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Celebratory Spaces between Homeland and Host: Memory, Work, and Play in New York's Malian Community

Ryan Skinner, Department of Ethnomusicology, Columbia University
rts2104@columbia.edu

On September 26th, 2004, Malian immigrant communities of New York City gathered to celebrate their country's 44th year of independence. The production of this event resulted from the coordinated work of individuals operating between New York City and Mali to create a celebratory space for their compatriots abroad. The spatial framing of the event itself, in the open air of Harlem's main thoroughfare, provided a stable, albeit impermanent, environment to encompass the varied play of local and national memories, hopes, fears, and desires engendered by the Malian-American public. In this paper, I step into the socioaesthetic spaces of these itinerant Malian communities as they move between and negotiate the boundaries of community and nation, patron and client, homeland and host-country. Such celebratory moments of spatial performance produce vital links between distant homes and proximate hosts. These trans-local pathways, in turn, facilitate intersubjective encounters in which relationships to home and host are produced and performed. By observing and engaging with the social and aesthetic performances of my interlocutors within this interstitial space of diasporic celebration, I follow the generative processes through which dislocated selves temporarily inhabit and transform the landscapes, institutions, people, and politics of heterogeneous urban societies to support and sustain the wellbeing of their communities. It is here, within this metropolitan ecumene, that a "third space" emerges between local tradition and global modernity, between African origins and American destinations.