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2. 'Chango 'ta veini'/chango has come': Spiritual embodiment in the Afro-Cuban ceremony, bembé
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Murphy,Joseph M., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring; Spring, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 69-94
3. African diaspora and Colombian popular music in the twentieth century
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Wade,Peter (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2008
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 28(2) : 41
- Notes:
- Explores the idea of diaspora and musical exchanges in relation to changes in Colombian popular music, specifically that from the Caribbean coastal region of the country, often identified as more or less African-influenced. It traces changes that occurred from the 1920s onward, with the commercialization of cumbia and porro and related styles, and looks also at more recent developments around vallenato, champeta, and rap.
4. An ethnographic comparison of Caribbean quadrilles
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Daniel,Yvonne (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 30(2) : 215
- Notes:
- Research on Caribbean dance has revealed consistent ongoing contredanse-related practices since the 17th c. in the Spanish islands and since the 18th c. in the French, British, Dutch, and former Danish islands. The Caribbean forms that emerged do not stand together in an obvious manner because of diverse names for similar configurations and different forms. The discussion, based on comparative fieldwork and a survey of Caribbean dance practices, attempts to overcome some of these difficulties and to show pointedly that Caribbean quadrilles by many names express the ongoing but submerged agency of African-descended performers, that Caribbean dance history and categorization are lacking, and that the royal pageantry that is associated with quadrille performance is significant.
5. Black music research journal
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Dudley,Shannon (Editor)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring, 2012
- Published:
- Champaign, IL: Center for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University of Illinois Press
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1): 1-191
- Notes:
- Special Religion issue, Includes Martha Ellen Davis, "Diasporal dimensions of Dominican folk religion and music"; Loren Y. Kajikawa, D'Angelo's voodoo technology: African cultural memory and the ritual of popular music consumption"; Joseph M. Murphy, "'Chango 'ta vein'/chango has come': Spiritual embodiment in the Afro-Cuban ceremony, bembé"; Teresa L. Reed, "Shared possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and sacred music"; and Rebecca Sager, "Transcendence through aesthetic experience: Divining a common wellspring under conflicting Caribbean and African American religious value systems."
6. Curaçao and the folding diaspora: Contesting the party tambú in the Netherlands
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- De Jong, Nanette T., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall; Fall, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(2) : 67-81
- Notes:
- Tambú represents a ritual from Curaçao, largest of the Netherlands Antilles, employed by the island’s African peoples as a religio-spiritual vehicle. In Dutch mainland cities, however, the Tambú has developed into a type of party music, with Curaçaoan immigrants joining other African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to explore and express complex collective identities. These reinvented tambú parties constitute new sites of cultural reproduction as well as contestation, of solidarity as well as difference, providing the rare occasion to observe diasporic belonging among Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands. These contemporary tambú parties provide a needed space to negotiate competing and overlapping identities, enabling both a specific Antillean identity as well as a more inclusive diasporic identity.
7. D'Angelo's voodoo technology: African cultural memory and the ritual of popular music consumption
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kajikawa,Loren Y., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring; Spring, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 137-159
- Notes:
- Unedited] Focusing on R&B neo-soul singer D’Angelo’s 1999 album Voodoo, this article explores the relationship (both real and imagined) between African American popular music and Afro-Caribbean religion. While most songs on the album do not use traditional Caribbean rhythms, the album’s imagery appears to equate Voodoo’s blend of funk, soul, and gospel with Afro-Diasporic religious practices such as Santeria or Vodou. Not only do D’Angelo’s own statements about the album affirm this connection, but his fans also contribute valuable evidence supporting the link. Surveying the reception of Voodoo by music critics as well as hundreds of online customer reviews of the album via Amazon.com, I argue that D’Angelo’s listeners characterize the album as an inner-directed musical experience approximating spirit-possession. By consicously linking the repetitious, circular grooves of black popular music with the form and function of Afro-Diasporic religious traditions, D’Angelo and his fans testify to the value of black spirituality and offer a critique of the hypermasculinity and materialism pervading contemporary hip-hop and rap music. Voodoo refocuses our attention on the spiritual qualities of African American music that persist even in an age of mass-mediated global capitalism.
