Unedited] The career of Laba Sosseh, the Senegambian singer of Afro-Cuban music, challenges many of the dominant paradigms of world music' research. His music was not the product of Western influence nor was Sosseh shaping his music to please elite Western audiences. Sosseh instead sought to Cubanize African popular music and Africanize new world Latin music. He was active in several West African music centers in the 1960s and 1970s and New York in the 1980s. He was the first musician reportedly to have a gold record in West Africa and his recordings for a U.S. Cuban-owned company circulated widely throughout the Caribbean Basin. In the 1990s, Sosseh returned to Dakar, Senegal, to mentor a new generation of Senegalese Latin musicians. By looking at Sosseh’s life on both sides of the Atlantic, it becomes clear that world music can come from unexpected places in unanticipated ways. Sosseh’s music had its roots in a South-South dialogue that underscored cultural difference and local identities. His work demonstrates that globalization does not inherently produce global homogeneity. Non-western communities can deploy communication technologies (records, radio and cassettes) to create forms of counter-globalization that rather than promote Western cultural hegemony resist it.
