government], creative industries include the following sectors: the performing arts, advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software (such as computer games), music, publishing, software and computer services, and television and radio. (Jaw, Chen & Chen, 2012, p. 256)

The creative industries formed as a distinct economic sector in the 1980s fashioned by the neo- liberalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a way to integrate ‘the arts’ into the capitalist economy. Flowing from the Reagan administration’s opposition to social support sponsored by the state and the simultaneous efforts of European administrations to boost economic growth, the process of commodifying cultural production through integrating ‘the arts’ into the capitalist economy began to receive more governmental support. (Miller, 2009)

In an attempt to combat economic recessions and repeal critics of conservative economic ideologies, proponents of neo-liberal economics saw an opportunity to leverage the creative industries as a new way to further consolidate the culture of capitalism. Toby Miller, a cultural studies and media studies scholar, argues that up to this point capitalist economics had maintained

40 a wall, though porous, between agricultural and technical modes of production and the cultural sector. (Miller, 2009) However, in the 1980s, a sustained political agenda committed to remedying the losses being experienced in the agricultural and industrialized economic sectors began to shape music, radio, television, heritage, and so forth, into a formal economic sector, the creative industries. (Miller, 2009) Starting in the 1980s this political agenda saw to it, through both the

Reagan and Thatcher administrations, that “post-industrial activities, not food or manufactures, but finance and ideology” were the economic pathways which were being pursued. (Miller, 2009, p. 94) Within this post-industrial shift is where creative industries not only took root but began to flourish. As a result, there was a dramatic increase in the profit generated by the creative industries.

“Between 1980 and 1998, annual world exchange of print, film, radio, photography, art, and music grew from US$95 billion to US$388 billion[.]” (Miller, 2009, p. 93) With the creative industries taking a more centre stage position in economic discussions and platforms, the influence of capitalist economics on understanding the value of cultural production cannot be ignored. The influence that creative industries have had on understanding the value of cultural production has been to associate value with price and profit.

I was a part of a meeting of pan-African popular education practitioners in Dakar, Senegal in December 2015 that focused, in part, on how to create methodologies and tools for community engagement and make them accessible to the African communities across the globe of which we, the participants of the meeting, are all a part of. This conversation quickly became about the political economy of knowledge production, information circulation and distribution networks. As a tangent of these conversations I began talking with one of the other practitioners about the music industry and how the emphasis on the volume related to circulation, or how many records are sold, have affected how we understand value. As a young man in the 1980s he was deeply embedded in

41 the punk scene, at one point manifesting his love of punk by joining a band. During this time Bad

Brains released a cassette called Bad Brains ROIR which was deeply influential to him and to the punk scene in general. He said the initial circulation of that record could not have been more than a few thousand copies sold, a dismal failure by today’s record industry standards. However, the point he was making was that how much money the record was able to garner had nothing to do with the value that the record had. His argument was that even with just a few thousand records sold, that album helped create new genres of punk and greatly influenced the playing and composition styles of many artists both within and outside of the punk scene. Yet, in our current contexts, a higher value would be attributed to 10 million copies sold as opposed to the cultural influence of a record with a circulation of a few thousand records. This linkage of the value of cultural production to price can partly be explained by the “…particular focus on the role that artistic and cultural production and consumption plays within the capitalist economy… understanding [artistic and cultural production] from a position firmly located within the locus of market mechanisms” (Shorthose, 2004, p. 1) This linkage between value and profit has allowed neo-liberal policies to consolidate the culture of capitalism by sanitising potentially radical cultural production through processes of commodification.

The creative industries have been able to proliferate at the rate they have because they undermine the critical traditions of cultural production through process of commodification. In A

More Critical View of the Creative Industries: Production, Consumption and Resistance (2004)

Jim Shorthose writes:

Cultural capitalism has historically demonstrated a capacity to assimilate new cultural values and production ‘back into’ the mainstream economy, to sanitise [sic] cultural critique and so commodify culture as a passively-consumed series of ‘events, participated in as something extrinsic to one’s own life and capacity for creative expression. (p. 4)

So how then is the assimilation that cultural capitalism attempts to operationalize by sanitizing liberatory cultural production connected to the ways that the nation-state, through policies and practices, enacts power for the purposes of repression and erasure? In his essay Subjects of

Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada Glen Coulthard, a Dene scholar, argues that a fundamental flaw of some current Indigenous self-determination struggles sits within seeking recognition from and within nation-state structures. This is because the structure of the nation-state system can only recognize particular ideological frameworks in order to perpetuate and maintain itself. Within these frameworks struggles for self-determination have to betray themselves in order to be recognized because “…the politics of recognition in its contemporary form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that

Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.” (Coulthard,

2007, p. 439) We can extrapolate Coulthard’s argument here to be in conversation with

Shorthose’s contentions about cultural capitalism if we understand capitalism to be one of the configurations of power through which repression is produced in the service of the nation-state.

In the context that Coulthard is writing, Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island are fighting for self- determination against colonial occupation by the nation-state of Canada. Coulthard’s argument is predicated on Frantz Fanon’s “critique of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in

Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition.” (Coulthard, 2007, p 437) The possibilities for the quest for self-determination and nationhood to be achieved through the

Canadian state are contradictory because the state’s very existence relies on the subjugation of

Indigenous communities, land and ways of life.

An example of how the thesis of Coulthard’s essay collides with Shorthose’s framing of cultural capitalism is the 2010 Winter Olympic Games held in Vancouver, Canada. The Winter

Olympics were met with immediate and coordinated resistance though the Olympic Resistance

Network, a loosely affiliated network who made popular the slogan “No Olympics on Stolen

Native Land”, as well as other Indigenous, racialized, and allied communities which were not affiliated with the network. The groups came together to protest the allocation of billions of dollars to the Winter Olympics when there were critical social services like housing and healthcare which were not being adequately provided to economically under-resourced residents of Vancouver, many of which are racialized and Indigenous. (Abbs, Frampton, Peart, 2009)

Furthermore, the network believed that bringing the Olympics to Vancouver was a direct attack on poor, Indigenous and racialized communities because as a result of Olympic preparations many communities were displaced, shelters were closed, and people living on the streets were forcibly being removed by police to be relocated, in some cases to other provinces. (Abbs,

Frampton, Peart, 2009) Many groups were also concerned with the increased surveillance that would result from having an international event in the city and the police abuses that would result as part of this increased surveillance.

Around November of 2007 the mascots for the Olympic games were revealed. The logos were created through a collaborative effort that consisted of Olympic appointed committees and a design firm called Meomi. (CBC, 2007) When the designs were made public the statement that accompanied them said that “[t]he three mascots and a sidekick for the 2010 Winter Olympics in

Vancouver were inspired by traditional First Nations creatures[.] (CBC, 2007) The media talking points, which were on repeat throughout the 24-hour news cycles at this time, continued to reiterate the connection to First Nations communities. Though some Indigenous communities did

44 work with the Olympic committees, as was seen in the opening ceremonies, many more

Indigenous communities were resolutely against the Olympics and having aspects of their cultures co-opted and sanitized to fit neatly into the Canadian nation-state imaginary. This was an image war and through mainstream media the Olympic committee, the provincial government of British Columbia, and the federal Canadian government saturated the public with enough propaganda that to an unsuspecting observer it might even look as though Indigenous communities were pleased with their culture being used for the commercial benefit of the

Olympic games. (Abbs, Frampton, Peart, 2009) The creative industries were the vehicle through which this capitalist sanitization of cultural production was able to manifest.

Through creative industries attempt to assimilate and sanitize liberatory cultural production one distinction, however, that is clear is the

fundamental distinction between artistic work- conceived as an expression of one’s creative capacity through self-determined labour- and managed ‘creativity’, reduced to alienated work within orthodox capitalist relations of production. Managed creativity, which is a characteristic of formal employment within the ‘creative industries’, routinely proceeds through a separation of creative conception from its execution. The subsequent reduction of scope for artistic autonomy parallels the ‘deskilling’ that such a separation brings. (Shorthose & Gerrard, 2004, p. 47)

In the mid-1960s Herbert Marcuse, in One Dimensional Man, made the point that cultural capitalism can have two potential consequences: it will operate either as an axis that will consolidate capitalist systems through control, or in opposition to this, it will be a path through which catalysts for its own destruction will be bred. (Marcuse, 1964) Cultural studies theorists like Jim Shorthose have taken up the latter point in an attempt to point out the ways in which creative industries may have spurred counter-cultural proposals inspired by the exploitative conditions of labour championed by the creative industries. Along this line Shorthose argues that:

[t]he fraying of the traditional distinction between work and social life may encourage alternative, self-organized social, economic and cultural forms to emerge. The rise of the creative industries and the ‘creative class’…may mean that new economic and political spaces are created ‘from below’, which reject culture as something externally organised and managed.” (2004, p. 4)

Undoubtedly this rise of the creative class and its effects of managing creativity through state protocols, policies, and norms has negatively impacted communities who are already marginalized and subordinated. The ways that cultural production is deployed by the neo-liberal state through creative industries becomes yet another way that African peoples are alienated from their histories. This echoes Amilcar Cabral’s warnings of the dangers of colonialism when he says “[o]ur situation as a society is that of a colonial society. This means that our history was stopped short in its own internal, natural, normal development.” (Wick, 2006, p. 51) Adding to the thread of arguments that both Cabral and Shorthose make, Marcuse argues that

[p]rior to the advent of this cultural reconciliation [with capitalism], literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction-the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed. They were a rational, cognitive force, revealing a dimension of man and nature which was repressed and repelled in reality. (1964, p. 64)

However, it is important that we proceed with caution in terms of the potential effects of cultural capitalism that both Marcuse and Shorthose are forwarding because these positions can, without meaning to, make cultural capitalism the first chapter of a story which in fact has many chapters preceding it.

