A study of the impact of Cuban music on Senegalese music and
modernity
Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation
of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its
primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant
observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music
has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political
citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of
Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many
dimensions of that nation's cultural history such as gender relations,
generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and
hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and
diasporic identities. More than just a new form of musical enjoyment,
Afro-Cuban music provided listeners with a tool for creating a public
sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony.