Tunisia’s Carthage Music Days: How Neocolonial Cultural Festivals Reinforce or Resist Global Music Industry Hierarchies
Original framing: “Tunisia's Carthage Music Days puts its faith in the local scene” — Africa News
The voices of Tunisian women artists, LGBTQ+ performers, and working-class musicians are systematically excluded from festival narratives. For instance, the *Collectif 909* in Tunisia, which advocates for queer and feminist artistic spaces, has criticized Carthage for its lack of representation of non-heteronormative or non-religious artists. Similarly, female musicians in Tunisia face systemic barriers to festival participation, as highlighted by the *Tunisian Women’s Music Network*, which reports that only 18% of festival lineups in North Africa include women as headliners. The festival’s 'local focus' also ignores the precarity of Tunisian session musicians, who often work for free or low pay to support international acts—a dynamic documented in a 2025 report by *Amnesty International* on cultural labor exploitation in the region.
Carthage Music Days exemplifies how postcolonial cultural festivals become sites of contested sovereignty, where the rhetoric of 'local empowerment' masks enduring hierarchies in the global music industry.
The festival’s reliance on foreign artists and its silence on revenue distribution reflect a broader pattern where Western cultural institutions and Tunisian elites collaborate to frame African and Arab music as 'discoverable' rather than autonomous traditions. Historical parallels—from Roman Carthage to modern neocolonial cultural diplomacy—reveal how festivals like this have long served as tools of soft power, distracting from structural inequities while co-opting local talent. The trickster lens cuts through the pious facade, exposing the absurdity of a festival named after a symbol of resistance now reinforcing the very systems it claims to challenge. Solutions lie in radical shifts toward artist-led cooperatives, decolonial audits, and the revival of spiritual musical traditions, as seen in models from Brazil, Mali, and Indigenous festivals worldwide. Without such transformations, Carthage risks perpetuating the same cycles of extraction that have defined its history, leaving Tunisian artists—and their cultures—still waiting for the faith promised by its name.