The creative industries are not a totalizing force. Although the state seeks to normalize the idea of managed creativity, this does erase the fact that historically autonomous cultural forms have and continue to exist. (Lubiana, 2002) I make this point in order to ask: when does an autonomous enactment cease being the alternative? Are autonomous cultural forms defined only

46 and continually by their resistance to notions of managed creativity? To help guide us through these questions it is helpful to mobilize the notion of the antenormative here, a concept I introduced in Chapter One (Moten, 2015). Again, the idea behind Moten’s antenormative is that there are forms and ways of being which are in opposition to norms/oppressions but are not defined by them because they were also manifested with no reference to that norm/oppression.

Inserting Moten’s contribution of the antenormative into the discussion about cultural capitalism then addresses, in part, the shortfalls, or gaps in analysis, of Marcuse’s and Shorthose’s proposition on the alternative while also holding true that pathways of resistance have been spurred in direct opposition to the rise of the ‘creative class’ caused by the creative industries.

Now that I have discussed the relationship between African peoples and capitalism, the attempts by the neo-liberal state to consolidate the culture of capitalism through the creative industries, and the linkage by the creative industries of the value of cultural production to price/profit, I want to spend time discussing how value is formulated in a capitalist society and exploring some non-capitalist theories of value before proposing what I mean by liberatory value and its relationship to cultural production.

What is Value?

In day to day conversation, value is a word which is often deployed and which has many connotations. I might say I value someone’s opinion to mean that I find that contribution to be important. Or I might say I value having someone around to connote an affective response that the presence of that person is something that I enjoy. But is this how value is understood in the field of political economy? In part yes, because value implies an importance and a demand. In

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume I Karl Marx writes about the relationships which

47 contribute to the development of modes of production under capitalism. In it he discusses the definition and significance of value as understood through labour, social interaction, and production.

All that [these products]…tell us is, that human labour power has been expended into their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are Values (Marx, 1887)

Through this angle of understanding value, Marx is signifying the importance of understanding the relationship between labour and value. Labour is the source through which something comes into existence, so without labour the question of value would not be something we could discuss.

However, we know that just because labour is a necessary precondition to the notion of value as

Marx writes about it above, that it does not mean that the significance of value is always determined through labour. For instance, the value of a tree to the ecosystem is delinked from human labour but might be linked to how it interacts with the ecosystem to rid air of various toxins.

Having said that, another layer of how Marx defines value can be understood when he writes in Volume I of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1887): “We see then that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.” (Marx, 1887) Here it would seem as though Marx is positing that labour is not only a necessary precondition for value to be discussed, but that it also acts as a signifier for the value of a given object that has been produced. However, we often see a discrepancy in the relationship between labour and value (for instance the discrepancies that exist between the Global North and Global South). Michio

Morishima in Marx's Economics: A Dual Theory of Value and Growth (1973) explains this

48 discrepancy by stating that Marx understood this formulation of value to be understood only in special cases:

[Karl Marx] knew that the exchange-values of commodities could equal their relative values only in special cases, that is, either in the purely abstract society of ‘simple commodity production’ or in the special capitalist society which satisfies the very restrictive conditions that each has the same value-composition of capital. (Morishima, 1973, p. 36)

The special circumstances Morishima is referring to are necessary because of the exploitation that is characteristic of capitalism. It is this exploitation that creates a difference between value and price. Thus, Marxist economics have developed the frameworks of price and value as distinct in order to understand the phenomena’s caused by capitalist economics. (Yaffe, 1974)

Furthermore, the exploitation of capitalist systems does not only cause a difference between price and value but also between different evaluations of value.

Another way to understand the above discussion is through what Marx refers to as the law of value. The law of value, in its most basic form, tell us that, putting aside any mitigating factors, that value of product or service X and product or service Y is directly proportional to the labour-time required for that specific production. (Yaffe, 2009) So if product or service X takes

50 hours to complete and product or service Y takes 25 hours to produce, then the ratio of value would be 2:1. “The price of production of the commodities would then equal [be proportional to] their value only in spheres, in which the composition [the value-composition of capital] would happen to be 80c + 20v [the same].” (Marx, 1959, p. 120). If the law of value, as forwarded by

Marx, was in perfect operation then the value of the product would always equal the labour-time that constituted bringing the product into fruition. However, “[b]y comparing capitalist society, where the exchange-values (or the relative prices) can deviate from the relative values, with this

49 ideal society, we can see how capitalists’ exploitation affects trade, the distribution of income, and so on.” (Morishima, 1973, p. 36)

In addition to labour-time there are two other factors which are important to highlight to analyse the nuances of the valuing of cultural production: exchange within the law of value and the idea of a commodity. A commodity is understood through processes of socialization.

(Appadurai, 2013; Yaffe, 2009) Therefore, according to Appadurai, “[t]he definitional question is: in what does its sociality consist? The purist answer, routinely attributed to Marx, is that a commodity is a product intended principally for exchange, and that such products emerge, by definition, in the institutional, psychological, and economic conditions of capitalism.”

(Appadurai, 2013, p. 6) In addition to understanding a commodity through the institutional, psychological, and economic conditions of capitalism, Marx also conceptualizes the commodity as something that is separate from us and that satisfies a particular demand, need or want of something around it. (Appadurai, 2013) In terms of exchange, the interesting thing about Marx’s propositions about the law of value is that it necessitates exchange in order to be operationalized.

With this foundation for understanding how value is understood in capitalist frameworks and how the law of value operates, I will explore revolutionary experiments that have attempted to subvert the law of value through an analyses of post-Revolution Cuba between 1959-1961. I focus specifically on Cuba and on this time period because it is a concrete example of how non- capitalist practices were put in place in order to imagine how value could be formulated outside of capitalist frameworks. Pointing to the experimentations of the Cuban Revolution in building political practices which sought to undermine the alienation and exploitation of people, lands, and resources between 1959-1961 helps to base how I later conceptualize what I refer to as liberatory value in praxis. In the following section I rely heavily on the work of Hellen Yaffe

50 through her book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution (2009) because it is a text which is based on primary source documents from the Cuban Revolution and on interviews she conducted with people who were a part of building post-Revolution Cuba. This usage of primary source documentation and interviews by Yaffe is important because as Nelson Valdés, a Cuban-

American scholar, writes “[t]he literature on Cuba has been permeated by so much political polemic that scholars have preferred to remain silent about the method they have utilized or the paradigm guiding their investigation and analytic logic.” (1988, p. 184) This in addition to

“English-language literature on Cuba…[being]… dominated by ‘Cubanology’ an academic school which is central to the ideological war waged against Cuban socialism” (Yaffe, p. 4,

2009) makes the work that Yaffe does in Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution (2009) a key text for understanding the political economy practices of Cuba.

The Great Debate

In 1959 the Cuban Revolution came to fruition after a disciplined and tactical armed struggle of six years, which overthrew the US-backed Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. The revolution of the Cuban people was explicitly positioned as a socialist revolution. (Yaffe, 2009)

It was a revolution whose aim was to redistribute the wealth, so that every Cuban could access healthcare, housing, and work structured to empower the people rather than to exploit them. In

2014 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a scholar and public intellectual, posed to African communities a reflection about movement building practices when she asked as “…architects of discourse and as builders of a movement, what do we know about the bottom of the barrel? How is that place of knowledge, clarity, injustice and violence reflected in our work?” (Gumbs) Similar lines of questioning not only inspired the Cuban revolution but also guided its work in the years after

1959. In some ways one could also argue that the revolution began anew on January 1, 1959 because then came the work of building a society which had been gutted by, among other factors, trade deals which saw raw resources being extracted and through the alienation intrinsic to capitalist modes of production. (Yaffe, 2009)

As part of the building and envisioning of what this new society was to manifest, debates and lively conversations about the various ways forward were commonplace. The economic realm was no exception; in fact, it was one of areas that the Cuban Revolution emphasized.

Cuban economists, revolutionaries, workers, artists and students were united in their disdain for capitalist thought but the question of how to subvert capitalist practice was not proving to be such a simple one. Many questions were on the table for discussion – including how, for a society that has been so immersed and framed by economic expressions of capitalism, would labour be understood and manifested? (Yaffe, 2009) The law of value was a particular point of focus in these discussions. As a starting point the form that the law of value took in its relationship to capitalism outside of abstract, or theoretical, exercises needed to be grappled with.

