Abstracts and Bios
Roger D. Abrahams
“Questions of Competency and Performance in the Black Musical Diaspora.”
Within the context of the sociolinguistic distinction between receptive competence and performance competence, I will discuss how musicians and dancers throughout the black diaspora have crafted a cultural imaginary in which questions of identity and creativity are not only performed but discussed by the community at large. I will argue that musicians and dancers are most aware of this processing of stylized culture, as they have incorporated in their memories the story of black creativity. Often connected to particular times, places, and even legendary performers, black performance style is a matter of constant discussion apart from performances. That is, there exist indigenous philosophers who have developed unique vocabularies for discussion of the music and dance, vocabularies that have almost nothing in common with European musical commentators. This vocabulary is learned as part of the acquiring of both receptive and productive competence. In bald terms, I am pointing out the obvious: that each kind of musical style engenders in-group terms which must be learned and used if one is going to be taken as “hip” or “cool” or “down” or whatever. This philosophizing is not simply epidermal, in-group jargon used to show off. It is alive to constant change. It is as deeply concerned with making philosophic distinctions as any other aesthetic system. The jazz era made much of the world aware of this special way of talking and playing, but every style before and since has a similar special vocabulary which imitators must learn to be regarded as part of the black musical diaspora, whether they identify themselves as African or African Americans in other social circumstances. I will begin with an outline of the aesthetic of the cool and suggest a number of ways in which this conceptual cluster needs extension if we are to fully reckon with the black musical diaspora.
Roger D. Abrahams has carried out extensive fieldwork in a range of African-American communities in the United States and the Greater Caribbean. He has written a number of works which draw on this experience. He began as a folknik, as a professional singer getting just a little beyond the hootenanny stage. He earned his Ph.D. in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, and began his teaching at the University of Texas, where he assisted establishing research centers in folklore and in African and African American studies. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, where he served as the Hum Rosen Professor of Folklore and Folklife. He is now retired from teaching, but continues to write.
Terry Agerkop
Terry Agerkop was born in Suriname and studied guitar at the Music Conservatory in Utrecht in the Netherlands from 1962 to 1968. He has worked as a teacher and researcher at the Interamerican Institute for Ethnomusicology and Folklore in Caracas, Venezuela (1971–1977 and 1992–1997). He was the founder of the Department of Cultural Studies in the Ministry of Education and Culture in Suriname, which he headed from 1978 to 1987, during which time he did extensive field research on Surinamese music and folklore, with a special focus on the Saramaka Maroons. He has also done ethnomusicological fieldwork in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Brasília in 2001. He lives in Brazil.
Rose Mary Allen
“Curaçao and the Larger Caribbean: Diaspora, Migration, and Music”
This presentation examines the role of successive intra-regional migrations on the construction of cultural identity in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. My intent is to analyze the Afro-Dutch experience within the broader canvas of Caribbean migration studies, and thus bring 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 intra-regional migrations in the formation of discourses on diaspora and cultural identity. I argue that migration studies which 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. I argue that intra-regional 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 intra-Caribbean interactions of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
Rose Mary Allen is a native of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. She studied at Maria Immaculata Lyceum in Curaçao, after which she studied sociology and cultural anthropology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. After returning to Curaçao, she worked as a researcher and assistant director at the Institute of Archeology and Anthropology of the Netherlands Antilles (AAINA) until the institute’s demise in 1998. Allen received her Ph.D. in 1997 at Utrecht University, and since 1998 she has been working as a consultant and as a part-time lecturer at the University of the Netherlands Antilles and other institutions of higher learning on Curaçao. She has authored and co-authored several curricula on Curaçao culture and society, has co-published, edited, and published several books and articles on the cultural and social history of the Netherlands Antilles, and has served as a representative of the government of the Netherlands Antilles in numerous committees on gender and on culture issues. Her current projects include a comparative analysis of four plantations in Curaçao and a study on the social history of family relationships and structures in Curaçao.
