The Politics of Personalism
By Brendan Kibbee (City University of New York) *This article also appears in SEM Student News 14.2, Fall/Winter 2018 . As we engage with the world as scholars concerned with music and its political effects, it is important that we not only consider what we think and say, but just as importantly, who we engage and express ourselves with, and how we think and express ourselves with others. Doing so might enable us to establish new repertoires of social action in our personal and professional lives and new ways of creating knowledge in the world. As I have been processing my experiences doing fieldwork in a crowded, working-class neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal, over the past few years, and as I have begun to think about what I hope to achieve with my work, I have become increasingly drawn to an idea of “personalism” as it manifests in the postcolonial city.