Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0067
N. D. Jong
General diasporic discourse informs the definition of immigrant minority groups as "residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin--their homelands" (Sheffer 2986, 3). Yet for Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the distinction between the ideas of "host country" and "homeland" becomes hazy at best. Curacao, the largest of the Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands, boasts strong social and political ties with the Netherlands. The Dutch language, for example, is the official language of Curacao, and on the island, the Dutch educational system reigns supreme. Curacaoans hold Dutch passports and are legally Dutch citizens; therefore, there is a tendency to gravitate to the Netherlands, and Curacaoans who do emigrate typically expect their integration into Dutch society to be problem free. The reality, however, is decidedly different. Curacaoans who make the move are likely to find themselves treated as "ethnic migrants" in the Netherlands and considered "foreigners with a Dutch passport" by the general Dutch public (Sharpe 2005, 292). "I always thought of myself as Dutch," said one Curacaoan gentleman in 2009, a man who migrated to Amsterdam nearly twelve years ago. "That is until I came to Holland." His Curacaoan friend, living in the Netherlands for over seven years, said the same year that "growing up on Curacao, you are told you have two homes: here and there. And you believe your destiny is to move to Holland.... It was very traumatic for me when I got here and I discovered [that] none of this was true." (1) For Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the notions of "home" and "homeland" quickly lose their former meaning. Concepts of "self" dissolve into experiences of "otherness" as feelings of belonging are replaced with uneasiness. A simultaneous feeling of disconnect to Curacao inevitably accompanies the Curacaoans trying to make their way in the Netherlands, and they become folded into and hidden within the larger, culturally diverse immigrant society surrounding them, composed of Moroccans, Congolese and Turks, to name a few. As their histories and experiences connect, a "folded diaspora" emerges. Born of disjunction and struggle, the folded diaspora represents a venue for global and local coexistence: a place where a multitudinous terrain of belonging and unbelonging, sameness and difference, converge. For displaced Curacaoans specifically, entrance into the folded diaspora is less the result of their leaving home than it is the result of being cast as a stranger within what had heretofore been considered home territory. And yet the folded diaspora affords Curacaoans a place of perceived safety and strength--an arena in which (borrowing from James Clifford) to construct "alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space [of the Netherlands] in order to live inside, with a differenc
{"title":"Curaçao and the Folding Diaspora: Contesting the Party Tambú in the Netherlands","authors":"N. D. Jong","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0067","url":null,"abstract":"General diasporic discourse informs the definition of immigrant minority groups as \"residing and acting in host countries but maintaining strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin--their homelands\" (Sheffer 2986, 3). Yet for Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the distinction between the ideas of \"host country\" and \"homeland\" becomes hazy at best. Curacao, the largest of the Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands, boasts strong social and political ties with the Netherlands. The Dutch language, for example, is the official language of Curacao, and on the island, the Dutch educational system reigns supreme. Curacaoans hold Dutch passports and are legally Dutch citizens; therefore, there is a tendency to gravitate to the Netherlands, and Curacaoans who do emigrate typically expect their integration into Dutch society to be problem free. The reality, however, is decidedly different. Curacaoans who make the move are likely to find themselves treated as \"ethnic migrants\" in the Netherlands and considered \"foreigners with a Dutch passport\" by the general Dutch public (Sharpe 2005, 292). \"I always thought of myself as Dutch,\" said one Curacaoan gentleman in 2009, a man who migrated to Amsterdam nearly twelve years ago. \"That is until I came to Holland.\" His Curacaoan friend, living in the Netherlands for over seven years, said the same year that \"growing up on Curacao, you are told you have two homes: here and there. And you believe your destiny is to move to Holland.... It was very traumatic for me when I got here and I discovered [that] none of this was true.