Egberto Bermúdez
Egberto Bermúdez studied early music performance practice and musicology at the Guildhall School of Music and King’s College, University of London. Currently he is tenured Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas of the National University in Bogota, Colombia. He has published a number of works on Latin American and Colombian music history, traditional and popular musics, and musical instruments. In 1984 he founded, and since then has directed, Canto, an ensemble specializing in Spanish and Latin American Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. In 1992, with Juan Luis Restrepo, he established the Fundación de Musica, an institution dedicated to disseminating the products of research on the Latin American musical past, both amongst the scholarly community and the general public. He served as President of the Historical Harp Society from 1998 to 2001.
Brenda F. Berrian
Brenda F. Berrian is professor of Africana Studies, English, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Africa, Harlem, Haiti: The Great Black Cultural Revolution (Institute for Services to Education, 1978); coeditor of Bibliography of Women Writers from the Caribbean: 1831-1968 (Three Continents Press, 1985); and author of “Diversity and Orality in Euzhan Palcy's La Rue Cases-Negres” in Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Film Music, Mark Slobin, ed. (Wesleyan University Press, 2008). She has won research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Group Study Abroad and Research Project, and the Southern Fellowship Fund, and has been an NEH fellow. She has been a guest lecturer in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean and was the keynote speaker at the first African American Studies Interdisciplinary Perspectives Conference in Istanbul. She is currently working on Senegalese film music.
Curwen Best
Curwen Best is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture and Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. He is author of Barbadian Popular Music (Schenkman Books, 1999); Roots to Popular Culture (Macmillan Caribbean, 2001); Culture @ the Cutting Edge (2005); The Politics of Caribbean Cyberculture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Kamau Brathwaite and Christopher Okigbo: Art, Politics and the Music of Ritual (Peter Lang Publishers, Inc., 2009). He is co-editor of the journal BIM: Arts for the 21st Century.
Dominique O. Cyrille
“Black Music Diaspora: A French Caribbean Perspective”
My paper explores some of the ways in which diaspora is imagined and experienced through music in the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. I have taken examples from the recent past in order to demonstrate that while musical imaginations of diaspora allow Martinicans and Guadeloupeans to experience connectedness to their past and to other people of African descent, their musical discourse of diaspora also tells of belonging to the place inhabited rather than a longing for an idealized, distant homeland. To most French Antilleans, diaspora is a complex and ambiguous notion. It is a sonic space that specific musical styles and instruments help define. It is also a place where identities are explored and experienced in relation to other black peoples of the Americas. To most French Antilleans who are faced with the hegemonic power of France, musical imaginations of diaspora open a space for political contest. I contend that rather than “Africa,” most French Antilleans place at the center of their imagined diaspora the Caribbean with its peoples, the shared experience and the common history in the Americas. Hence, I believe that as a concept that deals with boundaries, displacement, power, and belonging, diaspora may seem promising for theorizing Caribbean music. To me, however the centrality of “Africa,” in most people's imagination of the diaspora undermines considerably its usefulness in the case of the French Caribbean.
Dominique O. Cyrille teaches at the Université des Antilles Guyane and is the Director of Mission Patrimoine at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance (CMDT) of Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Université Paris-IV-Sorbonne, Paris. She has researched and published extensively on the music and dance traditions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other Creole-speaking countries of the Caribbean. She taught ethnomusicology in the Black Studies Center of Lehman College CUNY, has extensively studied the traditional dance and music of her homeland, Martinique, and has carried out fieldwork in St. Lucia, Dominica, and Haiti to study the politics of contredance and quadrille performance practice in former French colonies. She has been published in Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Black Music Research Journal, and Dance Research Journal, contributed to the book Caribbean Dance, and is author of program and liner notes for numerous projects. Cyrille was in residence at the Center for Black Music Research during 2003–2004 as a Rockefeller Resident Fellow in the Humanities.
Nanette de Jong
“Diasporic Belonging: Contesting Tambú in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Den Haag”
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.
