From Rio to Cairo, Miami to Kampala - Chromesthesia probes the audiopolitics of diaspora, tracking soundscapes of errantry and migration along the isles of The Global Mangrove Archipelago. This world pulses with sound. Dancehall and Baile Funk, Amapiano to Dembow, Mahragan and Raptor House, Jizan to Jazz – these sounds, forged through intergenerational exchange and displacement, define the global rhythms of our time.

Brainchild of British-Egyptian historian, Hannah Elsisi, Chromesthesia—aptly named "the colour of sound"— tracks afro-diasporic rhythms from The Whole Mangrove World. In its first of more-to-come iterations, special research projects and commissions, Chromesthesia launches its inaugural compilation mapping centuries of movement, resistance, and creolite that undergird global electronic music today. Featuring a veritable avengers team of everyone’s favourite producer: Sho Madjozi, Asher Gamedze, Nick León, Deena Abdelwahed, Kelman Duran, GAIKA, Lord Tusk, Covco, Julmud, LYZZA, Maurice Louca, Baby Cocada, 3Phaz, LAFAWNDAH, Double Zuksh, Lamin Fofana, DJ Babatr.

Any look at the musical charts of the last two decades reveals the music of the world today to be: Afrobeat, Dancehall, Baile Funk, Cumbia, Reggaeton, Shatta (forged in intergenerational interactions between Central and West-African rhythms used by enslaved populations to communicate with each other in the mangrove forests of the Caribbean and South America, before later migratory movements, both forced and voluntary, transported these sounds back across the shorelines of the Mexican Gulf to North America); Mahragan “Electro-Shaabi”) and Arabic Trap-Bow (forged in intergenerational interactions between afro-islamic musicking rituals of North and East Africa and the Gulf: Bahri, Gnawa, Singeli, Zar); and the hip-hop, drill, grims, punk and noise of the world’s colonial metropoli.

From the Mexican to the Persian Gulf, the Atlantic to the Med, the global rhythms of our times archive over a millennium of African and afro-descendant musicking on the move. In reprising the interaction of longue-durée African migratory patterns with more recent movements of migration across these bodies of water, Chromesthesia centres the sonic and sensory rites (rituals of song, dance, music and performance) in which racialised labour groups have forged an imagined sense of local and global community. The popular music of the twenty-first century is virtually impossible without shared global experiences of migration and displacement due to war, climate change, economic collapse, and gender violence, among other factors. In other words, ‘the hit parade’ is shot through with power. Who controls these sounds? How does music intersect with rights? What does belonging mean in our globalised soundscape?

Chromesthesia tracks the perduring exercise of sonic rights by enclosed communities everywhere: the right to sing, dance and play. Elsisi flips the script on politics through a sonic lens: “Chromesthesia investigates politics as the power to be heard – to sing this song, to bang that beat – as it chafes against the right to be heard – the legislation of acceptable and hegemonic speech. The two, often, do not go hand in hand: cultural enfranchisement has not always translated into political representation. But precisely because music needs no permission, it can sound the horn of liberation. Music, then, is an archive of political power, expressed otherwise. Sitting with that sonic archive it becomes possible to make audible what written history has silenced: joy in community crying out from the deepest of enclosures; immense power as against impossible violence. The rhythms of the mangrove world are held out to be blasted out LOUD.”

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Notes on Mangrove Being, Hannah Elsisi (2024):

That the being is relation, and it goes everywhere. That human cultures exchange while living on, change without losing themselves: that this becomes possible. I am this mangrove country in the Lamentin in Martinique where I grew up and at the same time, thanks to an imperceptible infinite presence, which takes nothing away from the Other, that bank of the Nile where the reeds turn to bagasse like sugar canes. The aesthetic of Relation reduces to anachronism the illusions of exoticism, which made everything uniform.

