Kinshasa, 1974: Fania All Stars or the Africanist Imagination in the New York Salsa Scene in the 1970s

Abstract

Taking as its starting point the historic concert of Fania All Stars in Kinshasa (1973), this essays analyzes how the label Fania Records develops during the 1970s a commercial strategy that emphasizes, not the Afro-Caribbean origin of salsa, but its African nature. This vindication of Africa in such visual materials as the magazine Latin NY and the documentary film Salsa! (1976) signals the emergence of a new cultural geography of hybridity in which salsa becomes what Homi Bhabha defines as a sonic “third space” that unites the peripheries of the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Latino communities from New York into a sonic vision of a Global South avant-la-lettre