\" (1) For Curacaoans living in the Netherlands, the notions of \"home\" and \"homeland\" quickly lose their former meaning. Concepts of \"self\" dissolve into experiences of \"otherness\" as feelings of belonging are replaced with uneasiness. A simultaneous feeling of disconnect to Curacao inevitably accompanies the Curacaoans trying to make their way in the Netherlands, and they become folded into and hidden within the larger, culturally diverse immigrant society surrounding them, composed of Moroccans, Congolese and Turks, to name a few. As their histories and experiences connect, a \"folded diaspora\" emerges. Born of disjunction and struggle, the folded diaspora represents a venue for global and local coexistence: a place where a multitudinous terrain of belonging and unbelonging, sameness and difference, converge. For displaced Curacaoans specifically, entrance into the folded diaspora is less the result of their leaving home than it is the result of being cast as a stranger within what had heretofore been considered home territory. And yet the folded diaspora affords Curacaoans a place of perceived safety and strength--an arena in which (borrowing from James Clifford) to construct \"alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space [of the Netherlands] in order to live inside, with a differenc","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122515455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0083
R. Abrahams
Fifty-some years ago, the foundational work Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives was edited by Norman Whitten and John Szwed, in the lee of a controversial symposium held in several sessions at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1967. The book included contributions from nonparticipants who had entered into the lively discussion, including a masterful overview of the papers by Sidney Mintz. As the editors indicated in their preface, they sought papers that would judge the impact of Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) on subsequent scholarship. Herskovits was portrayed as a troublemaker who carried an assimilationist point of view into his fieldwork in many African and Afro-American communities. His insistence on not neglecting African cultural patterns in studies of black communities in the New World fostered a general feeling among those on the soft Left that honor should be paid, as often as possible, to the African ancestry of any New World practice that showed signs of some sort of cultural continuity. He sent a call out to the social sciences in general, and especially to those engaged in ethnographic fieldwork of some sort, working and living in Afro-American communities. He was a faithful student of Franz Boas, who had advocated fine-grained reporting of the lifeways of non-Europeans. Herskovits was also politically committed to encourage the secular cosmopolitan ideas that had been inherited from the Enlightenment, but he did not fall into the trap of the social Darwinists, who insisted on studying a version of the civilizing process that derogated anyone without good table manners and the ability to schmooze effectively. He did not respond with enthusiasm to anthropological approaches that privileged structure and systematic practices--especially kinship systems and other forms of organized power. As a musician he both heard and felt the power of performances of drumming, dancing, and storytelling. And, like Boas, he pursued the study of language and culture in diffusion. Implicitly, he furthered the philological and morphological manner of studying cultures not only in stabilized and bounded communities, but in comparison with contiguous studies. His political position, once its implications could be understood, stressed a pluralist and assimilatonist agenda. Groups should be, to use Greg Dening's wonderful term, ethnogged--that is, studied at ground level in terms of the systematic behaviors which could be observed in daily life (Dening 2004). Under such a regime, the systematics of a culture would emerge from the ways in which power and responsibility were put into practice. Herskovits, like Boas, wanted students with open minds who would accord sympathy, even dignity, to whatever peoples each ethnographer chose to study--with the supposition that all humans lived in groups with shared values and practices. Again, like Boas, he wanted something like social and politic
{"title":"Questions of Competency and Performance in the Black Musical Diaspora: Toward a Stylistic Analysis of the Idea of a Black Atlantic","authors":"R. Abrahams","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0083","url":null,"abstract":"Fifty-some years ago, the foundational work Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives was edited by Norman Whitten and John Szwed, in the lee of a controversial symposium held in several sessions at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1967. The book included contributions from nonparticipants who had entered into the lively discussion, including a masterful overview of the papers by Sidney Mintz. As the editors indicated in their preface, they sought papers that would judge the impact of Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) on subsequent scholarship. Herskovits was portrayed as a troublemaker who carried an assimilationist point of view into his fieldwork in many African and Afro-American communities. His insistence on not neglecting African