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In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music—a secular, drum-based tradition—captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island’s decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Aurality, Jérôme Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.
Within the circum-Caribbean, the ubiquity of tourism and the variety of musical life are hard to miss. Scholars have long explored both of these themes in the Caribbean, but have done so from disciplinary perspectives that tended until recently (and for a variety of reasons) to foreclose readings that considered tourism and music together. This volume addresses itself to analyzing the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region.
In A Refuge of Cure or Care: The Sensory Dimensions of Confinement at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane, Madeline Kearin Ryan analyzes the therapy model of the nineteenth-century asylum. Because the five senses were believed to provide a direct conduit into a person’s mental condition, the curative force of the hospital was thought to reside in its command over sensory experience. Ryan examines how the institution was designed to target each of the five senses as a mode of therapy, and conversely, how that well-intentioned design materialized in the haphazard realm of institutional practice. In doing so, Ryan seeks to reconcile the disjuncture between the benevolent promise of the asylum model and its ultimate failure in a way that captures the complex power dynamics and heterogeneity of actors within the institution.
Between the mid-1930s and the late '40s the centre of the jazz world was a two-block stretch of 52nd Street in Manhattan. Dozens of crowded basement clubs played host to legends like Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. These clubs defied the traditional boundaries between art and entertainment, and between the races.
Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide poetics that attends to the centrality of Caribbean music in retrieving and replaying personal and cultural memories, Hamilton offers a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization.
Introduces the richly varied musical traditions of the Caribbean from interdisciplinary perspectives that will support decolonised curricula and research.
An Appeal to the World: Creolizing Domination in the Political Thought of Montesquieu, Fukuzawa, and Du Bois reconstructs how three distinguished political philosophers challenged transnational domination—namely, forms of arbitrary political and economic control across national borders—through distinct, but comparable, philosophical frameworks geared toward a range of global contexts. For Montesquieu, despotic formulations remain the most alarming kinds of domination but can effectively be resisted through an emphasis on contextualized forms of moderation. Fukuzawa’s key concern with domination centers on dependent relations but can be resisted through an emphasis on contextualized for...
This book examines the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Edouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn.
"Rock and roll's most iconic, not to mention wealthy, pioneers are overwhelmingly white, despite their great indebtedness to black musical innovators. Many of these pioneers were insensitive at best and exploitative at worst when it came to the black art that inspired them. Tear Down the Walls is about a different cadre of white rock musicians and activists, those who tried to tear down walls separating musical genres and racial identities during the late 1960s. Their attempts were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine engagement with African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. Burke considers this question by recount...
When Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered during the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, its avant-garde music and jarring choreography scandalized audiences. Today it is considered one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century. In this volume, the ballet finally receives the full critical attention it deserves, as distinguished music and dance scholars discuss the meaning of the work and its far-reaching influence on world music, performance, and culture. Essays explore four key facets of the ballet: its choreography and movement; the cultural and historical contexts of its performance and reception in France; its structure and use of innovative rhythmic and tonal features; and the reception of the work in Russian music history and theory.