Then Bergh, M.A. Sarah

A grammatical reading of the relationship between the discipline of international relations and Africa would find that Africa continues to be imagined to hold a position of its own, such that we are faced with a severing of Africa from the world. The symptoms of this severing include the relative absence of the former as a site, driver and actor of international relations, beyond its links to development, humanitarian and aid politics, state building, or conflict resolution case studies. The structure of this narrative is problematic on both methodological and epistemological levels, and deserves a second look. To do so, I propose to examine music as a mode of political communication and perception that highlights the structure of international relations’ narratives around Africa.

I explore this in light of two site-specific research endeavours. First, I focus on German-African foreign policy, particularly its use of music as an affective mode of cognition and interpellation that dispositions German responsibility toward Africa. In this context, I probe music as a mechanism for political mobilization by examining its use for semantic representations of post-colonial Mali in the context of contemporary German foreign policy marketing. I extrapolate this from the aesthetic inception of a German army recruitment series entitled Mali, with particular focus on the series’ soundtrack as a vehicle to promote German foreign policy qua military involvement in Northeastern Mali.

Against this, I engage in ethnographic research on the sociological surroundings of Mande and Bambara musical aesthetics performed at the Yeredon Center for the Malian Arts in contemporary Bamako. Situated as a central nodal point of exchange between local and global artists, I examine the particular practices of spatial, temporal and dialogical relationality that Mande, and particularly Bambara, musical aesthetics require and enact through their production at the Center. Reading these elements alongside each other reveals music as a site and driver for affective constructions of political and social communities. Sounding a representation and/or invocation of these communities’ spatio-temporal configurations in relation to imaginaries of the international, music emerges as a fruitful sensory mode through which to engage considerations of subjectivity formation within the context of international relations.