Pages: 1-17., Examines the songs of the insular Caribbean as a contribution to the oral literature of the Caribbean region, with particular reference to the songs and singers of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent, Barbados. Among the artists discussed are Trinidad's African Queen of Song, Ella Andall, Dominica's Nascio Fontaine, and Carolyn Cooper's perspectives on the Jamaican dancehall and Kittitian legend King Ellie Matt, 'De Hardest Hard', who reigned supreme during the 1970s and 1980s. He influenced the late Daddy Friday, whose songs still receive significant airplay today. Trinidad's chutney soca songs speak to the presence of its East Indian singers while Jamaican sisters Tami Chynn and Tessanne Chin of Chinese, Cherokee, European, and African descent have become known, respectively, as pop and rock reggae singers.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
Special journal issue: Papers in Honour of Merrick Posnansky., Archaeological and ethnological evidence from the site of Efutu in Ghana is used to indicate the African cultural background of people imported into the Caribbean for enslavement in historical times.
Bilby,Kenneth M. (Author) and Neely,Daniel T. (Author)
Format:
Book, Section
Publication Date:
2009
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The Anglophone Caribbean islands are host to a rich and diverse tradition of dances and dance music adopted from European ballroom traditions. These traditions should be seen less as examples of “assimilation” than as products of a shared history of creativity, struggle, and adaptation among the colonized. Thus, for example, the related “tambrin” tradition of the island of Tobago has served as a vehicle for spirit possession in ceremonies with clear African-derived elements.
Cyrille,Dominique (Author), Gidal,Marc Meistrich (Author), and Vaughan,Umi A. (Author)
Format:
Book, Section
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Explores the relationships between music, religious affiliations, and difference. The primary case study is the multi-ethnic, multi-class Afro-gaucho religious community in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The local term Afro-gaucho calls attention to African descendents in the region and their efforts to valorize their contributions to gaucho culture. Since a majority of the estimated 40,000 worship houses practice three religions (Batuque, Umbanda, and Quimbanda), participants use music to help segregate and mix the religions and their denominations.
Peek, Philip M. (Editor) and Yankah, Kwesi (Editor)
Format:
Book, Section
Publication Date:
2004
Published:
New York: Routledge
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
593 p, Written by an international team of experts, this is the first work of its kind to offer comprehensive coverage of folklore throughout the African continent. Includes Maureen Warner Lewis' "Caribbean verbal arts."
Chabela Ramírez, the black singer and activist born in Montevideo in 1958, is a singular personality of candombe, the only multi-form Afro-Uruguayan musical genre. Retracing her trajectory leads us through the history of Uruguay's black community (10% of the total population) and candombe, with particular attention on how this musical expression went from devalued practice to national heritage in a country deeply marked by a Eurocentric ideology. Ramírez founded and gave voice, with Afrogama, the choir and dance group that she leads, to a unique aesthetic thought that brought meaning to candombe via the field of Afro-religions (Umbanda and Batuque).
By reflecting on the intersections of race, nationality, and the body within the specificities of Black Seminole border culture and history, the essay problematizes Anne Anlin Cheng’s notion of racial melancholia, suggesting that self rejection might be a more strategic move than Cheng acknowledges it to be. In the end, the author coins the term dialectical soundings and proposes that the singing of spirituals among the Black Seminoles in fact operates as such, rendering blackness visible in the context of the Mexican border essentialist racial discourse.