One thing that was clear was that:

Marx demonstrated that the law of value has a peculiar and paradoxical function. As an economic law, it predates but is then developed under capitalism, so that its operation is initially transparent but then obscured. Yet it provides the regulating law of motion of capitalism, in which it finds its most developed expression. (Yaffe, 2009, p. 51)

This obscuring is what happens when mitigating factors such as profit, exploitation and extraction take effect and mutate the law of value. (Yaffe, 1974) At the same time the law of value becomes developed through capitalist mechanisms because it is mutated, adjusted, and reconfigured to fit the demands of capital development. For a newly socialist state like Cuba how the law of value regulated the motion of capitalism was of critical interest. (Yaffe, 2009) Ernesto

Che Guevara, one of the architects of the Cuban revolution, argued that “[c]ommodities are the product of concrete human labour, but their constant and complex exchange gives the human labour expended a particular abstract, social, character.” (Yaffe, 2009, p. 52) This abstract social character is also what, in part, allows for different usages of the law of value because different expressions of capitalism use different ratios of labour to means of production, for example raw materials, machinery, etc., which then produce different surplus values from the initial investment. Furthermore, the effect and the relationship of the law of value in a non-capitalist state needed to be understood because it influenced how modes and means of production, circulation and distribution of products, labour incentives, wages, social relations and investment would be conceptualized and put in relation to each other. (Yaffe, 2009)

In the years between 1959 and 1961, members of the post-Revolution Cuban government experimented with two different forms of economic regulation; the Budgetary Finance System and Economic Calculus. The Budgetary Finance System, advocated strongly by Ernesto Che

Guevara, believed that the law of value had to be subverted in non-capitalist societies, whereas

Economic Calculus argued that the law of value could be regulated without detriment to the transition out of capitalism. (Yaffe, 2009) It was this, the debate between the Economic Calculus and the Budgetary Finance System, which eventually became termed as the Great Debate. As was just mentioned, one of the most contentious points of this debate circled around the law of value.

All participants in the Great Debate agreed that the law of value continued to operate because commodity production and exchange through a market mechanism continued to exist after the Revolution. The social product continued to be distributed on the basis of socially necessary labour time. However, they disagreed about the conditions explaining the law’s survival, its spheres of operation, the extent to which it regulated production, how it related to the ‘plan’ and, finally, whether the law of value should be utilized or undermined, and if so, how. (Yaffe, 2009, p. 53)

Participants of the Great Debate were interested in the question of how the law of value functioned in the transitory economic phases of a state attempting to construct socialism.

The advocates of Economic Calculus borrowed ideas from the socialist block of the

1950s to answer this question. (Yaffe, 2009) Their answer for how to create the material abundance found theoretically in communism was “…to utilize methods of production and distribution that allowed the operation of the law of value through the spontaneous and centrally unregulated processes of exchange with the aim of hastening the development of the productive forces.” (Yaffe, 2009, p. 53) While Guevara, and the advocates of the Budgetary Finance

System, warned that

depending on the law of value to foster development would undermine collective consciousness, obstructing the construction of socialism and communism. Socialist countries had to find alternative levers to develop the productive forces, such as the national plan, investment in research and technology, administrative mechanisms and social consciousness itself. (Yaffe, 2009, p. 53)

So, what proponents of the Budgetary Finance System did was rather than try to undermine the continued existence, however obscured, of the law of value within non-capitalist societies was to instead explore and understand what spheres the law of value continued to operate in order to be able to eliminate the conditions which it needed. This is of particular importance to how I conceptualize liberatory value because it provides a foundational analysis for how capitalist formulations of value could potentially be subverted.

Guevara believed that a socialist country’s task was not use, or even hold the law of value in check, but to define very precisely the law’s sphere of operation and then make inroads into those spheres to undermine it; to work towards its abolition, not limitation. To ‘eliminate the conditions for their existence’ meant raising Cuba’s productive capacity, creating the material abundance necessary to ignore the law of value. The challenge was to achieve this without using those same capitalist levers to production. (Yaffe, 2009, p. 56)

Through this exploration and study of the law of value it became clear to Guevara that the commodity and exchange components of the law of value were something he could influence.

Putting forward Marx’s definition of what constitutes a commodity as a product which “…has to pass into the hands of a second party, the one who consumes it, by means of an act of exchange”,

Guevara argued that the law of value within the centralized system of the Budgetary Finance

System ceased to function because there was no exchange between different parties. (Yaffe,

2009, p. 54) He formulated and understood the state as one entity so when products would move from one factory to another it was not a commodity because it was not being moved between two different entities. This was critical because it allowed the workers to be the architects of discourse and builders of what their non-capitalist society would look like. Guevara argued that

“[s]ince the law of value did not operate in exchange between state production units, the workers themselves should decide what the socialist, non-value-oriented economic policies to pursue in safeguarding society against capitalist restoration and achieving economic abundance.” (Yaffe,

2009, p. 54) In the Cuban manifestation of the Budgetary Finance System the law of value was undermined through a precise analysis of what its sphere of operation and effect were. This helped proponents of the Budgetary Finance System to conceptualize economic frameworks outside the constraints of capitalist thought and practice. In this way it allowed for people forwarding the Cuban revolution to envision a transition to socialism without having to use the very methods which it was trying to move away from while also being able to operationalize the idea of value outside of capitalist exchanges and the law of value. For Ernesto Che Guevara

“[t]he law of value and planning are two terms linked by a contradiction and its resolution. We can therefore state that centralized planning is characteristic of the socialist society, its definition.” (Yaffe, 2009, p.56)

Liberatory Value

Continuing the thread that Guevara picked up on and continued to weave throughout the

Great Debate I am interested in transposing his linkage between the law of value and planning to how the law of value and cultural production are “two terms linked by a contradiction and its resolution.” (Che, 2009, p. 56) Similarly to the advocates of the Budgetary Finance System, it is my contention that cultural production concerned with the freedom of African communities makes the law of value redundant by challenging the ideas of commodity and forms of exchange.

That is, the types of cultural production that I am deploying here, ones embedded in struggles for self-determination and freedom, subvert dominant capitalist narratives of value, production and commodification. These manifestations of cultural production redefine value as liberatory value, by undermining the notion of exchange and commodity as central to value. Cultural production concerned with self-determination, autonomy, and freedom creates sites for liberatory dialogue through process-oriented methods and not through the operationalization of discrete units, or commodities. That is, the value does not stem from the painting itself, or the song itself, or the poem itself but rather value is shaped by the relationships it is predicated on and the contexts of the freedom dreams which it is surrounded by. Its liberatory value stems from its ability to incite a space where insurgent imagination can be developed, take root, and be put into praxis. Its value is in its improvisations of freedom.

What this process-oriented understanding of value also does is undermine the exchange between discrete units. Think here of Guevara’s assertion that his central planning in the

Ministry of Industries undermined the fact that each factory was a discrete accounting unit and rather than when exchange was happening it was occurring between the same grand entity thus

56 fundamentally moving away from what conceptualizes, as Marx thought of it, a commodity. In other words, exchange was happening between factories but each factory was part of a whole which it contributed to. This differs from a factory in the capitalist system which is understood to be a discrete, and alienated, unit which is not part of or accountable to a larger whole. The collective work to make reality African freedom dreams is analogous to the work that central planning was doing in Guevara’s undermining of the law of value. What I mean by this is that though there are different manifestations of cultural production they function within an ecosystem that by the very act of its collective commitment to self-determination defies the oppressive mechanisms of capitalism in its attempts at improvising, practising and exercising freedom. This self-determination is the overarching thread, the link to the whole, just as in

Guevara’s assertions central planning was the overarching thread and the link to the whole. In this way labour-time is divorced from the idea of profit or from the idea that the law of value needs to be deployed in order to develop the productive bases thus invoking what Guevara was calling for – a development of the productive bases while simultaneously building consciousness. This consciousness is built through the dialogues and relationship building that occurs in the process of cultural production and the interactions it fosters and creates.