cultural patterns in studies of black communities in the New World fostered a general feeling among those on the soft Left that honor should be paid, as often as possible, to the African ancestry of any New World practice that showed signs of some sort of cultural continuity. He sent a call out to the social sciences in general, and especially to those engaged in ethnographic fieldwork of some sort, working and living in Afro-American communities. He was a faithful student of Franz Boas, who had advocated fine-grained reporting of the lifeways of non-Europeans. Herskovits was also politically committed to encourage the secular cosmopolitan ideas that had been inherited from the Enlightenment, but he did not fall into the trap of the social Darwinists, who insisted on studying a version of the civilizing process that derogated anyone without good table manners and the ability to schmooze effectively. He did not respond with enthusiasm to anthropological approaches that privileged structure and systematic practices--especially kinship systems and other forms of organized power. As a musician he both heard and felt the power of performances of drumming, dancing, and storytelling. And, like Boas, he pursued the study of language and culture in diffusion. Implicitly, he furthered the philological and morphological manner of studying cultures not only in stabilized and bounded communities, but in comparison with contiguous studies. His political position, once its implications could be understood, stressed a pluralist and assimilatonist agenda. Groups should be, to use Greg Dening's wonderful term, ethnogged--that is, studied at ground level in terms of the systematic behaviors which could be observed in daily life (Dening 2004). Under such a regime, the systematics of a culture would emerge from the ways in which power and responsibility were put into practice. Herskovits, like Boas, wanted students with open minds who would accord sympathy, even dignity, to whatever peoples each ethnographer chose to study--with the supposition that all humans lived in groups with shared values and practices. Again, like Boas, he wanted something like social and politic","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133048039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0051
R. Allen
Curacao, one of the Dutch islands in the Caribbean, could be said to be caught between and betwixt different identities: being Curacaoan, Antillean, Caribbean, Latin American, and Dutch. In everyday life, people seem to switch between these sometimes conflicting identities in their expression of culture. Curacao as Part of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora The question of what it means for a Curacaoan to be part of the Caribbean has not received much scholarly attention. The Netherlands remains, unwittingly, the principal reference point for most people of the island. Also, Curacaoans have traditionally been raised and educated to feel superior to the rest of the Caribbean (Allen 2003, 78). This phenomenon is found in other parts of the Caribbean, too. Caribbean people still look toward their respective metropoles in Europe or North America for all kinds of matters (Kuss 2004, 110). During Carifesta X, celebrated in Guyana in 2008, Rex Nettleford protested against this aspect of the Caribbean way of life, stating instead that Caribbean life and culture are more than what "the binary syndrome of Europe suggests. It is also a matter of the mind, which cultivates the spaces that remain invalid, that is beyond the reach of oppression and oppressor. That very mind also constructs for the intellect and the imagination, a bastion of discreet identities as well as quarries of very invaluable raw material that can be used to build the bridges across cultural boundaries" (2007). (1) According to Franklin Knight, the focus on the metropole has led to a "fragmented nationalism" in the region, which is divided between Francophone, Hispanic, Anglophone, and Dutch-speaking subregions (2005; Knight in Barros de Juanita and Trotman 2005). One would expect a debunking of the cultural boundaries erected by colonialism, given the fact that a great many countries in the Caribbean are independent states; however, the opposite holds true. In this essay I propose that the concept of "diaspora" could help in transcending these cultural boundaries. The term diaspora has evolved over time. Originally, it referred to overseas minority communities residing in host countries that maintain "strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin--their homelands" (Sheffer 1986, 3). Up to the 1960s the term was used primarily for the Jewish, Chinese, and Indian communities dispersed around the world. Later the concept of the African Diaspora was introduced. Joseph Harris defined the African Diaspora as encompassing the global voluntary and involuntary dispersion of Africans throughout history, the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition, and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa (1993). In a more recent definition by Michael A. Gomez, the African Diaspora is described as the "movements and extensive relocations of persons of African descent, over long periods of time, resulting in the dispersal of Afr
