Youth Festivals and Museums: The Cultural Politics of Public Memory in Postcolonial Mali

Abstract Public memory practices are essentially political, and in postcolonial Mali, as elsewhere in Africa, the state's cultural agenda have involved a refocusing and revalorizing of the precolonial past through both performance and material culture. In postcolonial Mali, youth festivals and the National Museum are important sites for constructing a national culture. Through the use of different media, each site has marshaled a constellation of historical memories, symbolic forms, and cultural practices in the service of this nationalistic project.