Civil taxis and wild trucks: the dialectics of social space and subjectivity in Dimanche a Bamako

This article presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam’s 2004 album, Dimanche a Bamako, meaning ‘Sunday in Bamako’, produced ‘by and with’ world music maverick Manu Chao. I consider how Dimanche à Bamako musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of ‘global modernity’ in postcolonial Africa and its diaspora. ‘Global modernity’ refers to the fraught encounter between local actors and the globalised socio-economic conditions in which modern subjects are increasingly embedded. By framing these local and global tensions in the context of a modern African city, Dimanche à Bamako offers a theoretically sophisticated representation of urban African social space that, while rooted in a particular place (Bamako, Mali) attends to the wider world in which a local sense of place gives way to the wanderlust and anxieties of living and laboring in a globalised world. Through critical application of Lefebvrian and Mande socio-spatial theory and focused analysis of several of the album’s tracks, I argue that Dimanche à Bamako elucidates a dialectic of ‘civility’ and ‘wildness’ that shapes the way social space and subjectivity are conceived, lived, and perceived in urban African communities in an era of global modernity.