In spaces of violence, scholars and activists have typically addressed music as sites of resistance. In postcolonial Caribbean, the focus of most studies unsurprisingly has thus been placed on the work music has done for the oppressed—or conversely, on the ways the (neo)colonial regimes have used music to increase their control over the masses. Until recently, few publications have addressed the music that has been performed to fortify and gather people together in times of hardship. In this case, what is at stake is not so much a matter of 'us and them' or of resistance, but rather the ways in which the 'us' is mobilized to strengthen senses of belonging and networks of solidarity. Amidst the escalating everyday violence since the mid-1990s, party music in Trinidad continues to thrive. Instead of dismissing such music as merely a source of escapism or hedonism, I want to examine what makes it so compelling and what it does for people. This paper is based on in-depth study of soca music making and mumerous ethnographic interviews with Trinidadian soca artists and fans over the past 15 years.
Tambrin music on the Caribbean island of Tobago is traditionally performed to entertain people at weddings and other family celebrations. The genre is also connected with healing ceremonies and the belief in ancestral spirits. It can cause trance and possession. Nevertheless, today’s musicians hardly ever play in these traditional contexts. Opportunities to perform arise from political events, folklore festivals, and concerts for tourists. In consideration of theoretical views concerning cultural contacts, preservation, and staged respectively participatory performances, the article deals with different forms of musical interaction and different ways of playing depending on repertory, individual performers, and performance conditions, based on fieldwork conducted between 1995 and 2009, thus comprising the music of two generations of musicians.
Examines the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. Material from Mexico, Cuba, France, and Great Britain are brought together to create anew, expand upon, and critique the standard histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts and others. In these standard histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres that are racialized and moralized for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents, and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators and their nations. Africa is treated as a conceptual nation, and Africanness as something extra that racializes hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted, or co-opted as being black or white.
Considers the characteristic features of Garífuna music, which are intrinsically related to the history of slavery, warfare, miscegenation, and resistance of this people of African and Caribbean ancestry, living today mainly on the Atlantic Coast of Central America and in the U.S. Based on his analysis of the Wanaragua or Yancunú rhythm, performed in Livingston, Guatemala, by dancers wearing shell rattles (illacu) tied to their ankles, and a musical ensemble consisting of two drums (garaón) and gourd rattles (sisira), the author examines the metric ambiguity of its basic “time line” or 'clave' of 3:3:2 as well as the rhythmic flexibility and unpredictability with which the dancers and musicians relate to it, as a musical expression of the social and cultural conditions created by that history, especially by the processes of miscegenation.