Edouard Glissant
– Treatise on the World


Mangrove forests are widely distributed in Asia, America, and Africa, where they have long served as natural refuge reserves for coastal societies evading war and as rich sources for sustenance: “"When there is nothing, we go there. It is our money tree". They are particularly prevalent in, and relevant to, global afro-descendent communities by virtue of the west African mangrove forests in which many of their ancestors were hunted and kidnapped and the mangrove shorelines to which they were transported as slaves. Scholars have noted the crucial role of ‘mangrove ecosystems in the African diaspora [given] the habitat's significance for firewood collection, maroonage, and escape agriculture; archaeological sources that underscore mangroves' longstanding support of shellfish collection’. Afro-Latin, Afro-American and Afro-Khaleeji communities were all constituted in this entanglement of land and ocean, salt and fresh water, colonialism and decolonisation, liberty and domination, creolisation and globalisation that indexes the Mangrove World. The ocean and the mangrove are an inseparable part of the movement of bodies across the world. The People are Mangrove and the Sea is History, to forget them, as Derek Walcott reminds us, is to forget to breathe. This, too, is Cesaire’s Mangrove Condition.

“Barca walla Barzakh!”
– Senegalese Migrants

Music emerges from our dispossession, not as compensation but rather as a critique of possession … How could the transformative power we know the music has, that we know is held in music, be held there unless it’s upheld there, held out from there, out of there, disbursed and dispersed? … It runs away from being held and it’s held out to be given away.

Fred Moten
– The Freedom Principle


Relation is an archipelagic, coastal poetics; it is a walking along the edge of shoreline, amongst the mangroves, where the line between sand and soil is buried, where the binary of land and sea is obfuscated, where shrub and root are stilted, turning our world upside down. The habitat of the mangrove reminds us not to forget the ocean and an ocean of other modes of being-in-the-world. In Poetics of Relation Edouard Glissant puts forth his theory of identity and errantry, of detour and retour, by taking up the botanical distinction put forth by Deleuze and Guattari between the single-root, as that which kills everything outside of itself while the rhizome extends to meet other roots. The rhizome refers to complex subterranean root systems, such as Mangroves, where new roots are generated constantly (‘mass of roots’ from the Greek /rhízōma/), growing in different directions, horizontally, upwards, downwards, but also unpredictable: new roots can develop at any time. Thus, when generated as a measure of being and identity, the single-root is not merely shoddy metaphysics or ill-conceived fantasy, it also consumes and destroys difference. For D&G thinking like Rhizomes can capture the multiplicities, assemblages and interconnections that shape the social world, give it meaning and work against logics of enclosure and possesion.


It is understandable that in this universe every cry was an event ... Monotonous chants, syncopated, broken by prohibitions, set free by the entire thrust of bodies produced their language from one end of the world to the other. These musical expressions born of silence: Negro spirituals and blues, persisting in towns and growing cities; jazz, biguines, and calypsos, bursting into barrios and shantytowns; salsa and reggaes, assembled everything blunt and direct, painfully stifled, and patiently differed into this varied speech. This was the cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.
Edouard Glissant
– Poetics of Relation

Glissant was adamant that single-rooted identity was a shibboleth that hewed to fascist logics of uniformity and universalism: ‘the ardent stigmata of that rigid will that leads to the Universal’. The trace, by contrast, did not hold out a ready-made model of identity or counter to those ‘other models forcibly imposed on us’. In Against Race, Paul Gilroy similarly approached history like a DJ, tracing the ‘edge-connecting routes’ of transatlantic black culture instead of ‘stable motherland roots’ that held out false emancipatory promise in the racial grammars of domination (The Colour Line). Such trace thought refutes the extremes of possession and tracks an escape-route from the strangulations of identity towards a being of self-derived from the other. For Glissant, who had a special predilection for the mangroves of his Carribbean youth - ‘the bay of Lamentin and the devastated mangrove there’ – identity was rhizomatic, the mangrove was its avatar and the whole world its stage. Processes of migration and regeneration were indexed by a decidedly salty poetics, that categorically refused fixities and universalisms. To trace such movements required one to “consent to listen together to the cry of the world”. These cries were the syncopated language of creolised and globalised identities, cries that have now become “the music of the world”. For Glissant, this music was ‘the only sort of a universality there is, when from a specific enclosure the deepest voice cries out’.

My deepest thanks to the comrades and bedfellows, producers, DJs, artists, thinkers, fighters and beyond, present and future, that make this kind of work possible and with whom I’ll look forward to walking the long path from this mangrove shore to that.
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