Listening to the Caribbean


Book Description

The primary aim of Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race is quite ambitious: to open up the Caribbean to a “sound studies” approach, and to thereby effect a shift in Caribbean studies away from the predominantly visual biases of most scholarly works and towards a fuller understanding of early Caribbean societies through listening in to the past. Paying close attention to auditory elements in written accounts of slavery and revolts allows us to unlock the sounds that are registered and recorded there, so that not only does one gain a more sensorially full understanding of the society, but also to a considerable extent, the voices and subjectivities of the enslaved are brought out of the silence to which they have been largely consigned. Reading texts in this way, listening to the sounds of language, work, festivity, music, laughter, mourning, and warfare, for example, allows one to know better the lives of the enslaved people, and how, counter to the largely visual power of the planters, the people developed a highly sophisticated auditory culture that in large part ensured their survival and indeed their final victories over the institution of slavery.




Reggae & Caribbean Music


Book Description

Provides a complete historic overview of the sounds of the entire English-speaking Caribbean region, bringing together informative essays on the development of a range of music styles and the industry's top performers. Original.




Isles of Noise


Book Description

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.




Focus: Music of the Caribbean


Book Description

Focus: Music of the Caribbean presents the most important issues of Caribbean musical history and current practice, discussing thought-provoking questions in a student-friendly fashion. It uses current ethnomusicological research on Caribbean music to tell the stories of Caribbean history—those of colonialism and neocolonialism, race and nationalism, marginalization and globalization—and to explore that history’s continuing impact on the lives, cultures, musics, and dance of modern-day people in the Caribbean and beyond. In three parts, the text presents an embodied understanding of the sounds, rhythms, and movements that exemplify the history, culture, and politics of Caribbean music: I. Caribbean Music and Caribbean History establishes a framework for thinking about Caribbean musical history and the roles race and migration play II. Music and Dance in Caribbean Societies considers how contrasting forms of dance music reconcile competing ideas about Caribbean identities past and present III. Focusing In: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments in Merengue Típico explores the music of the Dominican Cibao region through a focus of the genre’s dominant musical instruments Accessible to all students regardless of musical background, Focus: Music of the Caribbean is bolstered by web resources, including more than sixty detailed listening guides and accompanying playlists, vocabulary lists, and student quizzes. Discussion questions and activities for each chapter are featured in the text.




The Cry of the Senses


Book Description

In The Cry of the Senses, Ren Ellis Neyra examines the imaginative possibility for sound and poetics to foster new modes of sensorial solidarity in the Caribbean Americas. Weaving together the black radical tradition with Caribbean and Latinx performance, cinema, music, and literature, Ellis Neyra highlights the ways Latinx and Caribbean sonic practices challenge antiblack, colonial, post-Enlightenment, and humanist epistemologies. They locate and address the sonic in its myriad manifestations—across genres and forms, in a legal trial, and in the art and writing of Xandra Ibarra, the Fania All-Stars, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Eduardo Corral—while demonstrating how it operates as a raucous form of diasporic dissent and connectivity. Throughout, Ellis Neyra emphasizes Caribbean and Latinx sensorial practices while attuning readers to the many forms of blackness and queerness. Tracking the sonic through their method of multisensorial, poetic listening, Ellis Neyra shows how attending to the senses can inspire alternate, ethical ways of collective listening and being.




Music of Latin America and the Caribbean


Book Description

Music of Latin America and the Caribbean, Second Edition is a comprehensive textbook for undergraduate students, which covers all major facets of Latin American music, finding a balance between important themes and illustrative examples. This book is about enjoying the music itself and provides a lively, challenging discussion complemented by stimulating musical examples couched in an appropriate cultural and historical context—the music is a specific response to the era from which it emerges, evolving from common roots to a wide variety of musical traditions. Music of Latin America and the Caribbean aims to develop an understanding of Latin American civilization and its relation to other cultures. NEW to this edition A new chapter overviewing all seven Central American countries An expansion of the chapter on the English- and French-speaking Caribbean An added chapter on transnational genres An end-of-book glossary featuring bolded terms within the text A companion website with over 50 streamed or linked audio tracks keyed to Listening Examples found in the text, in addition to other student and instructors’ resources Bibliographic suggestions at the end of each chapter, highlighting resources for further reading, listening, and viewing Organized along thematic, historical, and geographical lines, Music of Latin America and the Caribbean implores students to appreciate the unique and varied contributions of other cultures while realizing the ways non-Western cultures have influenced Western musical heritage. With focused discussions on genres and styles, musical instruments, important rituals, and the composers and performers responsible for its evolution, the author employs a broad view of Latin American music: every country in Latin America and the Caribbean shares a common history, and thus, a similar musical tradition.




Listening to Salsa


Book Description

The pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music's implications in larger social terms.




Is Just a Movie


Book Description

In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970's Black Power rebellion, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town's folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love--and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie, is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life. Earl Lovelace's books include While Gods Are Falling, winner of the BP Independence Award; the Caribbean classic The Dragon Can't Dance; and Salt, which won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. For Is Just a Movie, he has won the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe and the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.




Horizon, Sea, Sound


Book Description

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.




The Coming Storm


Book Description

Teenage stowaway Jack Sparrow and his band of hoodlums are on a mission to find the legendary Sword of Cortâes which will grant them unimaginable power, but first they have to survive the power of the sea, vicious pirates, and ancient curses.