Nanette de Jong is senior lecturer at the International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University. Her research examines the identities forged by African diasporic groups, emphasizing the ways in which these identities find expression in music. She has published on avant-garde jazz and Caribbean music in such journals as Latin American Music Review, Afro-Hispanic Review, Jazzforschung/Jazz Research, and Black Music Research Journal. Her most recent work, Tambú and the Politics of Memory, will be published by Indiana University Press in 2010. Through a recent Fulbright fellowship to South Africa, she has expanded her research to include the trans-Atlantic journey of Afro-Caribbean and jazz rhythms returning to Africa through globalization.
Shannon Dudley
Shannon Dudley is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Dudley has conducted extensive field research on steelbands in Trinidad and Tobago, the music of El Gran Combo and salsa music in Puerto Rico, as well as Latino contributions to American popular music. His theoretical interests include nationalism, festival, transculturation, race and ethnicity, and the way these forces shape musical performance. Dudley is author of Carnival Music in Trinidad (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Music From Behind the Bridge (Oxford University Press, 2008), a history of Trinidad steelband music. Dudley has published articles in Black Music Research Journal, World of Music, Ethnomusicology, and Latin American Music Review. Dudley also coordinates the activities of the Seattle Partnership for American Popular Music (SPAPM), a collaboration between the UW School of Music, the Experience Music Project museum, and KEXP-FM, funded by the Allen Foundation.
Elizabeth McAlister
Elizabeth McAlister is Associate Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, where she also teaches in American Studies and African American Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in 1995 from Yale University in American Studies with an expertise in Afro-Caribbean religions. Her books include Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora (University of California Press, 2002) and Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2004), co-edited with Henry Goldschmidt. McAlister has published an educational website on Haitian Rara festivals and numerous articles and book chapters, and produced three compilations of Afro-Haitian religious music: Rhythms of Rapture (Smithsonian Folkways, 1995), Angels in the Mirror (Ellipsis Arts, 1997), and the CD Rara! that accompanies her first book. In her efforts to make Afro-Caribbean religions better understood by the American public, McAlister has been interviewed by Terri Gross on “Fresh Air,” profiled in the New York Times, and consulted for projects such as “Africans in America” for PBS, the Learning Channel, and for essays on “Afropop Worldwide” on Public Radio International. McAlister is currently writing on musical artist Wyclef Jean, on Zombies in American culture, and on the interactions between American evangelicals and the “demonically entrenched” (their term) nation of Haiti.
Robin Moore
Robin Moore is Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Humanities Center. His written work includes articles in Latin American Music Review, Cuban Studies, Ethnomusicology, Encuentro de la cultura cubana, and other journals and book anthologies. His books include Nationalizing Blackness: afrocubanismo and artistic revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) and Music and Revolution (University of California Press and the Center for Black Music Research, 2006). He was a 1996–1997 Rockefeller Resident Fellow in the Humanities at the Center for Black Music Research and is currently editor of Latin American Music Review.
Raquel Z. Rivera
“New York Bomba and Palos: Liberation Mythologies and Overlapping Diasporas”
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 paper 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 (2005) has termed the “actively diasporan fraction” who seek “not so much [to] describe the world as seek to remake it.” In this paper, I document and analyze 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 (1995) has termed “overlapping diasporas” as well as the shifting borders of diasporic identity that Juan Flores (2007) and others have explored—two key factors in the way “diaspora” is enacted, but that Brubaker himself fails to properly address.
Raquel Z. Rivera is a Researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, New York. Her areas of scholarly interest are popular music and culture, race and ethnicity, nation and diaspora, and the intersections between Latino and Africana studies. She is author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and numerous articles on popular music and culture, and is co-editor of the anthology Reggaeton (Duke University Press, 2009). A freelance journalist, her articles have been published in various magazines and newspapers, including Vibe, One World, Urban Latino, El Diario/La Prensa, El Nuevo Día, and The San Juan Star. A singer-songwriter, she is a member of Puerto Rican bomba group Alma Moyó, and a founding and former member of Boricua roots music group Yerbabuena and the women’s musical collective Yaya dedicated to Puerto Rican bomba and Dominican salves.