Department of Sociology and Anthropology

A number of scholars have discussed how ‘jazz’ has been constructed as being the creative product of the United States of America. The article draws on some of the ideas of Arjun Appadurai in order to show how the music of two non Americans, Moses Molelekwa (South Africa) and Nah Youn-Sun (South Korea), may be understood as challenging
which sounds may be classified as ‘jazz’, and who may be included in its audiences. I will focus on their active involvement in—frequently trans-global—collaborations with
artists outside or on the peripheries of ‘jazz’. The article also explores the conditions of globalization that make possible such reconfigurations and how these dynamics relate to broader processes of reimagining global geographies of power and music. In discussing the musical performances of these ‘jazz’ artists, I hope to reflect on the role of the imagination in the process of genre definition.

This paper follows four years of ethnographic research in Beijing and investigates tropes of ‘Third World Solidarity’ (termed disanshijie datuanjie 第三世界大团结) and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as they are pragmatically recruited or inter-subjectively evoked in urban Afro-Chinese interactions. In it, I demonstrate how historical tensions between cosmopolitanism and ‘Third Worldism’ are mediated through the translation of the inter-subjective ‘cultural concepts’, Guanxi (关系) and Ubuntu. I ask: How do semiotic horizons of ‘history’ and ‘culture’ become pragmatically indispensable activities through which contemporary Chinese and African subjects establish historical or culturally intelligible grounds for a ‘novel’ interaction under current conditions of South-South educational migrancy? Drawing on a genealogy of pragmatist semiotics and symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1983, Agha 2007, Carr 2011), read through a critical theoretical lens (Fanon 1965, Lukács 2010), I reveal a dialectics of interaction at play in the mediation of historical and cultural dynamics in Afro-Chinese encounters in Beijing. In doing so, this paper explores a tension that emerges at the juxtaposition of third world solidarity and cosmopolitan aspiration, one – as I will show – that certainly informs what will come to be among the most pivotal interactions of the 21st century: that between China and Africa.

This paper follows four years of ethnographic research in Beijing and investigates tropes of ‘Third World Solidarity’ (termed disanshijie datuanjie 第三世界大团结) and ‘cosmopolitanism’ as they are pragmatically recruited or inter-subjectively evoked in urban Afro-Chinese interactions. In it, I demonstrate how historical tensions between cosmopolitanism and ‘Third Worldism’ are mediated through the translation of the inter-subjective ‘cultural concepts’, Guanxi (关系) and Ubuntu. I ask: How do semiotic horizons of ‘history’ and ‘culture’ become pragmatically indispensable activities through which contemporary Chinese and African subjects establish historical or culturally intelligible grounds for a ‘novel’ interaction under current conditions of South-South educational migrancy? Drawing on a genealogy of pragmatist semiotics and symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1983, Agha 2007, Carr 2011), read through a critical theoretical lens (Fanon 1965, Lukács 2010), I reveal a dialectics of interactio...