Paper long abstract:

"African cultures have been deprived of their authentic traditions!" claimed an Ivoirian artists to me.

Appadurai argues that globalization enhances imagination for all social actors - and in doing so, they should rely on all cultural traditions of the globe, and not feel restricted by state powers to specific local ones. A reaction to today's mass culture, actually, are intensified ideas of and longings for authentic, rooted traditions (forms of behaviour, ritual activities, or material culture).

In this paper, I argue that images of the authentic and of the global are not in opposition to each other: both are produced within one imaginative process. My argument will be based on research on the art biennale of Dakar, Dak'Art. The question I shall deal with may be formulated as following: how can such an arena for contemporary (global) art constitute itself as characteristically rooted in the metropole Dakar?