As developed in the preceding section, the law of value necessitates two things, commodification and exchange between discrete units. An exchange happens between point A and point B, there is a beginning to the exchange and an endpoint to the exchange. Liberatory value subverts the law of value by not having the end point necessary for exchange as conceptualized by the law of value. The flow of ideas garnered by cultural production improvising freedom is never ending because processes of freedom are never ending. Freedom is a horizon we are always walking towards and as such the movement of ideas is constant and

57 moving in many directions simultaneously rather than, as in capitalist frameworks, moving from a distinct point A and ending at a distinct point B. The work of José Esteban Muñoz on queer futurities in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) and the scholarly work of Neil Roberts on Maroon communities is particularly useful in understanding the concept of freedom as a continual process versus a finite one. In attempting to conceptualize the relationship between queerness and futurity Muñoz writes:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there…Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. (2009, p. 1)

This aesthetic practice, or what I have thus far termed liberatory cultural production, holds a particular power, as Muñoz states, in that it can provide a site for this ideality, of freedom, of self-determination, to take root without then trying to prefigure its political outcome. Neil

Roberts in Freedom as Marronage (2015) writes on themes of futurity and understanding freedom through process by deploying the idea of flight through a study of Maroon communities struggle for freedom. Roberts engagement of flight supports Munoz’s assertion of freedom being

“the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (2009, p.1) when he writes that:

Marronage is a flight from the negative, subhuman realm of necessity, bondage and unfreedom toward the sphere of positive activity and human freedom. Flight is multidimensional, constant and never static…The concept of marronage is…an acknowledgement of subject formation in the shifting regions of the in-between, what Homi Bhabha identifies as the ‘emergence of the interstices.’”(2015, p. 15)

The work of envisioning African freedom dreams through cultural production which engenders, and makes referential, self-determination and liberation speaks against the restrictive delimiting of predetermined forms of political relationships by rerouting rupture, insurgent imagination and freedom into pathways of continual processes. Cultural production with liberatory value makes

African freedom dreams possible because through acting as a site for the improvisation of freedom it provides a site to gather, debate, and to form and reform ideas and ways of being.

Cultural production with liberatory value allows for the expression of African freedom dreams because it allows African peoples to hold true that “…we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.” (Kelley, 2002, p. 2) Cultural production infuses our freedom dreams into our everyday by opening up spaces for imagination. Robin Kelly, in his book Freedom Dreams, discusses how he believes being makers of culture affects African peoples through an anecdote about his mother. Kelley writes that his mother

…with her eyes wide open…dreamed and dreamed some more, describing what life could be for us. She wasn’t talking about a postmortem world, some kind of heaven or afterlife; and she was not speaking of reincarnation (which she believes in, by the way). She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air, organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism …just free. She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had she connected her vision to any political ideology. But she convinced my siblings and me that change is possible and that we didn’t have to be stuck there forever…I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than the desolation that surrounds us. (2002, p. 2-3)

In this way liberatory value is also antenormative because its referential point is not the oppressions being faced by African peoples but rather the freedom dreams being incited through liberatory cultural production. Thus, the law of value and cultural production which turns through ruptural forms of cultural production that improvise freedom are, borrowing from

Ernesto Che Guevara, “two terms linked by a contradiction and its resolution.” (Yaffe, 2009, p.

56)

Chapter 3: Senegal, Cultural Production, and Freedom

The State and Cultural Production

[T]hey entered into the battle with a sense that victory was inevitable, for not even the ruling class could control the weather. (Kelley, 2002, p. 87)

The makings of African nationalist subjectivities are integral to understanding the articulation and implementation of the political frameworks that Senegal has been forming since its inception. In a colonial landscape that sought to quarantine the imaginings of African subjectivities within spaces bound by consistent subjugation and violent repression, the creations of identity narratives that transgressed these white supremacist boundaries were key to the

Senegalese freedom struggle against French occupation. The manner through which contestations for African identity have been theorized are of particular interest because the ways that these theories have then been mobilized impact how the demands for self-determination are formulated and their manifestations. Though it is outside the scope of this section, it is worth noting that cultural production in the African context during the era of independence and in contemporary times did not, and does not, only express its freedom dreams through taking the nation-state and putting an African face as its administrator. Take for instance the work of Wole

Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1986. Wole Soyinka’s work includes the plays Dance of the Forests (1963), Death and the King’s Horseman (1975),

Madmen and Specialists (1970); a book of poetry titled Idanre and Other Poems (1967); an autobiography, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981); The Interpreters (1965), a novel; and literary, political and cultural criticism as can be found in Myth, Literature and the African

World (1976) and The Open Sore of a Continent: A personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis

(1996). (Alston, 2003) In an in-depth study of Soyinka’s work Kenyan scholar Joseph Walunywa writes in Post-Colonial African Theory and Practice: Wole Soyinka's Anarchism (1997) that

Soyinka’s artistic works, in alignment with anarchist theories of self-determination, can be understood as a “…consistent resistance—the desire to break free of—all forces, irrespective of whether they originate from "the left" or from "the right," that seek to confine either the individual or the community within any established social, economic or political constitutional barricade.” (1997, p. 75) Wole Soyinka would infuse themes into his stories, often based in

Yoruba culture, which would portray an African subject whose aspirations were not framed through nationalist desires. Instead, his writings would weave themes of how African peoples were resisting oppression through political practices which did not replicate hierarchy or coercion. (Walunywa, 1997) Wole Soyinka was calling for Africans to express their freedom dreams outside of the nation-state because he believed the nation-state to be a colonial inheritance which would continue to oppress African peoples. (Walunywa, 1997; Alston, 2003).

Similarly, in the dawn of the popular uprising in Egypt which started in 2010 there has been a proliferation of graffiti artists who are concerned with depicting an African subject that is explicitly working against coercion and the violence of authoritarian rule. Egyptian graffiti artist

El Zeft understands cultural production to be one way that people who are seeking anti- authoritarian alternatives are amplifying their messages and building with one another. (Mowafi,

2015) In an interview with journalist Timmy Mowafi, El Zeft understands the challenges to actualizing anti-authoritarian political formations and practices but despite the challenges he says

“we're going to win whether it's now, tomorrow or 20 years from now because we have something we believe in, whilst [people who believe in authoritarian rule] are just fighting because [they’re] scared of your superiors.” (Mowafi, 2015) However, for the purposes of this

62 section my focus will predominately be on African independence movements that did wish to gain nation-state power. I will explore the ways in which the liberatory value of cultural production can expand our terrains of struggle in the conclusion of the thesis. This section will begin by exploring the influence of culture in the creation of African identity. The intersections between the two are of particular interest in my analysis because of the ways in which these discourses have impacted the relationship between the state and ideas of artistic performance and creation.

The African independence movements that began to take shape in the late 1950s were propelled by the understanding that “…the dismantlement of the system of [colonialism] only removed a fetter blocking the possibility of emancipation.” (Reed, 2002, p. 41) Cultural production by its design, occupied the cultural realm of African freedom struggles. African cultural production was politicized in the service of the post-colonial nation-state by independence freedom fighters because cultural spaces served as central battlegrounds for the creation and propagation of the African nationalist subject, understood by advocates of the nation-state to be synonymous with a free African subject. (Cabral, 1974) The cultural productions of African independence movements and African freedom movements seeking liberation outside of colonial nation-state structures served as “…the “proof” or “reality” of

[African] cultural coherence and the desire for a wished-for reality.” (Lubiana, 2002, p. 159) At a time where the existence of African identity, throughout the continent and diaspora, not predominantly defined through a lens of oppression was the exception, politicized artistic expression interjected with a palatable narrative that an African subject, whether in the diaspora or on the continent, could exist outside of subjugation. In the mainstream white imaginary the formulation of the African subject was heavily influenced by colonial formulations of the nation-

63 state and its corresponding institutions. To counteract this formulation African freedom fighters and cultural producers who were a part of movements like Negritude or the Black Arts

Movements, in lieu of holding the power of nation-state apparatuses, utilized cultural spaces to delimit and represent “… liberatory forms and images, including the means by which…[African]…past, present, and future can be authorized and disseminated.” (Lubiana,

2002, p. 160) This was the work that African cultural producers like Miriam Makeba, Nina

Simone, Sonia Sanchez, and Wole Soyinka were doing. They connected their work to explicit political frameworks which sought to support the freedom struggles of African peoples. Take for instance the lyrics of Miriam Makeba’s “A Luta Continua”, a song she popularized in 1975:

My people, my people open your eyes And answer the call of the drum FRELIMO, FRELIMO, Samora Machel, Samora Machel has come.

Maputo, maputo home of the brave Our nation will soon be as one. FRELIMO, FRELIMO, Samora Machel, Samora Machel has won.

Mozambique a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua.

And to those who have given their lives Praises to thee Husband and wives, all thy children Shall reap what you sow This continent is home.

