African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
261 p., Examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. Analyzing the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture. Demonstrates how many individuals contest traditional roles by maneuvering within and/or trying to change their society's binary gender systems. These transgressions have come to better represent Caribbean culture than the "official" representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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661 p., Focuses on the diffusion of Cuban popular musical styles throughout the Americas as well as the creation of new hybrids in places such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Latin New York. Students, scholars and librarians will find Baila! to be an essential resource on Afro-Latin music and dance, language, literature, aesthetics, and more.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
60 p., Explains how the implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union should serve as an impetus for stakeholders in the region to address these barriers thereby creating favorable conditions for the production and export of Caribbean entertainment services. Presents an overview of policies in the creative sector in terms of the promotion of services exports in selected CARICOM states: Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
92 p, Investigates the power of stories told within Caribbean dancehall music and culture that present “good reasons” that are adopted by members of that culture. Shows that dancehall stories reveal powerful ideological frames that “naturalize” ways of being within Caribbean dancehall culture. Various relationships between “good reasons” presented in lyrical stories and the adoption of these “good reasons” by participants in their own stories emerged as well.
Using theories of performance geography, the author considers how black music and dance, especially the slave ship dance Limbo, create an urban counter-culture that evokes historic transcultural experiences of the Middle Passage, space, and modernity. Social theories of scholars including Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, and Catherine Nash are considered. Other topics include cultural geography, the Maroons of Jamaica, and dance customs of Trinidad. Interrelationships between performances at the Dancehall in Kingston, Jamaica, Blues music, and South African Kwaito music are explored.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan's recording of “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” was a major R&B and pop hit in 1946. In narrating a woman's murder of her abusive husband from a sympathetic first-person point of view, the recording's depiction of domestic violence raises the question of how it achieved mass popularity in a cultural milieu that discouraged frank discussion of this topic. This article accounts for this popularity by tracing the musical and lyrical changes between the hit recording and its sources, the Caribbean folk ballad Payne dead/Murder in the market and calypso performer Wilmouth Houdini's 1939 adaptation He had it coming.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
266 p, Provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas, rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk.
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'.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Focuses on cultural manifestations of pan-Americanism through the development of Haitian folkloric dance by the Haitian-born dance director Jean-Léon Destiné and the U.S. African American dance educator Lavinia Williams. As early as the mid-1930s, the Haitian government began to support the advancement and consumption of Haitian cultural arts to increase tourism to the country. In fact, many Caribbean administrations encouraged similar investments in tourism during this time to complement industrialization and to answer the dilemmas of debt, unemployment, and failing economies. The work of Destiné and Williams sought to modernize Haitian dance or, rather, to discipline it, classify it, and theatricalize it so Haiti’s original art form could be exhibited on the world stage and educate audiences about Haitian history and culture. The establishment of cultural institutions and the training of Haitian dancers by a U.S. African American choreographer affirmed not only the spirit of pan-Americanism’s cultural exchange programs, but also the creation of an alternative world by black dancers in which African-based art forms were celebrated and in consistent dialogue with Western culture.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
256 p, Spotlights the religious performance practices that influence many popular and folk music traditions throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, as well as globally. Myriad styles of music–including rumba, salsa, latin jazz, and hip-hop–have their roots in the religious performance traditions of the African diaspora.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida Gainesville, FL
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: Isaac Nii AKRONG, Ghanaian Gome and Jamaican Kumina: West African influences (RILM [ref]2010-06100[/ref]); Celia Weiss BAMBARA, Chimin Kwaze: Crossing paths, or Haitian dancemaking in Port-au-Prince (RILM [ref]2010-06101[/ref]); Graciela Chao CARBONERO, Melba NÚÑEZ ISALBE, trans., The Africanness of dance in Cuba (RILM [ref]2010-06095[/ref]); Jill Flanders CROSBY, Susan MATTHEWS, asst., Melba NÚÑEZ ISALBE, asst., Roberto PEDROSO GARCÍA, asst., Secrets under the skin: They brought the essence of Africa (RILM [ref]2010-06096[/ref]); Martha Ellen DAVIS, Dance of the Dominican misterios (RILM [ref]2010-06102[/ref]); Nicolás DUMIT ESTÉVEZ, The drums are calling my name (RILM [ref]2010-06104[/ref]); Hazel FRANCO, Tradition reaffirming itself in new forms: An overview of Trinidad and Tobago folk dances (RILM [ref]2010-06110[/ref]); Julian GERSTIN, Tangled roots: Kalenda and other neo-African dances in the circum-Caribbean (RILM [ref]2010-06091[/ref]); Ramiro GUERRA, Melinda MOUSOURIS, trans., My experience and experiments in Caribbean dance (RILM [ref]2010-06094[/ref]); Susan HAREWOOD, John HUNTE, Dance in Barbados: Reclaiming, preserving, and creating national identities (RILM [ref]2010-06108[/ref]); Susan HOMAR, Contemporary dance in Puerto Rico, or How to speak of these times (RILM [ref]2010-06105[/ref]); Tania ISAAC, Helen, heaven, and I: In search of a dialogue (RILM [ref]2010-06107[/ref]); Ravindra Nath 'Raviji' MAHARAJ, A narrative on the framework of the presence, change, and continuity of Indian dance in Trinidad (RILM [ref]2010-06111[/ref]); Annette C. MCDONALD, Big drum dance of Carriacou (RILM [ref]2010-06109[/ref]); Juliet E. MCMAINS, Rumba encounters: Transculturation of Cuban rumba in American and European ballrooms (RILM [ref]2010-06093[/ref]); Sonjah Stanley NIAAH, Dance, divas, queens, and kings: Dance and culture in Jamaican dancehall (RILM [ref]2010-06099[/ref]); Cynthia OLIVER, Rigidigidim De Bamba De: A calypso journey from start to. . . (RILM [ref]2010-06090[/ref]); Xiomarita PÉREZ, Maria Lara SOTO, trans., How to dance son and the style of a Dominican sonero (RILM [ref]2010-06103[/ref]); Cheryl RYMAN, When Jamaica dances: Context and content (RILM [ref]2010-06098[/ref]); Grete VIDDAL, Haitian migration and danced identity in Eastern Cuba (RILM [ref]2010-06097[/ref]); Janet WASON, Bele and quadrille: African and European dimensions in the traditional dances of Dominica, West Indies (RILM [ref]2010-06106[/ref]).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
173 p, Contents: O intérprete negro na música brasileira nos séculos XVIII e XIX -- Joaquina Maria da Conceição Lapa (Lapinha) -- Camila Maria da Conceição -- Principais apresentações e repertório de Joaquina Maria da Conceição Lapa (Lapinha) --Pincipais apresentações de Camila Maria da Conceição (1892-1908).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
The pioneering collector of African American music writes of a trip to West Africa where he found the cultural and historical roots for musical expression from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem. He recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.
