Rethinking Mande Studies with Shaka Bagayogo: Imagining Post-National Futures in West Africa Rosa De Jorio (bio) The journal Mande Studies brings together international, interdisciplinary, French, and English contributions on the Mande people, their histories, and cultures. However, since its inception, the journal has covered topics that transcend any presumed boundaries of “the Mande.” Its first volume, for example, focused on relations between Mande and Fula peoples. The volume foregrounded mobility not only as a way of life, but also as a feature of one’s identity, recognizing that ethnic distinctions were to some extent negotiable in the course of people’s travels and relocations (e.g., de Bruijn and Van Dijk 1999; Howard 1999). Subsequent volumes focused on a wealth of disparate topics, beyond themes falling squarely within the bounds of Mande Studies (e.g., oral literature, divination, etc.). These volumes included such diverse subjects as the Mali of Modibo Keita, insecurity in the Sahel, gender relationships and identities, and social movements. Throughout its twenty-three years of existence, Mande Studies has covered a multiplicity of topics that the concept of ethnicity or language family, even when reconfigured as changing, porous, and contextual, fails to clarify. My connection to Mande Studies dates from the start of my professional career when I published an article on marriage and marriage renegotiations in Mali (de Jorio 2002). I was contributing to a special issue on gender, coordinated by Barbara Hoffman, former president of MANSA and longtime contributor to Mande Studies (Hoffman 2002). Stephen Belcher and Ariane Deluz were editing the journal at the time and encouraging young scholars to contribute. Mande [End Page 193] Studies, its editors, and the contributors who gravitated around it formed a particularly welcoming community (see also Grosz-Ngaté, this volume). As current editor-in-chief of Mande Studies, I have collaborated closely with the past two presidents of MANSA, Joseph Hellweg and Sten Hagberg, who have supported my commitment to soliciting contributions from, and supporting scholars of, diverse academic traditions, across multiple continents, and at different stages of their professional careers. I therefore wish to contribute to the debate on the future of Mande Studies by exploring the meanings of “Mande” as more than just a language family or congeries of related ethnic groups. I explore the uses of Mande in relation to the creation of cultural heritage, primarily in Mali and with some occasional references to Guinea. The political reimagining and appropriation of cultural practices and memories of the past, taken together, constitute one of my ongoing research interests (e.g., de Jorio 2016). The “heritagization” of the Mande past has played a key role in the construction of postcolonial Mali and Guinea. The Malian state has consistently invested in the preservation and valorization of selected aspects of Mande identity as key to national unity. National initiatives such as the National Ballet, the National Instrumental Ensemble of Mali, Youth Week (later known as the Biennales), and others have brought performers together from across Mali to share their local performance practices with each other for the state-sponsored purpose of creating a Malian national identity (Bagayogo 1992, 32). Investment in cultural patrimony remains a state priority, although it increasingly occurs in collaboration with various entities such as NGOs and cultural organizations, in addition to the ubiquitous presence of international aid. More recently, the state has invested in valorizing the “Manden Charter,” considered one of the world’s first constitutions.1 The Charter, after being codified and written down, was recognized as a distinctive part of Mali’s national heritage, although neighboring Guinea had also applied, unsuccessfully, for such recognition. The Charter was inscribed on UNESCO’s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. The emphasis on cultural heritage, as a key site for articulating national identity, has had considerable, lasting ramifications for Malian political culture, especially as a discursive field saturated with references to reimagined precolonial and colonial pasts. While Mande cultural heritage has been studied through a romanticized ethnological lens,2 more critical readings of the uses of the past also exist, but they have remained marginal to current debates. It is within this context that I analyze the work of the...
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Jun 30, 2022
Hee Sook Moon 
Open Access