My brothers and sisters stand up and sing, Eduardo Mondlane is not gone FRELIMO, FRELIMO, your eternal flame Has shown us the light of dawn

Mozambique a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

In Zimbabwe a luta continua

A luta continua, continua, continua

In Botswana a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

In Zambia a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

In Angola a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

In Namibia a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

In South Africa a luta continua A luta continua, continua, continua

Or the poem “Affirmation” by Assata Shakur which appeared on the first page of her autobiography Assata: An Autobiography:

i believe in living. i believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. i believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs; And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. i believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. i believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. i believe in life. And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path i have seen the destruction of the daylight and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted i have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. i have walked on cut grass. i have eaten crow and blunder bread

and breathed the stench of indifference i have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. i believe in living i believe in birth. i believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port. (2001, p. 1)

African subjectivities created, through the support of liberatory cultural production, outside of the bounds of domination are inherently oppositional to the colonial nation-state. The very reason for the creation of these African subjectivities is because the possibilities for freedom cannot be held within the colonial project, in the case of Senegal through the state of

France. Senegalese cultural production acted as an incubator for this African nationalist imperative in Senegal. The cultural production of people like Léopold Sédar Senghor, former president of Senegal who also wrote various volumes of poetry and literature like Prière aux masques (1935) and Nation et Voie Africaine du Socialisme (1961), and Ousmane Sembéne, a

Senegalese filmmaker known for making films in Wolof like Xala (1975), Camp de Thiaroye

(1988), and Ceddo (1977) and for being one of the founders of Panafrican Festival of Cinema at

Ouagadougou (FESPACO), among others, expanded the base of people in Senegal who could engage the manifestations of a freedom through an African nationalist agenda. They did this by depicting an African nationalist subject that was relatable, within reach of their day-to-day lived experiences, and which introduced an imagination of reality outside of domination in a manner that was accessible and allowed for multiple entry points of engagement. (Okolo, 1984; Lubiana,

2002) For instance take the work of Ousmane Sembéne whose decision to make films was guided by a desire to make more accessible explorations of liberation, freedom and resistance to a broad African audience. Through his films African communities, particularly in West Africa, were able to engage with themes of freedom and liberation in spaces they would frequent in their day-to-day lives – at home, at a friend’s house, at a kiosk, or in a cinema. It also provided a platform for these discussions that took into consideration that not everyone wants to engage themes of liberation in, or through, academic settings and frameworks. In addition, his choice to make films both in Wolof and in French was also guided by a desire to make his films accessible to a broader African audience through the use of an Indigenous African language. (Niang,

Gadjigo, Sembène, 1995) Through music, poetry, writing, visual art and sound, cultural producers from Senegal and across the African world were able to nurture formulations of

African identities that were being created through sites of possibility rather than, as in colonial productions of African identity, sites of despair and harm. An example of this affirmation of

African identity outside of sites of despair and harm can be seen, for example, in the lyrics of

Nina Simone’s 1969 song “Young, Gifted, and Black” which was on her album Black Gold:

To be young, gifted and black, Oh what a lovely precious dream To be young, gifted and black, Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know There are a billion boys and girls Who are young, gifted and black, And that's a fact!

Young, gifted and black We must begin to tell our young There's a world waiting for you This is a quest that's just begun

When you feel really low

Yeah, there's a great truth you should know When you're young, gifted and black Your soul's intact

Young, gifted and black How I long to know the truth There are times when I look back And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today Is that we can all be proud to say To be young, gifted and black Is where it's at

The work of constituting African identity through sites of possibility rather than, as in colonial productions of African identity, sites of despair and harm can also be found in the poem “Song for Soweto” by June Jordan which was published in the collection of poetry titled Living Room in 1985.

At the throat of Soweto a devil language falls slashing claw syllables to shred and leave raw the tongue of the young girl learning to sing her own name

Where she would say water They would teach her to cry blood Where she would save grass They would teach her to crave crawling into the grave Where she would praise father They would teach her to pray somebody please

do not take him away Where she would kiss with her mouth my homeland They would teach her to swallow this dust But words live in the spirit of her face and that sound will no longer yield to imperial erase

Where they would draw blood She will drink water Where they would deepen the grave She will conjure up grass Where they would take father and family away She will stand under the sun/she will stay Where they would teach her to swallow this dust She will kiss with her mouth my homeland and stay with the song of Soweto

stay with the song of Soweto (Jordan, p. 352)

How is Culture Valued in Senegal?

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese, Dutch, and British traders arrived on the coasts of what is now understood to be Senegal, followed by French arrival. The French first occupied

Senegal in 1659 with the creation of the city of St. Louis. The French, with brief periods of exchange with the British, occupied Senegal until independence in 1960. The first president of

Senegal was Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and writer who had studied and lived in

France and was one of the initiators of the arts movements known as Negritude. (Okolo, 1984)

As you drive around Dakar today you will see murals of Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabe freedom fighter who fought against economic and political repression and violence, and who was the leader of Burkina Faso (1983-1987), assassinated in 1987. You will also see Angela Davis, an African freedom fighter based in the United States who was an important supporter and critic of the Communist Party, who was a part of the proliferation of the Black Power Struggle during the 1960s and 1970s, and who today remains a staunch advocate for prison abolition as a necessary condition for the emancipation of African peoples globally. These two murals are of easily identifiable people, but it is not just well known people who are the subjects of artistic creation. Perhaps what is one of the most interesting things to observe is that the majority of the graffiti that I have seen in Dakar depicts day to day life, it depicts Senegalese people, and it depicts political hopes and critiques of the communities in Dakar, and Senegal more broadly.

How cultural production is valued can also readily be observed on the streets of Dakar made bright by the many patterns and textiles that people are wearing. There is an art to tailoring and to clothing that holds in its seams generations of stories being regenerated through styles of clothing that both hold tradition and remix it with the evolution of style that the youth of Senegal bring. That Senegalese people value cultural production is evident in that it is incorporated through and with daily life. For instance, on a monthly basis Coumba Toure, a long time

Senegalese popular educator and cultural producer in Senegal and Mali, holds an event in Dakar honouring African feminists and the work they are doing towards the liberation of African peoples globally. As a part of this event music, visual art, and culinary art are mainstays. The cultural production is exhibited throughout the space so that people can engage with it while the

MC or honoree of the evening is speaking. This monthly event brings out an intergenerational crowd of people with various lived experiences and perspectives. Outside of events like the ones

Coumba hosts you will also regularly find poetry slams, musical festivals, and art shows being hosted. In addition to this, canvases putting into colour Senegal’s history and Senegal’s communities animate any walk or drive you may take.

In Senegal, culture is a space of political expression and cultural production is the site through which these expressions are built, experimented on, sculpted, amended and discussed.

Furthermore, cultural production in Senegal is also valued as a site of internationalism – a site through which Senegalese communities can be in conversation with African peoples outside of

Senegal. Mbalax is one example of how this internationalism has manifested in the cultural production of Senegal. “Mbalax, [is] the genre of dance music highlighted by Senegalese rhythms and griot vocal styles…In the late 1970s, mbalax was created by infusing Cuban dance music with Senegalese percussion and Wolof lyrics. By the 1980s, mbalax had become a distinct genre of its own[.]” (Tang, 2012, p. 80)

Negritude and Pan-Africanism

Because Senegalese cultural production has not evolved in isolation I want to spend some time discussing two spheres which have influenced cultural production in Senegal. These two spheres are Pan-Africanism and Negritude. In addition, I am also interested in the relationship that these two have had to each other. Negritude was a cultural production movement that began to find footing in the 1930s. Its initiators included Léon Damas of French Guiana, Aimé Césaire, a poet from Martinique, and Senegalese writer, and future president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar

Senghor. (Okolo, 1984) Negritude, predominantly through literature and poetry, sought to

71 address the alienation of African labour, life, and society caused by colonialism, imperialism, and sanctioned state violence. It saw as a central problem the question of identity and identity formation, similar to the diasporic Black Arts Movement which included cultural producers like

Sonia Sanchez, Max Roach, Gill Scott-Heron, Amiri Baraka and Abbey Lincoln. For Aimé

Césaire and Léon Damas the focus of their work was heavily influenced by the estrangement that the Transatlantic Slave Trade caused between African peoples, between African peoples and the continent of Africa, and between African peoples and conceptions of self outside of colonialism and subordination as a referential point. (Okolo, 1984) Léopold Sédar Senghor focused much more on the idea of tradition in African society. In this sense Léopold Sédar Senghor could be understood or framed as a traditionalist, harkening to Africa’s past as a way to envision and build the future. (Okolo, 1984) Negritude had a common thread which responded to global politics through an explicitly African lens however there were differences in perspective between the three initiators of Negritude. Namely, Léopold Sédar Senghor though emphasizing the need for a movement that would spur a reawakening of African worth and identity as defined by Africans also believed that through time white and African cultures could work towards a new racial consciousness. This was something neither Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas championed. (Okolo,

1984)

One thing however that the three of them did agree on was what Negritude as a movement signified. Léopold Sédar Senghor writes that Negritude is

... the whole of the values of civilization, cultural, economic, social, political which characterize the black peoples, more exactly the Negro-African world. It is essentially instinctive reason, which pervades all these values, because it is reason of the impressions, reason that is "seized." It is expressed in the emotions, through an abandonment of self in an identification with the object; through the myth, I mean by images, archetypes of the collective soul, especially by the primordial myth associated with image of the cosmos.

In other terms, the sense of communion, the gift of imagination, the gift of rhythm, these are the traits of Negritude that we find like an indelible seal on all the works and activities of the Black man. (Senghor, 1961, p. 206)

As can be observed from this above formulation of self, the relationship to a defined African identity, and literary imagination and production was the key component of Negritude. Picking up on the thread of identity Jean-Paul Sartre, in Black Orpheus, wrote, when describing

Negritude, that "Negritude inserts itself with its past and its future in the universal history; it is no more a State, neither even an existential attitude; it is a becoming." (Sartre, 1976, p. 57) It is this idea of becoming, an idea that Negritude did not focus enough on, that put Negritude on a path of collision with critics of the movement.

