Money Trouble

Pirate cassette cart. Photograph by the author

Chapter 5: Money Trouble interrogates the idea of intellectual property through the shifting politics of culture in postcolonial Mali. Beginning with widespread anxieties about the social and economic value of the arts in an era of private markets and decentralized politics, it presents a local genealogy of copyright and its criminalized corollary, piracy. Emphasizing the production, circulation, and performance of music, this history reveals the longstanding and steadily deepening social, political, and economic precarity that has shaped the subjectivity of the contemporary Malian artist. 

KEY TERMS

• Bureau Malien du Droit d’Auteur (BuMDA): the Malian Copyright Office, a national agency charged with the collection and dispersal of royalties for musical works
  
• copyright: known in French as “le droit d’auteur,” this “right of the author” includes both moral and proprietary rights (droits moraux et patrimoniaux), pertaining to the material publication and exploitation (proprietary rights), as well as the personal attribution and integrity (moral rights) of a creative work
  
• governmentality: the regulatory and disciplinary politics of population management and control in modern states 
  
• music piracy: according to established notions of intellectual property, the illicit reproduction and re-circulation of musical works, understood legally as an infringement of copyright 
  
• nongovernmental culture: performances, broadcasts, and exchanges that lie outside the purview of official cultural politics and economies, which neither fully accede to assertions of control, nor wholly ascribe to accusations of anarchy
  
• wariko: A Bamana term meaning “money trouble,” signifying the socioeconomic precarity of everyday life in Bamako today
  

WHO'S WHO

• Alpha Blondy: world-renowned Ivorian reggae star, famous for his support for and public praise of the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët Boigny (1905-1993)
  
• Man Ken: television and radio personality, famous for his spot-on musical impersonations of Ivorian reggae star Alpha Blondy
  
• Sorry Bamba: a formative exponent of state-sponsored music culture in postcolonial Mali, now an international artist on the world music circuit; father of Bamako singer Issa Sory Bamba
  

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Consider the difference between state-sponsored and neoliberal culture economies outlined in this chapter. Does state-sponsored culture always entail a nationalist agenda? Is private sector entrepreneurship antithetical to public funding and support for the arts? 
   
2. What is “nongovernmental culture?” How does this apparently informal (and sometimes illicit) cultural production, performance, and circulation relate to normative modes of cultural politics and economy? 
   
3. Copyright law and music piracy are typically understood as opposed to each other within modern culture economies. How does music culture in Bamako work both within and outside of this dichotomy? 
   

FURTHER READING & DISCUSSION

• “Music Piracy in Mali” by Bram Posthumus:  http://www.musicinafrica.net/music-piracy-mali
  
• “Music Piracy: The Forgotten African Disease” by Kelly Anderson:   http://www.theglobalipcenter.com/music-piracy-the-forgotten-african-disease/
  
• “The History of Music Piracy: Interview with Alex Sayf Cummings” by Sandvick:  http://dailyhistory.org/2014/08/14/2246/ 
  
• “Piracy and Production” interview with Laurence Liang:                         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SupTn-yBF8s 
  
• “In Defense of Piracy” by Laurence Lessig: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB12236764536332430 
  
• Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz:                         https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/files/7218/ppr89.pdf 
  
• “The Media Piracy Report” edited by Joe Karaganis:  http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/