Musical borderlands: A cultural perspective of regional integration in Africa

•Regional integration in Africa can be revealed through the practices of cultural producers.•Musical borderlands as a concept permit linking cultural products and practices with the social condition of production.•Relational thinking and practical planning uncover how space and action in the field of African music are co-constituted.•A dialogical focus on material and symbolic borderlands stresses a fluid in-between as the lifeblood of cultural practices.

This paper deploys a notion of “musical borderlands” to understand the practice and meaning of music production in an African context. This concept stresses flow rather than stasis, and liminal not dualistic thinking and being; it also relates economic and social practices to cultural content. It shows how Francophone (West and Central) African participants in hip hop music use translocal networks to sustain their community, and demonstrate dynamic relationships between material production and social reproduction. This enables new socialities to emerge with the potential to rearticulate political relations, which reaffirm trans-local, trans-urban, trans-border solidarities.