Roots in Reverse

"Shain documents a host of diasporic interconnections on multiple continents, and the use of Cuban music in various African political and postcolonial projects." —Robin D. Moore, University of Texas at Austin

"In Roots in Reverse, Richard M. Shain masterfully analyzes how music and debates about music delineate a field where the transforming appropriation of non-metropolitan musics stimulates the emergence of original modernities which combine rootedness and cosmopolitanism, and challenge colonial and postcolonial cultural domination. He demonstrates how Afro-Cuban genres as played by Senegalese musicians became the emblem of forms of local sociality, civility and sophistication which laid the ground for an idiosyncratic conception of cultural citizenship. Detailing the interactions between Senegalese and American musics, he eventually invites to re-think the "Black Atlantic" as a multi-layered space in which various diasporic imaginaries get entangled."—Dr. Denis-Constant Martin, Centre Les Afriques dans le monde (LAM), Sciences-Po Bordeaux, France