About

Catherine M. Appert is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the College of Arts & Sciences. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology and a graduate certificate in Women's Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research centers on popular music in Senegal and The Gambia, focusing on questions of globalization, migration, diaspora, ethnographic study of musical genres, popular music and gender, and the intersections of music and memory. Her scholarly interests also include feminist and urban ethnography, global hip hop cultures, and African, Atlantic, and postcolonial studies. Her notable publication, 'In Hip Hop Time: Music, Memory, and Social Change in Urban Senegal,' was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Her research has been supported by various prestigious organizations, including the West African Research Association, the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and others. Appert has contributed articles to leading journals such as Ethnomusicology, Africa, and New Literary History, and has chapters forthcoming in significant anthologies. She has presented her work at numerous major conferences and has received awards such as the Marcia Herndon Prize and the Richard Waterman Prize for her contributions to ethnomusicology, particularly in the areas of sexuality, gender, and African popular music. At Cornell, she teaches courses on hip hop aesthetics and performance, global hip hop cultures, African and African diasporic musics, postcolonial theory, migration and globalization, and ethnographic methods.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Aesthetics
• Communication
• Art
• Ecology
• Social psychology
• Cartography
• Epistemology
• Geography
• Anthropology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Biology
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• Thick Descriptions

  2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Thick Descriptions

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Thick Descriptions

  2023-04-18

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Resonances of Chindon-ya: Sounding Space and Sociality in Contemporary Japan

  Ethnomusicology · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers, Msia Kibona Clark (2018)

  Global Hip Hop Studies · 2020-08-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Review of: Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers , Msia Kibona Clark (2018) New York: New York University Press, xxi, 266 pp., ISBN 978-0-89680-319-0, p/bk, $32.95

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnomusicology beyond #MeToo: Listening for the Violences of the Field

  Ethnomusicology · 2020 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract Responding to an increasing sense of urgency about sexual harassment and assault during ethnographic fieldwork in the era of #MeToo, this article offers a lesson plan for effecting systemic change in the discipline of ethnomusicology. We show how disciplinary assumptions about the field where harassment occurs reify colonizing histories of racial othering, reinscribe heteronormativity, and alternately conflate or erase specific types of violences. We identify feminist scholarly genealogies that provide alternate models for theorizing in and through personal experience. We argue that this analytical work cannot and must not be absent from the important questions of how we practically approach and prepare students for fieldwork in ethnomusicology.

  PublisherDOI

• In Hip Hop Time: Music, Memory, and Social Change in Urban Senegal

  2018-11-12 · 37 citations

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• In Hip Hop Time

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-12-20 · 13 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <italic>In Hip Hop Time</italic> goes beyond popular narratives of hip hop resistance to address Senegalese hip hop—<italic>Rap Galsen</italic>—as a musical movement deeply tied to indigenous performance practices and changing social norms in a modernizing Africa. This is a story of globalization, of diasporic movement and memory, of an imagined African past and contemporary African realities, of urbanization and socioeconomic struggle, and of the relationship between popular music and social change. The book takes readers from Senegalese hip hop’s beginnings among cosmopolitan youth in Dakar’s affluent neighborhoods in the 1980s, to its spread throughout the city’s ghettoized working-class neighborhoods in the mid- to late-1990s, and up to the present day, where political activism and hip hop musicality vie for position in local and global arenas. It connects these classed and generational shifts to postcolonial political, social, and religious structures, as well as to globally circulating narratives of Afrocentricity and Blackness. It shows how, through social networks constructed through and around a shared system of aesthetic values called hip hop, Senegalese youth negotiate gender, class, and family in the context of underdevelopment. An ethnography of the inextricability of musical and social meaning in hip hop practice, <italic>In Hip Hop Time</italic> charts new intellectual territory in a growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship on hip hop in Africa and around the world.

  PublisherDOI

• Voicing Galsen

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-12-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter turns to the vast majority of Senegalese rappers who locate themselves in the underground, to show how they construct hip hop meaning in dialogue with other performance genres. Demonstrating how Wolof-centric processes of urbanization create a sense of distance from tradition, it positions mbalax as a modern musical tradition whose ties to indigenous communicative norms and speech genres render it antithetical to hip hoppers’ claims to a liberal, agential voice. It argues that hip hop undergoes a similar traditionalizing process, so that origin stories don’t just reflect local realities, but also comment on and voice them. It shows that, although hip hoppers contest lived experiences of underdevelopment through themes of education and consciousness raising, local hierarchies ultimately continue to limit the possibilities of hip hop voice.

  PublisherDOI

• Producing Diaspora

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-12-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter shows how palimpsestic practices of hip hop genre produce diasporic connections. It describes how hip hop practices of layering and sampling delink indigenous musical elements from traditional communicative norms to rework them in hip hop, where they signify rootedness and locality in ways consistent with hip hop practice in the United States. It demonstrates that this process relies on applications of hip hop time (musical meter) as being fundamentally different from indigenous music, whose local appeal is contrasted with hip hop’s global intelligibility. It outlines how hip hop concepts of flow free verbal performance from lyrical referentiality to render it a musical element. It argues that these practices of hip hop genre, in their delinking of sound and speech, reshape understandings of the relationship between commercialism and referentiality, and suggests that voice therefore should be understood to encompass artists’ agency in pursuing material gain in the face of socioeconomic struggle.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sidra Lawrence

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Marcia Herndon Prize (2020)
• Honorable Mention for Herndon Prize (2017)
• Richard Waterman Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology…
• Charles Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2…