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- Convenors:
-
Carlo Cubero
(Tallinn University)
Pablo D Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Considering contemporary music from the Caribbean and its diaspora as a sonically transgressive way of knowing, this panel presents a listening session and discussion of the anthropological implications of emerging forms of resistance through music in those areas.
Long Abstract:
What has been the musical response to the failed promises of neoliberalism in the Caribbean and its diaspora? This panel considers contemporary music in such locales as a 'sonically transgressive way of knowing' that articulates radical alternatives to the predicaments of modernity and ongoing colonialism.
This panel presents a listening session and discussion of the anthropological implications of contemporary music produced in the last three years in the archipelago and its diaspora. We will contextualise these tracks in relation to the historical backdrop of hemispheric protest music, the emergence of new urban music genres, and sonic responses to social anxieties and mobilisation.
Some themes that we are interested in, but not limited to, are the musical mobilisations of the #RickRenuncia protests in Puerto Rico during the summer of 2019; the music that surrounded recent protests in Haiti; the role of local rap music in the emergence of the New Afro-Cuban and San Isidro Movements in Cuba; grime music's articulations of race and power, in the UK; and, other mundane forms of resistance through music in and from the Caribbean and its diaspora. We suggest that Caribbean and Caribbean-descended music presents itself in complete ethnographic form as a challenge to written ethnographic production in and from said areas. We seek presentations and set-lists that consider how such music goes beyond the representation of an ontology that is sonically different and strives to remap epistemological shifts in the methodologies, the politics and the poetics of our discipline.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Monique Charles
Paper short abstract:
Black British popular music forms in the 2010s are interrogated with the Musicological Discourse Analysis (MDA) framework to elucidate music as both sonic and social process; producing particular ways of knowing, being, expressing and a resource of power generation.
Paper long abstract:
Musicological Discourse Analysis (MDA) as a holistic mode of analysis to contextualize music sociologically and musicologically. Its application retheorises genre to produce a specific, useful, and detailed 'Sonic Footprint Timestamp' (SFT). Music is both sonic and social (Lena 2012). The SFT gives insight to music as a social, cultural and political phenomenon at a particular moment in time.
The MDA framework provides a generic mode of musical analysis to elucidate key musical influences, particularly for music of the African diaspora. It uncovers material and immaterial factors of consideration in music making and culture generation. In doing so, it uncovers the power music can generate by penetrating and surrounding traditional political, cultural and political Western systems and structures. Music captures both the sonic and social practices laced and intertwined with neoliberal and colonial legacies. MDA will be applied to Black British music forms popular in the 2010s i.e. Grime, Drill and AfroSwing.
Carlo Cubero (Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will feature a curated playlist of music that was produced in Puerto Rico during the "#RickyRenuncia" protests in the summer of 2019. The music produced during the protests documents a shift in the terms of Puerto Rican post-hurricane political activism.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will feature a curated playlist of music that was produced in Puerto Rico during the weeks of the "#RickyRenuncia" protests, also referred to as "Telegramgate" and "RickyLeaks".
In July 2019, over a million people conducted a series of island-wide protests demanding the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. The protests were in response to a series of scandals associated with Rossello's administration responsibility in hurricane disaster profiteering, the FBI arrest of the Secretary of Education on corruption charges, allegations of influence peddling at Puerto Rico's Department of the Treasury and at the Governor's Cabinet, mismanagement of the public debt, and to a string of neo-liberal policies.
This playlist represents a sample of the extraordinary amount of music that was produced in support of the protest movement. My presentation will contextualise this set-list in relation to broader traditions of Puerto Rican protest music and musical responses to Puerto Rican colonialism. The music produced during the #RickyRenuncia protests represent a shift in the terms of Puerto Rican protest music from a narrative associated with romantic-nationalist traditions to a more nuanced message that acknowledges the heterogeneous character of the Puerto Rican franchise. This shift is illustrative of changing dynamics on the island's post-hurricane political activism.
Pablo D Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation of a playlist of Cuban rap songs analyses the relationship between recent urban music and socio-political protest in Havana.
Paper long abstract:
Havana rap artists are said to have ushered in the New Afro-Cuban Movement circa 1994. Soaked with street-level commentaries on race relations, their songs pushed open a new era for Cuba's public sphere. Louder than its predecessor, the Nueva Trova Movement of the 1960s through the early 1990s, local rap resonated with the city's tradition of music as social commentary and socio-political protest.
The rise of Havana rap duo Los Aldeanos around 2004 was pivotal in the transition from the aesthetically black and racially charged Vieja Escuela rap to the Rap Cubano Nueva Escuela era. The fall of the Cuban Underground Movement after the government's creation of the Cuban Rap Agency was also the fall of early Cuban rap's heavy discourse on race. Many of the newer songs protested the Cuban government in the manner 'the people' thought of the Cuban government. Rappers, poets and fine artists members of the San Isidro Movement, more recently, have trailed on the legacy of Hiphop concerts and sounded public interventions. How have racially and politically loaded rap songs transformed the tone through which the arts establish public platforms for citizens' exchanges with the Cuban state? Through an acoustemology of a selection of songs by Explosion Suprema, Papa Humbertico, Los Aldeanos, Omni Zona Franca and Maykel Osorbo, this presentation analyzes the relationship between local rap and the evolution of recent socio-political protest in Havana.
Sonjah Stanley Niaah (The University of the West Indies, Mona)
Paper short abstract:
An examination of the notion of 'citizenship' through the lens of musical texts from Jamaica.
Paper long abstract:
Jamaican music exists within a milieu of connections - local, regional and international - impacting selves, communities and social structures including legislative frameworks. Drawing on reflections from over 15 years of research on Jamaican popular music, this presentation examines the notion of 'citizenship' through the lens of musical texts from the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica. I foreground amplified sound, in particular, the sound system, as representation using select recordings from the 50 year period of 1969 to 2019. The sound system is articulated as a practice, a form of productive labour, complementary to the labour of citizenship, of nation-building, and celebration of human life. The presentation engages with ideas of belonging/non-belonging, transgression, freedom, and community. Ultimately, the presentation dis/locates the discourse on 'noise', accounting for in/securities, acts of suppression and the transgressive forms of citizenship which have emerged historically and in the contemporary context.