库拉索岛是位于加勒比海的荷属岛屿之一，可以说是夹在不同身份之间:库拉索岛、安的列斯岛、加勒比海、拉丁美洲和荷兰。在日常生活中，人们似乎在表达文化时在这些有时相互冲突的身份之间切换。库拉索岛作为加勒比地区的一部分和非洲侨民库拉索岛作为加勒比地区的一部分意味着什么，这个问题并没有得到太多的学术关注。在不知不觉中，荷兰仍然是该岛大多数人的主要参照点。此外，库拉索岛人在传统上被培养和教育为比加勒比海其他地区的人优越(Allen 2003,78)。这种现象在加勒比海的其他地区也有发现。加勒比海地区的人们在各种各样的事情上仍然期待着他们各自在欧洲或北美的大都市(Kuss 2004,110)。在2008年圭亚那举办的Carifesta X期间，Rex Nettleford抗议加勒比海生活方式的这一方面，他说加勒比海的生活和文化并不像“欧洲的二元综合症”那样。这也是一个心灵的问题，它培育了那些仍然无效的空间，那些超出了压迫和压迫者的范围。这种思想也为智力和想象力构建了一个谨慎的身份堡垒，以及非常宝贵的原材料的采石场，这些原材料可以用来建立跨越文化边界的桥梁。”(1)根据富兰克林·奈特(Franklin Knight)的说法，对大都市的关注导致了该地区“支离破碎的民族主义”，该地区分为法语区、西班牙语区、英语区和荷兰语区(2005;骑士Barros de Juanita and Trotman 2005)。鉴于加勒比地区许多国家都是独立国家这一事实，人们会期望它揭穿殖民主义所建立的文化界限;然而，事实恰恰相反。在本文中，我提出“散居”的概念可以帮助超越这些文化界限。随着时间的推移，“散居”一词也在不断演变。最初，它指的是居住在东道国的海外少数民族社区，这些社区“与他们的原籍国——他们的家园保持着强烈的情感和物质联系”(Sheffer 1986, 3)。直到20世纪60年代，这个词主要用于分散在世界各地的犹太人、中国人和印度人社区。后来又引入了非洲侨民的概念。约瑟夫·哈里斯(Joseph Harris)将非洲侨民定义为包括非洲人在历史上自愿和非自愿的全球分散，基于起源和社会条件的海外文化身份的出现，以及心理或身体上返回祖国非洲(1993)。在Michael a . Gomez最近的定义中，非洲侨民被描述为“非洲人后裔的运动和广泛的重新安置，在很长一段时间内，导致非洲人及其后代分散到世界大部分地区”(2005,1)。Gomez的定义只涉及分散;国土定位和边界维持的标准被淡化(Brubaker 2005,5 -6)。Brubaker(2005)和Cohen(2008)认为，“散居”一词近年来在大众和学术话语中广为流传，因此似乎正在慢慢失去其意义。罗杰斯·布鲁贝克(Rogers Brubaker)在一篇题为“散居”的文章中谈到了“散居”，并确定该术语本身已经在语义、概念和学科空间中变得分散，并已被用于各种知识、文化和政治议程(2005,1)。从分析上讲，“散居”的概念与移民、民族和种族有着密切的联系。散居通常被认为是由单一起源点的单向向外扩散构成的(Gomez 2005,8)。Peter Wade认为，无论起源点是地理的、文化的还是种族的，散居的这种概念都是有问题的(2008,2). ...
{"title":"Music in Diasporic Context: The Case of Curaçao and Intra-Caribbean Migration","authors":"R. Allen","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0051","url":null,"abstract":"Curacao, one of the Dutch islands in the Caribbean, could be said to be caught between and betwixt different identities: being Curacaoan, Antillean, Caribbean, Latin American, and Dutch. In everyday life, people seem to switch between these sometimes conflicting identities in their expression of culture. Curacao as Part of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora The question of what it means for a Curacaoan to be part of the Caribbean has not received much scholarly attention. The Netherlands remains, unwittingly, the principal reference point for most people of the island. Also, Curacaoans have traditionally been raised and educated to feel superior to the rest of the Caribbean (Allen 2003, 78). This phenomenon is found in other parts of the Caribbean, too. Caribbean people still look toward their respective metropoles in Europe or North America for all kinds of matters (Kuss 2004, 110). During Carifesta X, celebrated in Guyana in 2008, Rex Nettleford protested against this aspect of the Caribbean way of life, stating instead that Caribbean life and culture are more than what \"the binary syndrome of Europe suggests. It is also a matter of the mind, which cultivates the spaces that remain invalid, that is beyond the reach of oppression and oppressor. That very mind also constructs for the intellect and the imagination, a bastion of discreet identities as well as quarries of very invaluable raw material that can be used to build the bridges across cultural boundaries\" (2007). (1) According to Franklin Knight, the focus on the metropole has led to a \"fragmented nationalism\" in the region, which is divided between Francophone, Hispanic, Anglophone, and Dutch-speaking subregions (2005; Knight in Barros de Juanita and Trotman 2005). One would expect a debunking of the cultural boundaries erected by colonialism, given the fact that a great many countries in the Caribbean are independent states; however, the opposite holds true. In this essay I propose that the concept of \"diaspora\" could help in transcending these cultural boundaries. The term diaspora has evolved over time. Originally, it referred to overseas minority communities residing in host countries that maintain \"strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin--their homelands\" (Sheffer 1986, 3). Up to the 1960s the term was used primarily for the Jewish, Chinese, and Indian communities dispersed around the world. Later the concept of the African Diaspora was introduced. Joseph Harris defined the African Diaspora as encompassing the global voluntary and involuntary dispersion of Africans throughout history, the emergence of a cultural identity abroad based on origin and social condition, and the psychological or physical return to the homeland, Africa (1993). In a more recent definition by Michael A. Gomez, the African Diaspora is described as the \"movements and extensive relocations of persons of African descent, over long periods of time, resulting in the dispersal of Afr","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115540049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0003
Raquel Z. Rivera