As Negritude was beginning to gather footing in African communities so were calls for political frameworks that positioned African freedom dreams through a Pan-Africanist viewpoint. Pan-Africanism was a theory and a praxis which sought a multitude of demands and cannot be neatly defined. (Shivji, 2009) Though there was a convergence in Pan-Africanist thought on the idea of cooperation and collectivity throughout Africa the praxis of this convergence was understood in many different ways. (Nkrumah, 1963) For instance, an anti- authoritarian perspective would understand Pan-Africanism to be a call for no borders and the dismantling of the nation-state. (Mbah & Igariwey,1997) Whereas a liberal understanding might understand it as being operationalized through the creation of an economic zone which privileges trade among African nation-states. (Nkrumah, 1963) Considering the variations, Pan-African thought can be generally understood as a movement predicated on the solidarity of Africans globally for the purpose of economics, political, social and cultural self-determination. (Shivji,

2009) Steve Biko, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement and freedom fighter against

73 the systems of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa, understood Pan-Africanism through frameworks of Black Consciousness.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression - the blackness of their skin - and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. (Biko, 1987, p. 91-92)

Key to Steve Biko’s conceptualization was the call to action – something critics claimed was lacking in the Negritude movement. Their contention was that it was fine and well to embolden

Black identity through literature but if that did not translate to tangible programmatic ways forward then how did this materially benefit African populations? Frantz Fanon, a Pan-

Africanist, and one of the biggest critics of Negritude, writes in Wretched of the Earth

It is around the people's struggles that African-negro culture takes on substance and not around songs, poems, or folklore .... I say again that no speech-making and no proclamation concerning culture will turn us from our fundamental task: the liberation of the national territory; a continual struggle against colonialism in its new form; and an obstinate refusal to enter the charmed circle of mutual admiration at the summit. (Fanon, 1963, p. 189)

In contrast to Negritude, Amilcar Cabral’s call for cultural production was always directly related to how it could shift the material realities of people and support revolutionary processes.

(Cabral, 1974) In Cabral’s call, cultural production moved from a place of fostering pride to a place of fostering power through the ability to incite the insurgent imagination of African peoples as part of mobilizing struggles for freedom. Though Negritude was important in that it began conversations about the importance of defining African-ness by Africans it did not go far enough to act as a site for inspiring and catalysing action. The liberatory value of cultural production depends on its insistence in being a part of creating sites from which self-determined actions fighting for freedom can be propelled, incubated, revised, drawn up, and debated.

The Liberatory Value of Hip-Hop in Senegal

The hip-hop arts movement has left its mark on theatre, poetry, literature, journalism, criticism, performance art, dance, visual arts, photography, graphic design, film, video, name your genre, not to mention the recombinant and emerging versions of any and all of the above. (Chang, 2006, p. ix)

Hip-Hop is a resistance movement. Hip-hop is a musical, dance, and visual art form. Hip-

Hop is African expressions of rebellion which have found homes in the battle cries of oppressed peoples globally. From Soweto to Dakar to Salvador to the Bronx, hip-hop has carried the stories of struggles for freedom for generations. (Chang, 2006) Growing out of New York City the spread of hip-hop has reached beyond African communities in the United States to touch communities globally because hip-hop “…lends itself as a motivational force and context in the promulgation of indigenous languages and group identity, for peoples as diverse as the Maluku of Indonesia to the Sami of Norway. (Veràn, 2006, p. 278) This promulgation of identity is key because through hip-hop artists are able to articulate the harm being inflicted on their communities while speaking back against that harm through the music, visual art, dance and poetry of hip-hop. Hip-hop in this way provides communities a channel through which they are able to depict themselves outside of the bounds of oppression. Indigenous Australian hip-hop artist Grant Leigh Saunders situates the impact that hip-hop has had on his community through explaining the ways that it has facilitated the transmission of Indigenous knowledges between generations.

Hip-hop has proven itself a powerful voice and a powerful motivator in the way it’s been utilized by Aboriginal Australians. It has, I believe, strengthened the longevity of our Aboriginal cultures. We’re conscious that when our elders pass on, their knowledge will, too—unless we make it accessible to the young people, as hip-hop hop does indeed do. (Veràn, 2006, p. 287)

When asked, in a roundtable discussion with Indigenous hip-hop artists from Chile,

Aotearoa/New Zealand, Cherokee Nation of Oklohoma, Tanzania, and Australia, what the appeal of hip-hop was in their communities Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, a hip-hop artist from Tanzania, answered:

When hip-hop arrived in Tanzania, it was like the sons and daughters of the land being welcomed back home, introduced back to the families, clans, and tribes. At the same time, it came to us like a needed rain when the earth is dry, bringing a new voice, new ideas. Its rain fell and transformed the land; those who resist the changing cosmic waters now face being swept away in its powerful torrents. (Veràn, 2006, p. 281)

The ability of hip-hop to transpose and become relevant in different local contexts attests to its power as a transformative art form. Holding that the roots of hip-hop sprang from the struggles of Africans in the diaspora the global reach it has had can in part be attributed to the fact that resistance movements fighting for the freedom of oppressed peoples can be found world-wide.

Hip-hop has been a site through which different resistance movements have been able to be in dialogue with each other and take inspiration from each other in the fight for liberation.

When hip-hop emerged as an art form in Senegal in the 1980s many understood this as a homecoming of sorts. Faada Freddy of the Senegalese hip-hop group Daara J puts explains the idea of homecoming by saying that “…rap was born in Africa, grown in America and it went around the world to come back to Africa like a boomerang.” (Tang, 2012, p. 79) The argument being that much of hip-hop’s rhythms and styles, though born in African communities in the

United States, were also embedded in Senegalese traditions of music, rhythm and storytelling.

From its initial entry into the arts scene of Senegal hip-hop was a politicised art form that carried and amplified the voice of the people across political systems which had grown to alienate them.

(Gueye, 2013) But before we begin the discussion of the interventions which Senegalese cultural

76 producers made through hip-hop it is important to first understand the relationship of hip-hop to forms of cultural production that had historically existed in Senegal.

The term OG, or Original Griot, is a common phrase heard throughout the hip-hop community. Griot is a term that is taken from West African traditions of storytelling.

Griots have played a significant role in cultures throughout West Africa for more than seven centuries, serving as oral historians, praise-singers, musicians, genealogists, and storytellers. Best known as hereditary artisans of the spoken word, griots also specialize in a variety of musical instruments, from the kora and bala fon of Mande griots (jali) to the sabar drum of Wolof griots (géwël) in Senegal. (Tang, 2012, p. 79-80)

Mixing traditions of music with spoken word griots were the memory keepers of their communities. Transmitting histories while also archiving current moments of resistance and culture. They told stories of migration, of struggles for freedom, of familial and communal histories and of everyday occurrences, often with humour and playfulness. (Tang, 2012) Griot singers and drummers in Senegal are part of essentially any communal occasion of note because they live in, and are a part of, the communities whose stories they are transmitting. The traditions of hip-hop MC’s stem from the griots of not only West Africa but also of other parts of

Africa. (Tang, 2012)

Mbalax, a musical form that combines Wolof, Senegalese rhythms, and Cuban music, up until the 1980s “had been the quintessential and dominant popular music genre in Senegal, appealing to all ages and socioeconomic groups since the early 1970s.” (Tang, 2012, p. 83)

However, in the mid-1980s hip-hop in Senegal began to capture the imagination of the youth who were increasingly becoming frustrated with what they understood to be the political corruption of the administration led by Abdou Diouf. Abdou Diouf was the second president of

Senegal. He came into power in 1981 and eventually voted out of office in 2000. He was ousted from power due to sustained organizing which was spurred by artists in the hip-hop community.

(Künzner, 2007) I will come back to the point of how hip-hop artists spurred the movement that eventually forced Diouf from office. Senegal was introduced to hip-hop through groups like the

Sugarhill Gang, MCs and DJ’s like Grandmaster Flash, graffiti, and breakdancing. (Tang, 2012)

As the 1980s progressed hip-hop in Senegal became less of a thing that people just listened to as an imported art form from African communities in the United States and more of an art medium which allowed for rebellion and insurgent imagination to be expressed. (Fredericks, 2014) It was also during this time that some rappers in Senegal began to also challenge how hip-hop was being framed in terms of value. Awadi, a rapper who is a part of Positive Black Soul, one of the first widely popular hip-hop groups, describes how hip-hop artists in Senegal are trying to subvert the commodification of the art form.

A lot of people say that rappers are modern griots. But first one must understand what we rappers take from griots. The griots in traditional Senegalese society would sing for the kings; they would sing about the history of Senegal. They were like history books, like a journalist. And the griot was also someone who sang for money. So he wore several different hats. What we rappers have continued to do, what we have taken from the griots, is from the journalistic side. A journalist engaged in his society. But all of the other aspects of the griot, we don’t do. That is, we don’t sing for the purpose of receiving money. Of course, we are paid musicians. That’s obvious. But we do not sing about people so that they will give us money. There is a big difference. (Tang, 2012, p. 84)

This refusal to commodify hip-hop points to the beginnings of formulating value outside of capitalism which requires both a refusal of commodification and exchange as understood by the law of value.

