RESEARCH
Senegalese Joking Relationships
This paper argues that Senegal's secularism operates as a relational settlement sustained through cultural mechanisms through the use of the joking relationship, a friendly insulting banter between ethnic groups, rather than legal separation. Tracing laïcité from French anticlerical origins through colonial accommodation of Sufi brotherhoods, it shows that Senegalese pluralism rests on relational theology and repeated rituals of mutual respect; the Wade presidency tests this settlement: when institutional overreach violated norms of religious equidistance, accountability emerged through cultural norms can solve the issue faster and often times better than if it was through legal means.
Sonic Cosmopolitanism and the Strategic Whitening of Jazz in Shanghai
This paper examines how jazz traveled from African American communities in the United States to Shanghai in the 1920s–30s and as a result, inspired the creation of a new music style combining jazz and traditional Chinese music called Shidaiqu. Drawing on Presswood's "sonicated blackness" and Adorno's standardization theory, it argues that Shanghai's adoption of jazz was a racially coded modernization strategy, as well as the pre-existing Chinese constructs of blackness — through the example of the Kunlun Nu — accommodated Black virtuosity while excluding Black political consciousness. Composers like Li Jinhui grafted pentatonic Mandarin melodies onto standardized jazz, preserving Western form while erasing Black origins still seen today in the Peace Hotel Old Jazz Band.
