Abstract: Since 1992, year of the transition from a one-party to a multiparty government, urban life in the West African country of Mali has congruently transformed in a number of domains, among them the availability of land and capital to develop new residential neighborhoods, access to global media through satellite television and internet, the telecommunication revolution that has put a cellphone in nearly every hand, and increasing numbers of Malian citizens embarking on international travel. This combination of factors has opened new vistas and stimulated new cultural flows of ethnic identity, media, technology, finance, and ideas 1 that offer myriad opportunities for participation in a plurality of cultural styles, including cosmopolitan lifestyles that range from near-total disregard for the local and traditional to a more blended cosmopolitanism that embraces ideas of world culture without losing pride in local traditions and practices. Bamako’s television broadcasts have become a center for the performance of what I will argue is a particularly Bamakois blend of localized cosmopolitanism, to bend a term from James Ferguson’s work on Lusaka. 2 Like the citizens of Kumasi 3 and the Pentacostals of Lilongwe, 4 televised representations of the inhabitants of metropolitan Bamako perform cosmopolitan lifestyles in markedly local idioms.