Songs that made men leave: migration, imagination, and media in late twentieth‐century Mali

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, in the Soninke‐speaking area of West Africa, women sang to praise migrants and mock immobile men, before such songs were abandoned at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. These songs have commonly been read as reinforcing a normative order of migration whereby migration functioned as proof of manhood. The study of an original corpus, collected by a radio station since the 1980s, makes it possible to reconsider these songs as imaginative devices allowing women to take various stances on male migration, through their performance as much as in the metadiscourse on migration conveyed by stories about these songs. Calling for a finer attention to texts in the burgeoning scholarship on migration and imagination, the study of the ‘non‐migrant song’, and of its abrupt end, inscribes the imaginative processes about migration and gender roles in a long history that pre‐dates the tightening of borders and the global circulation of images. It highlights the analytical potential of studying textual engagements with technology to enrich the understanding of imagination processes in migration contexts.