In the mid-20th century, African musicians took up Cuban music as their own and claimed it as a marker of black Atlantic connections and of cosmopolitanism untethered from European colonial relations. Today, Cuban/African bands popular in Africa in the 1960s and '70s have moved into the world music scene in Europe and North America, and world music producers and musicians have created new West African-Latin American collaborations expressly for this market niche. World Music and the Black Atlantic follows two of these bands, Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism, and the industry and audiences that surround them-from musicians' homes in West Africa, to performances in Europe and North America, to record label offices in London. World Music and the Black Atlantic examines the intensely transnational experiences of musicians, industry personnel, and audiences as they collaboratively produce, circulate, and consume music in a specific post-colonial era of globalization. Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences work with and push against one another as they engage in personal collaborations imbued with histories of global travel and trade. They move between and combine Cuban and Malian melodies, Norwegian and Senegalese markets, and histories of slavery and independence as they work together to create international commodities. Understanding the unstable and dynamic ways these peoples, musics, markets, and histories intersect elucidates how world music actors assert their places within, and produce knowledge about, global markets, colonial histories, and the black Atlantic. World Music and the Black Atlantic offers a nuanced view of a global industry that is informed and deeply marked by diverse transnational perspectives and histories of transatlantic exchange.

About the Author
Aleysia K. Whitmore is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Lamont School of Music, University of Denver. Her research focuses on the world music industry, globalization, and cultural policy. She has published articles in Ethnomusicology and MusiCultures, and she has taught popular music, world music, and classical music courses at Brown University, Boston College, the University of Miami, and the University of Colorado Denver. She holds a BMus from the University of Toronto and AM and PhD degrees in ethnomusicology from Brown University.

Reviews
Whitmore has crafted a compelling ethnographic account of how industry, musicians, and audiences encounter each other in systems of the contested "world music" genre... Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * T. F. DeFrantz, Duke University, CHOICE *
This book is a confident step in a great direction, and contributes to a conversation that needs to be had, especially by those who engage with the world music industry. * Charlotte Algar, Songlines *
Aleysia Whitmore's outstanding book provides a rich ethnography of the contemporary world-music industry. She aptly weighs perspectives from musicians, industry professionals, audiences, and scholars to analyze topics ranging from the complexities of collaboration to recent trends of online music. * Marc Gidal, Ramapo College of New Jersey *
This elegantly written book goes beyond the fractious debates in the academic community about "world" music. Instead, it provides a lively discussion of how contemporary African musicians, industry professionals and "western" audiences negotiate the fraught complexities of transnational cultural production. * Richard M. Shain, Thomas Jefferson University *
Empirically rigorous, analytically ambitious, and thoughtfully constructed, World Music and the Black Atlantic sets a high bar for the study of cosmopolitan music cultures in the postcolonial world. A landmark study in current ethnomusicology. * Ryan Skinner, Associate Professor, Music and African American & African Studies, The Ohio State University *
Whitmore's analysis describes a new ethos untethered from simple oppositions between locals and cosmopolitans. For those wondering what happened to "world music," Whitmore's fine-grained ethnography looks at the emergence of "genre culture" and declares that world music is back, and it's here to stay. * Bob White, Universite de Montreal *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190083953
Author Aleysia K. Whitmore
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 386g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 15mm