I made up the story on the spot for my first-graders who I had been teaching bomba music through the rhythm called sica. I told them: Let's pretend there was a woman called Mama Africa who was a very good mother who had many kids. She had a big treasure that she wanted to pass on to her children. But there was a very bad man by the name of Mister E. who found out about the treasure and wanted to steal it. So Mama Africa hid the treasure so well that Mister E. wasn't able to find it. In the end, her kids were able to get her treasure. And she saved some of her treasure for all of us too. Then I asked my students: "Do you know what the treasure is? It starts with an 's.' "Candy!" was the first thing one of them said. "It starts with 'sssssss,'" I reminded them. "Toys!" another said. Finally, one of them remembered the rhythm that we had been learning in class: "Sica!" I have paraphrased above a story Manuela Arciniegas told me that filled my heart to the brim with tenderness and awe at her ingenious storytelling skills as well as her students' hilarious reactions. It is a story that poignantly introduces the two guiding concepts of this article: "liberation mythologies" and "diaspora." Aside from being a great story weaver and educator, Arciniegas is the New York-raised daughter of Dominican parents as well as a drummer, songwriter, singer, and cultural activist focused primarily on Afro-Puerto Rican roots musical traditions such as bomba and plena and Afro-Dominican roots genres such as palos, salves, congos and gaga. (1) She has also been my artistic collaborator and good friend for close to a decade since she came back to New York City with a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. We met as fellow members in the Afro-Dominican music group Pa'lo Monte. A few years later we were both founding members of the Afro-Puerto Rican ensemble Alma Moyo and co-founders of the all-women Afro-Dominican/Puerto Rican music collective Yaya. She went on to found the cultural arts and social justice organization, The Legacy Circle. (2) Currently a doctoral student as well as mother of three, Arciniegas is a powerhouse example of the beauty and commitment of the New York roots musical community that is at the heart of this article. Diaspora and Its Discontents Rogers Brubaker (2005) has criticized proponents of "diaspora" for misleadingly posing the concept as one involving discrete entities, bounded groups, and ethnodemographic facts. Thus, he argues, advocates of "diaspora" have fallen into the same essentializing pitfalls that they have criticized in the case of nationalisms and nationalists, with the great difference that instead of subscribing to territorial- and nation-bound notions of identity, advocates of diaspora have relied on a "non-territorial form of essentialized belonging": "Diaspora is often seen as destiny--a destiny to which previously dormant members (or previously dormant diasporas in their entirety) are now 'awakening.' ... Embedded in the
{"title":"New York Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Dominican Roots Music: Liberation Mythologies and Overlapping Diasporas","authors":"Raquel Z. Rivera","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.2.0003","url":null,"abstract":"I made up the story on the spot for my first-graders who I had been teaching bomba music through the rhythm called sica. I told them: Let's pretend there was a woman called Mama Africa who was a very good mother who had many kids. She had a big treasure that she wanted to pass on to her children. But there was a very bad man by the name of Mister E. who found out about the treasure and wanted to steal it. So Mama Africa hid the treasure so well that Mister E. wasn't able to find it. In the end, her kids were able to get her treasure. And she saved some of her treasure for all of us too. Then I asked my students: \"Do you know what the treasure is? It starts with an 's.' \"Candy!\" was the first thing one of them said. \"It starts with 'sssssss,'\" I reminded them. \"Toys!\" another said. Finally, one of them remembered the rhythm that we had been learning in class: \"Sica!\" I have paraphrased above a story Manuela Arciniegas told me that filled my heart to the brim with tenderness and awe at her ingenious storytelling skills as well as her students' hilarious reactions. It is a story that poignantly introduces the two guiding concepts of this article: \"liberation mythologies\" and \"diaspora.\" Aside from being a great story weaver and educator, Arciniegas is the New York-raised daughter of Dominican parents as well as a drummer, songwriter, singer, and cultural activist focused primarily on Afro-Puerto Rican roots musical traditions such as bomba and plena and Afro-Dominican roots genres such as palos, salves, congos and gaga. (1) She has also been my artistic collaborator and good friend for close to a decade since she came back to New York City with a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. We met as fellow members in the Afro-Dominican music group Pa'lo Monte. A few years later we were both founding members of the Afro-Puerto Rican ensemble Alma Moyo and co-founders of the all-women Afro-Dominican/Puerto Rican music collective Yaya. She went on to found the cultural arts and social justice organization, The Legacy Circle. (2) Currently a doctoral student as well as mother of three, Arciniegas is a powerhouse example of the beauty and commitment of the New York