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Speaker: Alice Aterianus-Owanga, Université de Neuchâtel
Discussant: Jamila Dorner, SOAS
Abstract
“Vitesse” (speed), “vivacité” (liveliness) and “rapidité” (quickness): the texts and videos of Ntcham music are filled with references (textual, musical and gestural) to rhythm and its apparent acceleration. In this recent musical genre, often labeled as a Gabonese-style Afropop, vitesse takes on ambiguous dimensions. It refers, in one sense, to the vigilance, offensiveness and responsiveness required to survive in the urban worlds of banditry depicted by Ntcham artists. These attitudes and values, characteristic of the ndoss (bandits of Libreville) culture, were capitalized on by Ntcham artists and became a trademark of the genre, provoking both rejection by some and fascination by others. An ironic and disillusioned replication of the daily lives of young people grappling with illegality, Ntcham offers a thrilling reflection of the ongoing crisis that affects the daily lives and aspirations of African urbanites (Roitman & Mbembe, 1995), particularly in Gabon following the economic, electoral and political crises of recent years. The vitesse of Ntcham artists is thus inseparable from money, which is the key value that they depict and pursue, and thus the ultimate goal of this intensification.
Simultaneously, this aesthetic of vitesse echoes a dynamic of accelerated musical production displayed by these artists (singers, video directors, beatmakers), who ‘do not sleep,’ make one studio recording after the other, shoot multiple music videos, and use trends and digital interventions to increase their public presence. In this sense, they establish a break with the slow production processes of previous generations and circumvent traditional media outlets and underlying mechanics of political control. Following the rapid deployment of a series of new audiovisual production tools and connectivity to streaming platforms, the world of Ntcham is both a product of acceleration “from below” and the resonance of the intrusion of monetization and digital quantification in African music scenes.
Extensively discussed by sociologists and critical philosophers inspired by the Frankfurt School, acceleration has been theorized as a “totalitarian force” that engenders alienation and a loss of time in modern societies (Rosa 2010). It has also been described in the context of Africa as an ideology linked to the technocapitalism of multinational firms and a developmentalist paradigm that elevates technical progress, inventiveness and entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty (Pollio 2022). While drawing on this literature, my discussion takes a step aside to explore this art of vitesse as a domain of “friction” (Tsing, 2011) between different forces and a “poetics of acceleration” (Pollio 2022) through which young urbanites both exploit and contradict technocapitalist scripts in order to recompose the social orders in which they evolve. By following the networks of relations and economies built around this art of vitesse, I show how Ntcham is developed as an efficient technology of evasion and illusion, where the race for money accumulation often fails but is converted into social and symbolic capital. Through this art of vitesse, the youth of Libreville reinvent modes of subjectivation, social recognition and integration into local systems of interdependence.
Biographical note
Alice Aterianus-Owanga is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel. Over the course of her PhD and postdoc research, she worked on popular music (hip-hop), politics and identity in Gabon; on Senegalese dance circuits between Europe (France and Switzerland) and Senegal; and, finally, on Afro-Latin dances and racial/gender boundaries in Cape Town. Her first single-authored book was inspired by her PhD research on rap in Gabon, and received a prize from the Académie Charles Cros. Her second single-authored book, published in 2024 by Paris Nanterre University Press, deals with the post-exotic encounters of Senegalese dancers and their students in France and Switzerland. She has also directed four documentary films and currently supervises a SNF team project on music digitalization and power dynamics in Central African cities.
Jamila Dorner is a social anthropologist trained at SOAS and a postdoctoral researcher at the UCL Ear Institute. Her journey into human knowledge, learning and theories of intelligence began at the University of Geneva where she worked as a research assistant in cognitive and school education. An accomplished performer and Bharatanatyam dancer, Jamila was awarded a Swiss artistic residence in India. Her doctoral research on Bharatanatyam enskilment, which explored the onerous process of gaining performative skills as a dancer in contemporary urban India, received a Royal AnthropologicaI Institute Sutasoma award. She is currently working on her first monograph entitled The Sound of the Tattukali: Embodied and Digital Knowledge in a Bharatanatyam Community.
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Artistry@Work is an online Seminar Series in the Anthropology of Artists & Artisans, running 2024–2025
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Université Clermont Auvergne, in collaboration with the Royal Anthropological Institute
Organisers: Dr Raphaël Blanchier & Professor Trevor Marchand
This seminar series in anthropology explores the situated practices of ‘artistry at work’ and, more broadly, the working lives and career trajectories of artists and artisans plying their trades in regions around the globe. The scope of the series also encompasses studies of occupations not conventionally categorised as “artistic” but that nevertheless foster creativity among (some) practitioners and even accommodate the development of “artist” identities.