8. Diaspora and its theorization
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bilby,Kenneth M. (Editor)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(2) : 1-93
- Notes:
- Special journal issue: New Perspectives on the Black Music Diaspora: Focus on the Caribbean., Includes Roger D. Abrahams, Questions of competency and performance in the black musical diaspora; Rose Mary Allen, Music in diasporic context: The case of Curaçao and intro-Caribbean migration; Nanette T. De Jong, Curaçao and the folding diaspora: Contesting the party tambú in the Netherlands; Elizabeth Mcalister, Listening for geographies: Music as sonic compass pointing toward African and Christian diasporic horizons in the Caribbean; and Raquel Z. Rivera, New York Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Dominican roots music: Liberation mythologies and overlapping diasporas.
9. Diasporal dimensions of Dominican folk religion and music
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Davis,Martha Ellen, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 161-191
- Notes:
- "Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taíno beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodú deity of the “black” Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora." -The Author
10. Listening for geographies: Music as sonic compass pointing toward African and Christian diasporic horizons in the Caribbean
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- McAlister,Elizabeth, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(2) : 25-50
- Notes:
- Can musical sounds reveal history, or collective identity, or new notions of geography, in different ways than texts or migrating people themselves? This essay offers the idea that the sounds of music, with their capacity to index memories and associations, become sonic points on a cognitive compass that orients diasporic people in time and space. Explores grassroots religious musical productions to show that Afro-Caribbean groups can stake out multiple diasporic identities in overlapping diasporic spaces through the various political registers of tribe, kingdom, and nation.
11. Music in diasporic context: The case of Curaçao and intro-Caribbean migration
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Allen,Rose Mary, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall; Fall, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(2) : 51-65
- Notes:
- Examines the role of successive intraregional migrations on the construction of cultural identity in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The author analyzes the Afro-Dutch experience within the broader canvas of Caribbean migration studies, and thus brings a broader diasporic perspective to current research of identity and culture, with particular reference to Curaçao. Through migrations, the island has incorporated different kinds of musical expressions of the region. Of all cultural forms, music provides an ideal opportunity to explore cultural exchanges within and beyond diasporas. Curaçao therefore offers a rare window for viewing the role of intraregional migrations in the formation of discourses on diaspora and cultural identity. Migration studies that look only at the modern transnationalistic diapora obscure the deeply rooted significance of migration on Afro-diasporic identity within the Caribbean and the cultural identity of specific island societies. Intraregional migration movements both past and present profoundly influenced the cultural identity of Curaçao and its diasporic historical vision. Curaçaoan cultural identity has not been solely shaped by the internal dynamics of a merging of African and European cultures, but also intraCaribbean interactions of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
12. National symbol or 'a black thing'? Rumba and racial politics in Cuba in the era of cultural tourism
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bodenheimer,Rebecca, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall; Fall, 2013
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 33(2) : 177-205
13. New York Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Dominican roots music: Liberation mythologies and overlapping diasporas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Rivera,Raquel Z., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Fall; Fall, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(2) : 3-24
- Notes:
- The African diaspora has been a key concept adopted by artists, activists, educators, and scholars committed to challenging the specific ways in which the marginalization of blackness has operated and continues to operate among Spanish-speaking Caribbeans and their descendants. This essay focuses on a relatively small network of New York roots musicians of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent who nevertheless have a strong impact on the way the concept of the African diaspora is argued for in local musical, educational, activist, and scholarly circles. They constitute a key component of what Rogers Brubaker has termed the “actively diasporan fraction” who seek “not so much to] describe the world as seek to remake it.” This article documents and analyzes these musicians' reliance on the concept of urban maroonage as a politicized permutation of the concept of the African diaspora and a central component of a liberation mythology and pedagogy. I propose that though this mythology and pedagogy often falls into what Brubaker has criticized as a “non-territorial form of essentialized belonging” it is at the same time a mythology that takes into account what Earl Lewis has termed “overlapping diasporas” as well as the shifting borders of diasporic identity that Juan Flores and others have explored—two key factors in the way diaspora is enacted, but that Brubaker himself fails to address properly.