The sites where hip-hop in Senegal was being developed and growing most rapidly were in places that people would frequent in their day to day life – schools, clubs, people’s homes. In particular, Sacré Coeur, a high-school in Dakar, was a hotspot for artistic development that had frequent rap and breakdancing battles. (Künzner, 2007) By the late 1980s the first widely known hip-hop groups began to form. Among the foundational groups were Positive Black Soul, WA

BMG 44, Rap’ adio, and Pee Froiss – all of which were politicized in the expressions of their art form. (Fredericks, 2014) “Born in the context of political crisis, much of Senegalese rap has been highly politicized from the beginning.” (Fredericks, 2012, p. 134) At the time of the rise of hip- hop as an artistic medium and as a culture of resistance in Senegal various factors were affecting the political landscape. The negative effects of structural adjustment programmes began to be felt by the Senegalese population and quickly became one of the factors causing social unrest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (Fredericks, 2014) During the 1988 elections Parti Democratique

Senegalais (The Democratic Party of Senegal) claimed that the sitting government of Abdou

Diouf committed election fraud. In response the government arrested Abdoulaye Wade, leader of

Parti Democratique Senegalais, causing clashes between protestors and police. The arrest of

Wade and the continued clashes between protestors and police all happened during a federally declared three-month state of emergency in Dakar which the Diouf administration has put in place to supress dissent. The third factor was the sustained student strikes which were spurred by the allegations of fraud, the arrest of Abdoulaye Wade, and the repression faced by protestors at the hand of the Diouf administration. These sustained student strikes caused Année Blanche, the school year to be cancelled. (Fredericks, 2012) These three factors collided to create a political climate in Senegal, and in Dakar particularly, which saw youth disaffected, angry and seeking change. “[A]t first Senegalese rappers patterned their music…after rap…from the US and

France. Soon, their art began to take on its own distinct flavor, combining elements of local musical traditions, indigenous languages, and messages that resonated with Senegalese youth.”

(Fredericks, 2012, p. 134) As mentioned earlier, hip-hop in Senegal was politicised from the outset because it was tied to the unrest that the youth of Senegal were feeling. This discontent was amplified by hip-hop artists. In 1995 Positive Black Soul released an album called Salaam

79 which included the track “Bul Faale”. Bul Faale recognized the economic and political crises facing the Senegalese population at the time and called for the youth of Senegal to work to build the future of Senegal. (Künzner, 2007) Bul Faale “was a precise expression of an attitude among young Senegalese wishing to emancipate and innovate…[and it] became the symbol of protest against the government…of Abdou Diouf” (Künzner, 2007, p. 97-98) In their song “Djoko”

Positive Black Soul (PBS) make it clear that they were not endorsing a particular political party.

Rather, they wanted to their music to inspire and mobilize Senegalese people struggling for change. The members of Positive Black Soul make this point clear in the lyrics of “Djoko” when they rap

We are not P.S [Party Social], or P.D.S. [Parti Democratique Senegalais], we are PBS, a brand new party, no one will be left out. The youth are good and fair. What they did in the past cannot be buried. We are underprivileged, but want the good life…Remember what they promised in 1987? We haven’t seen a thing. (Künzner, 2007, p. 98)

Hip-hop became a site through which to incite the insurgent imagination of youth seeking a shift in their lived realities.

Veteran rapper Keyti (originally with Rap’adio) sums up the impact of rap as direct critique as follows: It’s about the way Senegalese people can talk about certain things now – naturally …Before hip hop, it was not here. Traditionally the structure of this society is: the elders talk …and the youth they listen and do. But … rappers they broke the rules. [They said] enough of the social structure, enough of the social ladder, we are all citizens. We’ve got our word to say. And … little by little, people are accepting that a 12 year old can write a rap song and talk about the president. Even though the president is 86 or 90. (Fredericks, 2012, p. 136)

In 2001 Abdoulaye Wade finally came to power after a decade of organizing against a state which utilized every resource to keep Abdou Diouf in power. After 40 years of single party rule under Party Social (PS) Abdoulaye Wade became the third president of Senegal with 58.7% of the vote. (Gueye, 2013) Wade’s electoral campaign received support from other opposition parties who had endorsed him since he was the only candidate who acquired enough votes to

80 face Diouf for a second round. (Gueye, 2013) In addition to the eventual support of opposition parties, Wade’s campaign also had strong youth support. (Künzner, 2007) Throughout the struggles to remove Abdou Diouf from power hip-hop, through the music of politicized artists like Positive Black Soul, “allowed a vocally marginalized youth to gain visibility and representation.” (Gueye, 2013, p. 28) Because hip-hop gave voice to youth who felt disenfranchised it became a site through which their desires for change could be amplified. Some of the hip-hop groups, in addition to Positive Black Soul, amplifying the calls for change throughout the 1990s were WA BMG 44, Rap’adio, and Pee Frois whose music critiqued

“political corruption, bribery, and the general delinquency of the country’s leaders, as well as conditions of economic hardship, legacies of colonialism, and youth struggle.” (Fredericks, 2012, p. 135) The call for change and the building of consciousness around what that change could be was catalysed by the hip-hop movement’s engagement with community through processes which were; intergenerational, though particularly focused on youth; dialogue spurred through music, dance, and poetry; as well as through flows of ideas on how to continue building a free and Pan-

African society within Senegal. Though this process swelled into an election of Abdoulaye Wade in 2001 it would be a mistake to understand the process through which the hip-hop movement and artists engaged to build community to have culminated in electoral politics. It happened that many different currents within the hip-hop movement in Senegal converged and one of the manifestations of that organizing was the election of Abdoulaye Wade. However, there were also many less documented manifestations of this convergence of currents, such as the development of a more sustained Pan-African consciousness, which continued to be fostered long after the election of Wade. (Fredericks, 2012). At this time hip-hop as a site for social commentary and a site for accountability began to also take more solid shape as can be observed through the music

81 of Alif, an all woman hip-hop crew. In 1997 Marième Diallo, Ndiaya Gueye and Oumy Ndiaye came together to form the group Alif (attack liberate of the infantry feministe). As the first

Senegalese hip-hop crew they released three albums, Viktim (1999), Dakamerap (2004), and

Rareti (2008). (Outhere Records) Their music focused on issues of, among others, labour exploitation, economic injustice, and women’s rights. (Outhere Records, 2004) In their track

Joolaa, from the album Dakamerap, Alif “deplore[d] the victims killed on the ferry with the same name that sunk in from of Gambia’s coastline around the end of 2002, a sinking that Wade is blamed for.” (Künzner, 2007, p. 99)

In 2012 political unrest once again hit Senegal. By 2012 Abdoulaye Wade’s “popularity had declined dramatically owing to economic stagnation, extensive political scandals, and curbs on democratic practice which led observers to characterize his presidency as increasingly patrimonial, autocratic, and even authoritarian.” (Fredericks, 2012, p. 131) In addition to this,

Wade sparked outrage when he announced he was running for a third term in the 2012 elections.

When he was first elected in 2000, Wade carried out his promise to both change the presidential term from seven to five years and to limit it to two terms. But in 2003, he changed the term limit back to seven, which also meant that his first term was extended until 2007. (Gueye, 2013)

Despite protests he won a second term in 2007. In the lead up to the 2012 elections, Wade began to argue that he could run for a third term because the two term limit came into effect during his first term thus his first term did not count towards limit. (Gueye, 2013) Having learnt a lesson from the inability to defeat Wade in 2007, the hip-hop community, in the lead up to the 2012 elections, shifted strategies.

The documentary African Underground: Democracy in Dakar (2007), chronicles how rap artists unsuccessfully tried to use their music to prevent Wade’s reelection for a second term in 2007. But at the start of the 2012 election season, rap musicians moved

beyond musical denunciation to become physically involved in the re-shaping of the nation [.] (Gueye, 2013, p. 25)

This shift to root the aesthetic, musical and literary components of hip-hop in community mobilization and rebellion is reminiscent of the calls to action that Pan-Africanists were making to the Negritude movement. The move to root ideology in praxis began to be put into action by artists in the hip-hop community in 2012. Hip-hop artist, through their music, mobilized people into what became known as the grassroots movement Y’en a Marre (Had Enough). (Gueye,

2013) Y’en a Marre was formed by a coalition of journalists and hip-hop artists in 2011. (Gueye,

2013) Fadel Barro, one of the journalists there when the movement first began to take shape, explains that what inspired the early actions was a desire to take the task for making change into their own hands.

We were tired of criticizing without being physically involved. We wanted to do something that would show that we were fed up, but also, we wanted to let the Senegalese people understand that it was time to end this fatalism, this habit of keeping one’s hands folded and doing nothing. It was time to be involved in the running of the country. (Gueye, 2013, p. 25)

It is important to mention that many other currents of resistance also manifested which were not a part of Y’en a Marre but were also significant in agitating for change, though their exploration is outside of the scope of this thesis due to difficulty in accessing information about them. Y’en a

Marre was a “politically unaffiliated coalition of rap musicians and journalists engaged in a war of both words and activism against Wade and his government.” (Gueye, 2013, p. 23) Y’en a

Marre, alongside other groups unaffiliated with the coalition, took to the streets, held community gatherings, and produced cultural production that was both critical of the government but not deterministic. In the song “Faux! Pas force!”, written by Simon and Kilifeu, it is made clear that

Y’en a Marre was a movement of people determined to make the calls for change a reality

83 despite the repression they were facing. (Gueye, 2013)

Get ready for a face to face with us We will face your shadows We will fight until the end Anything you gather we will spill Us and you until the river dries out. We will be present wherever you summon us A revolted nation is not a match for an old thug.