roots musical community that is at the heart of this article. Diaspora and Its Discontents Rogers Brubaker (2005) has criticized proponents of \"diaspora\" for misleadingly posing the concept as one involving discrete entities, bounded groups, and ethnodemographic facts. Thus, he argues, advocates of \"diaspora\" have fallen into the same essentializing pitfalls that they have criticized in the case of nationalisms and nationalists, with the great difference that instead of subscribing to territorial- and nation-bound notions of identity, advocates of diaspora have relied on a \"non-territorial form of essentialized belonging\": \"Diaspora is often seen as destiny--a destiny to which previously dormant members (or previously dormant diasporas in their entirety) are now 'awakening.' ... Embedded in the","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117346848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0005
Teresa L. Reed
She was left undisturbed, allowed to continue her solitary dance to music that had long since ceased. As she danced, the evening worship service progressed in the usual manner--a few more testimonies, the offertory, the beginning of the sermon. Soon after the start of the sermon, her dance subsided, and the ladies in white went to her side to fan her, wipe the sweat from her brow, and escort her back to real time. "The Lord is doing a work in her," the preacher observed in a momentary digression from his sermon. The congregation responded with "amens" and other devotional affirmations, grateful for this evidence of the Lord's work, and unbothered by its spontaneous interpolation into the normal unfolding of things. This scene was one of many similar phenomena that I witnessed at Open Door Church of God in Christ in Gary, Indiana, the black Pentecostal church of my childhood from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. There were many labels for this particular brand of the Lord's work. The solitary dancer might be described as "getting the Holy Ghost," "doing the holy dance," "shouting," "being filled," "catching the Spirit," "being purged," or simply as someone "getting a blessing." Whatever the descriptor, the phenomenon was familiar to all members of this religious culture. And it was understood that music-not just any music, but certain music--could facilitate such manifestations. While "getting the Holy Ghost" and "catching the Spirit," the parishioners at my urban, black-American church had no awareness of the many parallels between our Spirit-driven modes of worship and those common to our Afro-Caribbean counterparts. We were completely unaware, for example, that members of Trinidadian Spiritual Baptist communities, Haitian Heavenly Army churches, and Jamaican Revival Zionist groups entertained and embraced religious phenomena very similar to ours, and that they, like us, used terms like "catching power" or "catching the spirit" or "being filled" in reference to Holy Spirit manifestation. We were even less aware of the threads that connected both black-American and Afro-Caribbean religious expressions to their West African origins. And although the term "spirit possession" was nowhere in the parlance of my particular church, it aptly describes the divine encounters both in our congregation and in the religious contexts of African diasporal groups around the world. Spirit possession is a phenomenon common to nearly all African societies, one that underscores the boundless interchange between the physical and the unseen in African consciousness. Some writers, such as Kenneth Anthony Lum, distinguish between spirit possession and spirit manifestation. While I use the term spirit possession primarily in reference to the phenomenon wherein an individual worshipper's consciousness, emotional state, and physical gestures are entirely subjugated to divine presence, I may use this term somewhat interchangeably with spirit manifestation. Spirit posses
没有人打扰她，让她继续随着早已停止的音乐独自跳舞。她一边跳舞，晚上的礼拜仪式像往常一样进行着——又做了几次见证，献上祭品，开始布道。布道开始后不久，她的舞蹈就平静下来了，穿白衣的女士们走到她身边给她扇风，擦去她额头上的汗水，护送她回到现实生活中。“上帝正在她身上作工，”牧师在布道中突然离题说。会众以“阿门”和其他虔诚的肯定回应，感谢上帝的工作的证据，并没有被它自发地插入正常展开的事情所困扰。这一幕是我在印第安纳州加里市的上帝敞开的门教会(Open Door Church of God in Christ)看到的许多类似现象之一。从20世纪60年代末到80年代初，我一直在这个黑人五旬节派教会度过童年。主的工作有许多特殊的标签。孤独的舞者可能被描述为“得到圣灵”，“做神圣的舞蹈”，“大喊大叫”，“被充满”，“抓住圣灵”，“被净化”，或者只是某人“得到祝福”。无论如何描述，这种现象对这种宗教文化的所有成员来说都是熟悉的。人们认为音乐——不是任何音乐，而是某些音乐——可以促进这种表现。当“得到圣灵”和“抓住圣灵”的时候，我所在的城市黑人教堂的教友们并没有意识到我们的圣灵驱动的崇拜模式和我们的加勒比黑人同行的共同模式之间有许多相似之处。例如，我们完全没有意识到，特立尼达精神浸信会社区、海地天军教会和牙买加犹太复国主义复兴组织的成员，都喜欢和接受与我们非常相似的宗教现象，他们和我们一样，使用“捕捉力量”或“捕捉精神”或“被充满”等术语来指代圣灵的显现。我们甚至没有意识到将美国黑人和加勒比非洲人的宗教表达与他们的西非起源联系起来的线索。尽管在我所在的教会里，“灵魂附身”这个词无处可寻，但它恰当地描述了我们的会众和世界各地非洲散居群体的宗教背景下的神性相遇。灵魂附身是几乎所有非洲社会普遍存在的现象，它强调了非洲人意识中物质和无形之间的无限交流。一些作家，如林肯尼斯·安东尼，区分了精神占有和精神表现。虽然我使用“精神占有”这个词主要是指一个崇拜者的意识、情感状态和身体姿势完全屈从于神的存在的现象，但我可能会把这个词与“精神显现”交替使用。当通过包括仪式化的击鼓、舞蹈和吟诵在内的崇拜行为，神圣的代理人暂时地、戏剧性地居住在奉献者的身体里时，精神占有就发生了。这种神圣的化身带来了一种超越的状态，在此期间，崇拜者充当了神的存在的表现的管道。塞缪尔·弗洛伊德(Samuel Floyd, 1995)在关于非洲无处不在的灵魂附身的文章中写道:“仪式附身是由有节奏的刺激(击鼓和诵经)、精力充沛和集中的舞蹈以及控制情绪和精神集中带来的。”然而，他认为，“整个仪式体验”，包括“舞蹈，音乐，服装，有时讲故事”，使占有有效。弗洛伊德进一步指出，虽然致幻剂有时有助于促进占有，但“这些神圣、幸福和改变的状态”是“主要由鼓点带来的”(20-21)。在我的美国黑人、五旬节派的成长过程中，灵魂占有的地位与整个非洲的宗教文化一样重要。．．．
