Paper short abstract:

Black Atlantic musical expressions and their corresponding performance practices have proliferated on the world stage and have deep continuities with a colonial past. Based on decades of interrogation I make statements on celebratory practices from the slave ship dance to urban ghettoes.

Paper long abstract:

Black expressive arts, specifically Black Atlantic musical expressions and their corresponding performance practices have proliferated on the contemporary world stage and have deep continuities in a colonial past. These continuities are around movement, celebratory patterns, schemes of eradication, and regulatory frameworks that are evident across historical and contemporary entertainment especially created by the working class descendants of enslaved peoples. I use research based on decades of interrogation to make statements on celebratory practices from the middle passage slave ship, or Limbo, the slave ship dance, to urban ghettoes/favelas/townships as in Jamaica’s Dancehall, Brazil’s Passinho and South Africa’s Kwaito. Located at the intersection of cultural history, cultural geography, and cultural studies more broadly, this paper continues exploration of black Atlantic performance geography and history by placing entertainment practice in a wider comparative and analytical field along a historical trajectory where Africa as source takes shape on a world 'stage' of social and political challenges and opportunities, indeed, transgressive sonicities.

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.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Eusebia Cosme's life and career as a reciter of Afro-Antillean style poetry and arts activism in Black feminist performance in New York City.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the sonic life of Eusebia Cosme’s career as a performer being born and raised in Santiago de Cuba and then living in New York City during the 1940s. Cosme’s career reciting Afro Antillean poetry led her to create various multidisciplinary performances that emphasized spirituality and spiritual kinship in African diasporic communities. Thus this proposal grapples with both concepts of diaspora and performance as sonic memory practice by immigrants from the Antilles to Florida and New York City. I will argue that sonic memory is a crucial component to the ways that Black Cubans conceived the mutual aid networks that they built, which actively maintained personal and political connections with various regions of Cuba, Florida and New York City in the early 20th century. Undoubtedly the connection between memory and performance has continuously developed through sonic landscapes that Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Central American immigrants have reconstructed in the South Bronx; these musical and theatrical bodies of work are also predecessors to musical genres such as hip hop and salsa which have become mainstream multi-billion dollar industries today. In her extraordinary stage career, Cosme's affective and professional collaborations with women like the worldwide renown singer Celia Cruz and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, reveal a history of arts activism that has also been understudied in existing historiography. Therefore recognizing Cosme as part of a continuum of Black feminist artists and intellectuals in New York City sheds light on the archival tensions around documenting Black women’s performance work.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation of an annotated playlist of Afro-Cuban rap, reggaeton, and reparto songs explores the relationship between recent urban music and Afro-Cuban socio-political protest in Havana.

Paper long abstract:

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.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares sounded practices in Buenaventura, Colombia at neighborhood gatherings under urban violence (2012), the 2017 general strike, and an assassinated leader’s 2018 funeral, tracing the affective politics of music across the waxing and waning horizons of the political over time.

Paper long abstract:

Life in the Colombian city of Buenaventura is marked by racist exclusion, systemic neglect, and unprosecuted violence, but also by ubiquitous and odds-defying joy, tied to ludic practices using loud sound systems. If politics is unthinkable without a future toward which political action is directed, then the foreclosure of possible futures in Buenaventura exemplifies the end of politics, making of Buenaventura's musical joy simple escapism. Or perhaps it reveals a new politics of the present tense, which relinquishes systemic change for fleeting but joyous solidarity, making it, like Roberto Esposito's notion of the "impolitical," less apolitical than politically agnostic. In Buenaventura, these same "escapist" sounded practices were fundamental to the surprisingly widespread, disciplined, and successful citywide strike of 2017, moving musical joy firmly into the political sphere. Nonetheless, the return of familiar necro-political exclusions, with the 2018 assassinations of grassroots leaders, has again shunted these sounded practices beyond politics, even as their affective ferocity seems to stand in political reserve. This paper compares performative listening practices at three moments in Buenaventura's recent history: neighborhood musical gatherings circa bloody 2012, the use of sound systems in police-occupied neighborhoods and road blockages in the 2017 strike, and the musicalized funeral of assassinated leader Temístocles Machado in February 2018, to compare the political ramifications of sounded practices in Buenaventura at these three moments. In doing so, this paper aims to describe diachronically how the affective politics of music work across the waxing and waning of the horizons of the political.