Alhough many supported the election in 2012 of Macky Sall, the then opposition to Wade and now the current president of Senegal, the liberatory value of the hip-hop movement’s engagement in this cycle of resistance and in the previous iterations in the 1980s and in the early

2000s was not to simply push a particular candidate. The purpose was to incite people’s imagination and to provide a site for the improvisation of freedom through self-determined actions – an improvisation which they could enact through a project of what Y’en a Marre termed Nouveau Type de Sénégalais (New Type of Senegalese person). (Fredericks, 2012) This positioning of hip-hop as the site from which the improvisation of freedom, a continual process which undermines exchange, is incited and the refusals from within the hip-hop movement to commodify it as an art form come together to enact a liberatory value.

Conclusion: On the Horizons of Freedom

In this thesis my primary aim has been to discuss how cultural production can act as a site for the improvisation of freedom and how cultural production that improvises freedom challenges commodification and exchange inherent in capitalist understandings of value. In the first chapter,

Becoming Jazz, I began by outlining the calls in the fields of cultural study by scholars like

Stuart Hall to reground the field in the urgency which faces oppressed peoples today so as to not allow cultural studies to merely be a theoretical endeavour. Using this call for urgency as the departure point I wrote about how liberatory African cultural production has been framed both as a contestation against the nation-state and also as a site of imagining which centres imaginings of freedoms rather than negations of oppression. This discussion about the referential point of liberatory cultural production opened a discussion on the ideas of antenormativity and breath – two components that influence liberatory cultural production which acts as a site for improvising of freedom. This then brought us to the question of what value cultural production which facilitated, engendered, and made possible improvised freedom brought to African communities.

Chapter Two, Liberatory Value, began the analysis of value by first reviewing the relationships between African peoples and capitalism. After outlining how capitalism as an economic system was built on the exploitation of African peoples, land, and resources I moved to investigating how capitalism has packaged cultural production to consolidate its culture.

Using the creative industries as an example I demonstrated how the consolidation of the culture of capitalism happens through the idea of managed creativity. Following this, the discussion of value moved toward understanding exactly how it is that value is conceptualized through capitalist frameworks. Using Marxist theory, I displayed how value in capitalist frameworks is

85 governed by the law of value and how exchange and commodification are the two defining components of the law of value. Once the capitalist framings of value were made clear I moved to a discussion on how non-capitalist societies, focusing particularly on Cuba in the late 1950s and early 1960s, subverted the law of value by eliminating exchange and commodification.

Borrowing from the work of Ernesto Che Guevara and the Budgetary Finance System on subverting the law of value, I then sketched how I conceptualized liberatory value. I argued that the types of cultural production that I am deploying, ones embedded in struggles for self- determination and freedom, subvert capitalist narratives of value, production and commodification. These manifestations of cultural production redefine value, to what I call liberatory value, by undermining the notion of exchange and commodity as central to value.

In chapter three, Senegal, Cultural Production and Freedom I focused on how culture has been valued in Senegal and how formulations of free African subjectivities vis-à-vis the state have been formed. I outlined how this relationship between free African subjectivities and the nation-state has influenced liberatory cultural production to focus on the nation-state as a key terrain for waging struggle for the freedom of African peoples. I then situated the Senegalese hip-hop movement between 1980-2012 in the traditions of Negritude and Pan-Africanism in order to adequately understand and thus be able to sketch its rise, tactics, and strategies. After this, I detailed how hip-hop has had liberatory value in Senegal by pointing to the ways that it has both resisted commodification and undermined how exchange is understood in capitalist frameworks.

Before I conclude I want to quickly circle back to Crawley’s idea of breath and Moten’s deployment of antenormativity that I wrote about in Becoming Jazz, Chapter One of the thesis, in order to put them in conversation with the idea of becoming which I wrote about in the section

86 on Negritude and Pan-Africanism in Chapter Three, Senegal, Cultural Production, and Freedom.

I want to do this because I believe, as I wrote in the first chapter, that Crawley’s insistence about the importance of breath alongside Moten’s notion of antenormativity makes it so that liberatory cultural production cannot be abstracted from the people. Therefore, in order for it to be viable as a site for the improvisations of freedom it must seek to manifest in political formations that break from the norms of coercion and hierarchy rampant throughout the nation-state. (Mbah &

Igariwey,1997; Aguilar, 2012) So, where can antenormativity and the liberatory value of cultural production bring us, or take us? These ideas of becoming outside of the African nation-state, as the nation-state necessities hierarchy and coercion, are not new and grow out of a rich tradition of anti-authoritarian political thought and discourses of pan-African struggles for freedom.

(Mbah & Igariwey,1997) Sam Mbah, Lucy Parsons, Kuwasi Balagoon and Ashanti Alston are perhaps the most well known proponents of African anti-authoritarian theory. (Mbah &

Igariwey,1997; Balagoon, n.d; Alston, 2012; Parsons, 1886) Heeding the calls of Pan-Africanists critiques of Negritude to ensure that propositions take into consideration the material and lived realities of the people it is worth taking a brief moment, as a detailed discussion is out of the scope of this thesis, to discuss one way that this anti-authoritarian politic has been operationalized in an African context by pointing to how the political system of the Ashantis in

Ghana practised this politic through cooperation and consensus building. Kwasi Wiredu, in

Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-party Polity (2000), writes about how the Ashanti political system rejected manifestations of political formations which required political parties and which relied on competition, hierarchy, and coercion because

“[t]he very nature of parties is to be partisan, oppositional, and divide the people between conflicting positions. Unfortunately, this makes it quite difficult for political demands that do not

87 fit party lines to emerge and change political life. (Nail, 2013, p. 22) So, instead the Ashanti moved in favour of an approach which fostered cooperation and collaboration. This collaboration and cooperation was important because it then became possible to “bring into direct, unmediated contact the people with themselves—as opposed to a small gathering of representatives speaking on behalf of the people.” (Nail, 2013, p. 23) Specifically for the Ashanti, Wiredu writes that

The sense in which the system in question did not feature parties is that [the Ashanti did not organize] themselves for the purpose of gaining power in a way which entailed others not being in power or, worse, being out of it. For all concerned, the system was set up for participation in power, not its appropriation, and the underlying philosophy was one of cooperation, not confrontation. (2000)

This popular participation in power to determine how the society functioned manifested from choosing the head of the lineage, the Ashanti are a matrilineal group and so the basic political unit among the Ashanti is lineage, through a process which has to be approved by the town council and “endorsed by the people through an organisation called, in literal translation, "the young people's association" in order to become final.” (Wiredu, 2000) To the head of a communal council only being able to make decisions if the rest of the council was in consensus with the decision at hand. (Wiredu, 2000) What the Ashanti did was give the space to imagine and experiment with governance models that were made up of a coalition of people in the community as opposed to a coalition of political parties. Wiredu argues that what this meant for the Ashanti was that

political associations will be avenues for channeling all desirable pluralisms, but they will be without the Hobbesian proclivities of political parties, as they are known under majoritarian politics. And second, without the constraints of membership in parties relentlessly dedicated to wrestling power or retaining it, representatives will be more likely to be actuated by the objective merits of given proposals than by ulterior considerations. (Wiredu, 2000)

I want to note that though I am giving the example of the Ashanti here, it is not to romanticise a past or to ignore the ways in which the governance models deployed by the Ashanti did also include oppressive manifestations. (Wiredu, 2000). It is true that there were problematic aspects and oppressive practices. For instance, a clear contradiction is that in order to be head of a lineage you had to be from a royal lineage. (Wiredu, 2000) I put the propositions of cooperation and consensus building of the Ashanti forward holding those contradictions and keeping them afloat. I put them forward to illustrate that there are ways, though flawed, that African society has attempted practices which attempt to challenge hierarchy and coercion. It is our duty as

Africans committed to the freedom of our people to further and more deeply study the ways in which political formations that have come before us have attempted at building models of political relationships devoid of hierarchy and coercion and to understand and root out their contradictions while building constellations of freedom in our current contexts which centre autonomy and self-determination.

In conclusion, the provocations that I have put forward throughout this thesis are meant to invoke one thing – possibility. The work that I am interested in contributing to through this thesis, which is a constant work in process, is how we can conceptualize and enact cultural production to nurture possibility in African communities. I am sure that these propositions and provocations will shift and adapt as I continue to journey and learn so nothing that I have written is intended to be prescriptive. The intention is to provoke dialogue about the possibilities for freedom, self-determination, joy, love, creativity, accountability, and autonomy.

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