{"title":"Shared Possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and Sacred Music","authors":"Teresa L. Reed","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0005","url":null,"abstract":"She was left undisturbed, allowed to continue her solitary dance to music that had long since ceased. As she danced, the evening worship service progressed in the usual manner--a few more testimonies, the offertory, the beginning of the sermon. Soon after the start of the sermon, her dance subsided, and the ladies in white went to her side to fan her, wipe the sweat from her brow, and escort her back to real time. \"The Lord is doing a work in her,\" the preacher observed in a momentary digression from his sermon. The congregation responded with \"amens\" and other devotional affirmations, grateful for this evidence of the Lord's work, and unbothered by its spontaneous interpolation into the normal unfolding of things. This scene was one of many similar phenomena that I witnessed at Open Door Church of God in Christ in Gary, Indiana, the black Pentecostal church of my childhood from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. There were many labels for this particular brand of the Lord's work. The solitary dancer might be described as \"getting the Holy Ghost,\" \"doing the holy dance,\" \"shouting,\" \"being filled,\" \"catching the Spirit,\" \"being purged,\" or simply as someone \"getting a blessing.\" Whatever the descriptor, the phenomenon was familiar to all members of this religious culture. And it was understood that music-not just any music, but certain music--could facilitate such manifestations. While \"getting the Holy Ghost\" and \"catching the Spirit,\" the parishioners at my urban, black-American church had no awareness of the many parallels between our Spirit-driven modes of worship and those common to our Afro-Caribbean counterparts. We were completely unaware, for example, that members of Trinidadian Spiritual Baptist communities, Haitian Heavenly Army churches, and Jamaican Revival Zionist groups entertained and embraced religious phenomena very similar to ours, and that they, like us, used terms like \"catching power\" or \"catching the spirit\" or \"being filled\" in reference to Holy Spirit manifestation. We were even less aware of the threads that connected both black-American and Afro-Caribbean religious expressions to their West African origins. And although the term \"spirit possession\" was nowhere in the parlance of my particular church, it aptly describes the divine encounters both in our congregation and in the religious contexts of African diasporal groups around the world. Spirit possession is a phenomenon common to nearly all African societies, one that underscores the boundless interchange between the physical and the unseen in African consciousness. Some writers, such as Kenneth Anthony Lum, distinguish between spirit possession and spirit manifestation. While I use the term spirit possession primarily in reference to the phenomenon wherein an individual worshipper's consciousness, emotional state, and physical gestures are entirely subjugated to divine presence, I may use this term somewhat interchangeably with spirit manifestation. Spirit posses","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115744197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0027
R. Sager
This essay concerns how transcendence through aesthetic experience might serve as a common theme for organizing knowledge about expressive behaviors in the African diaspora. By transcendence, I mean a change in a person's physiological or psychological state that engenders an awareness or sensation of going beyond one's usual experience of time, place, or being. In 2002, Gerard Behague discussed the problems and potential solutions of conceptualizing a "unified African diaspora" that includes both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the Americas. On the one hand, he concluded that "one should recognize that there can hardly be such a thing as a unified African diaspora throughout the Western Hemisphere for the simple fact that the ethnohistorical experiences of the Afro-American communities of the hemisphere differed widely" (9). But, as a student of Professor Behague's since 1991, I have observed that although he was relentlessly critical of all received wisdom, he always offered a constructive way through the rubble of shattered orthodoxy. With regard to the African diaspora, then, Behague proposed a way forward by urging scholars to focus their empiric, ethnographic investigations upon the processes of music making and its meanings as a way of illuminating the relevant similarities and differences between diasporic traditions (9). I take Behague's general proposition as my own starting point for this essay. To his priorities of researching processes and meanings, I also add my own predominant concern with investigating values--aesthetic, religious, or moral. In the following pages, I will explain my own attempt at a holistic view of musical meaning and the role of music in engendering transcendent experience, and the