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This article draws on an ethnography of the transmission of Senegalese sabar dancing in France and Switzerland to discuss how the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts bear witness to many modes of adoption or rejection of Mouride and Baye Fall aesthetics. I focus on several portraits of students in order to highlight three modalities of the relationship with Baye Fall aesthetics, faith, and religious knowledge, ranging from the dissociation between dance and religious meaning to conversion and immersion into Baye Fallism. I defend the importance of elaborating post‐exotic anthropological tools – such as the ideas of ethnophilia or religious conversations – in order to grasp the nexus of affects, embodied experiences, and intimate relationships that are conducive to and mediate the religious pathways of sabar enthusiasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes one of the constructions of African identity that occur through the spreading of sabar in European cities. Basing on a multi-sited fieldwork between Dakar, France and Switzerland, this paper traces the local roots and transnational routes of this Senegalese dance and music performance and presents the “transnational social field” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller) that sabar musicians and dancers have created in Europe. It analyses the representations of Africanity, Senegality and Blackness that are shared in Sabar dances classes, and describes how diasporic artists contribute to (re)invent “traditions” in migration. In this transnational dance world, “blackness” and Africanity are not homogenous and convertible categories of identification, on the contrary, they are made of many tensions and arrangements, which allow individuals to include or exclude otherness, depending on situations and contexts.

The article, authored by Alice Aterianus-Owanga, explores multisensory experiences in Southern African cities, drawing inspiration from Frantz Fanon's emphasis on phenomenology. Topics include the significance of affect and senses in neoliberal urban transformation, political surveillance, and inequality, raising questions about the potential for sensory engagement to reshape social dynamics and foster new modes of coexistence in postcolonial/post-apartheid Southern Africa.

Drawing on ethnographic research within the salsa, bachata and kizomba (SBK) scene of Cape Town, this article examines the values and narratives of personal development that Cape Town's adepts of Afro-Latin dance elaborate around the emic notion of "connection." I describe how this multisensory experience is informed by an ethic of personal development and self-transformation, which at the same time reflects the influence of global neoliberal entrepreneurial paradigms — together with the hopes, values and hampered dreams of Cape Town's post-apartheid middle classes. Narratives and descriptions of the hapticscape and multisensory knowledge built through the search for connection highlight how these encounters give shape to intimate spaces where salsa amateurs can imagine, materialise and embody the multiple injunctions they navigate and can reconfigure the boundaries of intimacy, identity and otherness in the post-apartheid city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article discusses how Alain-Philippe Durand's recent edited book about Francophone hip-hop gathers a plurality of voices and disciplinary approaches on hip-hop worlds, and offers thoughtful insights with regards to a number of issues often raised about hip-hop--related to race, migration or institutionalization of countercultural forms over different spaces of the French-speaking Atlantic--but also regarding the field of hip-hop studies itself. I address two main lines of discussion opened by the book and that could deserve further discussion in light of the current literature on hip-hop in the Francophone area. The first one is related to the contrasts and oppositions perceptible at the reading of this collection of papers, about the meaning of making hip-hop studies in a context of imagination of hip-hop as a "resistant" and countercultural form. The second is the issue of racial politics, imaginaries and identifications exchanged over the Atlantic space, and the role of Africa as an imagined or real land of reference in the construction of identities, art forms, ideologies and discourses in Francophone hip-hop worlds. I finally defend how the book's rich reflections raise many questions and future possibilities, both for the field of hip-hop studies and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on an unsung part of Gabonese history: the construction of national performance and 'spectacle' culture. It is based on long-term ethnographic and historical research on Gabonese music and dance groups and on an analysis of two music and dance genres created during the one-party rule. While the first one (cultural animation groups) has represented a national unity project and a masculine dominance of the state in a period of 'Renovation', the second (the National Ballet) has used local initiation rituals on stage as emblems of the Nation in a period of heritage-making and the construction of cultural policies. This paper shows how, in the case of Gabon, dance and music ensembles have not only been used by the single party to produce ordinary consent; they were also employed by popular classes to assert their agency, despite the domination of the single party. It highlights how the micropolitics and negotiations of some have shaped local 'traditions' to become part of a 'national culture' in public performances. This unknown history of two national dance and music genres ultimately adds innovative elements to the existing literature on culture, politics, gender, and initiation societies in Gabon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]