14. Preaching blues
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brackett,David, (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring; Spring, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 113-136
- Notes:
- Unedited] Blues scholarship has offered a number of interpretations for the haunted desperation of the souls of Delta blues musicians, their deals with the devil, and the magical acquisition of musical skill. The association of 1920s and 1930s blues musicians with the supernatural may have been fed by those rediscovered blues musicians sharing what their mid-20th c. white interlocutors wanted to hear, but they may also have resonated with a more metaphorical belief in the role of the supernatural. Robert Johnson’s diverse recordings, specifically “Crossroad blues,” “Preaching blues” and “If I dad possession over judgment day,” illuminate connections between blues and African Diaspora of the circum-Caribbean. The lyrical content, with its images of prayer and desperation, musical construction, with connections to common practices in religious musics in the circum-Caribbean, and ascribed primitivist elements in these songs suggest that Johnson’s invocation of the supernatural may also have been the metaphorical presentation of a widely known legend. Therefore, beliefs about spirituality in the blues, and the interconnection of blues and religion, have bases beyond religious or commercial sources.
15. Shared possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and sacred music
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Reed,Teresa L., (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- Spring; Spring, 2012
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 5-25
- Notes:
- There are many parallels between the music and worship of the African American Pentecostalism of the author’s upbringing and that of Afro-Caribbean religious groups, including Trinidadian Spiritual Baptists, the Haitian Heavenly Army, and Jamaican Revival Zionists. This can partly be attributed to their shared West African roots. Many features of West African worship have survived among these two geographically separate groups, including a heavy use of rhythm and percussion instruments, a call and response vocal form, and a climax of spirit possession, when congregants reach a state of rhythmically induced ecstasy in which they feel fully possessed by the divine. Both groups have also independently adopted white Christian hymnody, in which they stay true to the text but often change the music in an improvisatory style.
16. The tambú of Curaçao: Historical projections and the ritual map of experience
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- De Jong,Nanette T. (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 30(2) : 197
- Notes:
- Describes the genre and charts its evolution from the slavery years through the 20th c.
17. Transcendence through aesthetic experience: Divining a common wellspring under conflicting Caribbean and African American religious value systems
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Sager,Rebecca (Author) and Arce,Bridget Christine (Author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2008
- Published:
- Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International (UMI) Ann Arbor, MI
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- Black music research journal
- Journal Title Details:
- 32(1) : 27
- Notes:
- [Unedited] My dissertation examines the way in which specific historical bodies such as the soldadera (a female camp follower), the mulata, and the figure of Emiliano Zapata have been appropriated in Mexico by different cultural genres such as literature, music, popular balladry, and film. All of the historical figures that I consider occupy the site of a powerful tropological discourse that has saturated the public imagination throughout the 20th c. Hayden White, among others, contends that trope, which is figurative language, constitutes a 'mode of thought.' As a mode of thought, trope can govern the expectations that are held of certain people. This project is concerned with defining those expectations within the confines of the nation-state, and more importantly, explaining how they are disrupted. This leads to my critical query: why do certain historical bodies constitute the sites of such discursive tension? The figures I examine in this study suggest something deeper in the concept of nationhood than the reigning paradigms of identity; their bodies become metaphors for the tensions within the spaces they occupy. In order to embrace this project, I explore the idea of tropes within traditional Western rhetorical practices and then enter into dialogue with indigenous thought and aesthetics. The process by which noted historical figures become aesthetic tropes in both popular cultural production and high art constitutes the crux of this study. For example, the soldadera and the mulata are given anonymous, even pejorative names that reveal their striking omnipresence in the national imaginary; nevertheless, they are erased from the national narrative. In effect, the participation of the soldaderas in the Mexican military was never officially recognized or remunerated; they were deplored as cumbersome parasites. Similarly, mulatas enter the imaginary as exceptional, exotic figures whose exuberant sexuality is perceived as dangerous to traditional culture. Yet their image is nonetheless pervasive in 20 th century Mexican culture. In light of the nation's historical amnesia regarding the place of Africans, I examine the way in which different musical genres and cultural traditions in the state of Veracruz articulate Mexico's legacy of blackness. Unlike the nameless anonymity of the soldadera, mulata and Africans, Emiliano Zapata begins as a specific individual with a proper name and history. However, the specificity of his historical context becomes abstracted through the appropriation of his name by the indigenous groups who, by assuming his patronymic as Zapatistas, forcefully insert their anonymity into the national narrative. Despite its program to achieve mestizo middle-class values, national culture repeatedly turns back to figurations of marginal subjects. How these figures inspire art forms as diverse as corridos, film, fiction, and music as well as the power of these uniquely marginalized figures to travel across genres so irreverently is what drives my intellectual endeavor.