Adieu foulard, adieu madras is a very popular tune from the French Caribbean. It is just as popular today in continental France, where it has been adapted to different musical genres. Yet, for those familiar with the simple melody and its evocative lyrics, which encourages carefree humming, not many may be aware that it is so deeply rooted in the history of French colonialism, island tropes, and ethnic relations. This essay uses Adieu foulard, adieu madras and its multiple sonic meanings as the lens to better understand the dynamics of the (post)colonial relationship of the people of the French Antilles, particularly from the island overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, many of whom have now migrated permanently to metropolitan France. For these, Adieu has now also become their song of exile.
Berkeley: University of California Press Berkeley, CA, U.S.A
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Examines the role music has played in the formation of the political and national identity of the Bahamas. It analyzes Bahamian musical life as it has been influenced and shaped by the islands’ location between the United States and the rest of the Caribbean; tourism; and Bahamian colonial and postcolonial history. Focusing on popular music in the second half of the twentieth and early 21st c., in particular rake-n-scrape and Junkanoo, the author finds a Bahamian music that has remained culturally rooted in the local even as it has undergone major transformations. Highlighting the ways entertainers have represented themselves to Bahamians and to tourists, he illustrates the shifting terrain that musicians navigated during the rapid growth of tourism and in the aftermath of independence.
With Joe Arroyo's passing on 26 July 2011, the world has lost a superstar and true innovator of modern Latin music. His work combined lyrics of protest, romance, and spirituality with a joyful music that was at once fresh and accessible. The sixth album Arroyo put out with La Verdad marked a transition from a less adventurous to a more radical approach, where the diverse mix heard on later records is fully embraced for the first time. With Me le fugué a la candela (I escaped the fire) his players gelled, and the pan-Caribbean sound they became famous for came into its own, especially on side two.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Examines a variation of samba called pagode baiano in several peripheral neighborhoods of the city of Salvador. Dance parties organized around this genre provide the context for the affirmation of a racial identity discourse as well as the reterritorialization of 'easy women', 'dishonest and lazy people', jobless people, homosexuals, and blacks. Pagode reintegrates aspects of traditional African manifestations found in Brazil, such as dance, call-and-response song, and the emphasis on polyrhythm. It embraces a sub-altern gender (feminine) and sexuality (homosexual) and undermines the hegemony of the macho. It exists as a musical experience whose feelings are particular and shared amongst certain subjects. Musicians and the public share a language and a way of speaking about themselves and others that reveal an emergent, imperfect citizenship.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
402 p, Exploration of the musical heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, arranged by region, focusing on the major countries/regions (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, etc. in Latin America and Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Haiti, etc. in the Caribbean). In each chapter the author gives a complete history of the region’s music, ranging from classical and classical-influenced styles to folk and traditional music to today’s popular music.
Belafonte,Harry, (Author) and Shnayerson,Michael, (Collab.)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
01/01; 2011
Published:
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A personal account of an era of enormous cultural and political change, which reveals Harry Belafonte as not only one of America's greatest entertainers, but also one of our most profoundly influential activists. Belafonte spent his childhood in both Harlem and Jamaica, where the toughness of the city and the resilient spirit of the Caribbean lifestyle instilled in him a tenacity to face the hurdles of life head-on and channel his anger into positive, life-affirming actions. He returned to New York City after serving in the Navy in World War II, and found his calling in the theater, before transitioning into a career as a singer and Hollywood leading man. During the 1960s civil rights movement, Belafonte became close friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., and used his celebrity as a platform for his activism in civil rights and countless other political and social causes. This book tells the inspiring story of an original and powerful entertainer who has always engaged fiercely with the issues of his day.
As Angola restructures following a long civil war and Brazil takes a leading role among the rapidly developing BRIC nations, new questions arise pertaining to the African heritage in Brazilian music and to Brazil's role in Angolan cultural initiatives and musical markets. Through examination of Brazilian discourse about such exchanges, combined with a comparative analysis of three versions of Angolan musician Teta Lando's 1974 song, Angolano segue em frente—the original, a recent Brazilian re-recording, and a Brazilian remix—new attention is given to the South-South dialogue that builds on historical connections yet also establishes new resonances in musical evocations of Atlantic affinities.
Examines the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multiethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.
The dance-music complexes known as salsa and bhangra have not been subjected to any comparative academic scrutiny, despite clear parallels in their respective histories as cultural processes born out of multiple ruptures and conjunctions, including European colonialism, migrations during the postcolonial period, and transnational cultural and commodity flows. While salsa has resulted from the movement of people, music, and rhythmic cultures across Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, bhangra evinces their movement across the partitioned space of Punjab, the United Kingdom, and the post-Partition nations of India and Pakistan. Both salsa and bhangra have, moreover, moved beyond original regional ambits to become cultural signifiers (albeit often contested as much as claimed) of wider Latino/a and Desi (pan-South Asian) identities respectively. Undoubtedly, it is the academic and cultural embedding of salsa within a Hispanophone postcolonial paradigm, and of bhangra within its Anglophone counterpart, that has prevented serious comparative work between these two musical expressive cultures which are equally but differently exemplary of the complex relationship between music and migration. Yet across the world, from Delhi to San Francisco, the two dance-music complexes increasingly meet each other in the same space, particularly that of the dance floor. Drawing on such evidence as well as on personal experience of dancing both salsa and bhangra, I will advance in this article a theoretical framework for their comparison as transnational musics, suggesting ways in which such a framework can illuminate the circuits of pleasure and politics that traverse each of these dance musics as embodied histories of a traumatic yet life-affirming postcolonial modernity.
Colorism and skin bleaching is evident in contemporary Jamaica as expressed in some dancehall songs which praise skin bleachers, and the explanatory narratives of skin bleachers that bleaching makes them pretty and sexually attractive to potential spouses. Similar themes are reflected in the criticism that the browning Dancehall Queen Carlene was deemed sexually attractive and choreographically talented only because of her brown physicality. Some spouses request that their partner acquire the bleached physicality because they find it sexually attractive similar to many male clients in 'massage parlors' who only request female sex workers who bleach their skin.