vital and ubiquitous role of transcendence in human life and society. I question here whether the lens through which we view the meanings of music (among other modes of human communication) affects our ability to discover common values and processes underlying different African diasporic cultural traditions. And if so, then perhaps a different focus might help us discover which common values unite even the most antagonistic religious systems within the diaspora, such as what I witnessed between Haitian Vodou practitioners and Haitian Protestants in the Northern Department of Haiti, or between the theologically divergent worship traditions of Haitian Vodou singing and black gospel singing in Austin, Texas. My hope is to better explain similarities and differences between African diaspora cultures with divergent ethnohistories, as well as to better account for fluid membership exchanges between apparently antagonistic cultural domains within a population, such as between Vodou and Protestantism in Haiti, or between even blues, soul, or hip hop and gospel in the United States. My question is whether or not conceptualizing a continuum of human expression as ranging between the predominant (but never mutually exclusive) functions
{"title":"Transcendence through Aesthetic Experience: Divining a Common Wellspring under Conflicting Caribbean and African American Religious Value Systems","authors":"R. Sager","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0027","url":null,"abstract":"This essay concerns how transcendence through aesthetic experience might serve as a common theme for organizing knowledge about expressive behaviors in the African diaspora. By transcendence, I mean a change in a person's physiological or psychological state that engenders an awareness or sensation of going beyond one's usual experience of time, place, or being. In 2002, Gerard Behague discussed the problems and potential solutions of conceptualizing a \"unified African diaspora\" that includes both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the Americas. On the one hand, he concluded that \"one should recognize that there can hardly be such a thing as a unified African diaspora throughout the Western Hemisphere for the simple fact that the ethnohistorical experiences of the Afro-American communities of the hemisphere differed widely\" (9). But, as a student of Professor Behague's since 1991, I have observed that although he was relentlessly critical of all received wisdom, he always offered a constructive way through the rubble of shattered orthodoxy. With regard to the African diaspora, then, Behague proposed a way forward by urging scholars to focus their empiric, ethnographic investigations upon the processes of music making and its meanings as a way of illuminating the relevant similarities and differences between diasporic traditions (9). I take Behague's general proposition as my own starting point for this essay. To his priorities of researching processes and meanings, I also add my own predominant concern with investigating values--aesthetic, religious, or moral. In the following pages, I will explain my own attempt at a holistic view of musical meaning and the role of music in engendering transcendent experience, and the vital and ubiquitous role of transcendence in human life and society. I question here whether the lens through which we view the meanings of music (among other modes of human communication) affects our ability to discover common values and processes underlying different African diasporic cultural traditions. And if so, then perhaps a different focus might help us discover which common values unite even the most antagonistic religious systems within the diaspora, such as what I witnessed between Haitian Vodou practitioners and Haitian Protestants in the Northern Department of Haiti, or between the theologically divergent worship traditions of Haitian Vodou singing and black gospel singing in Austin, Texas. My hope is to better explain similarities and differences between African diaspora cultures with divergent ethnohistories, as well as to better account for fluid membership exchanges between apparently antagonistic cultural domains within a population, such as between Vodou and Protestantism in Haiti, or between even blues, soul, or hip hop and gospel in the United States. My question is whether or not conceptualizing a continuum of human expression as ranging between the predominant (but never mutually exclusive) functions ","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132643079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0137
Loren Y. Kajikawa
The execution of Call-Response tropes opens the symbolic field, where reside the long-standing, sublimated conflicts, taboos, and myths of personal and group emotional experience and our relationships to them. --Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music Voodoo is an ancient African tradition. We use "voodoo" in the drums or whatever, the cadences and call-out to our ancestors and that in itself will invoke spirits. And music has the power to do that, to evoke emotions, evoke spirit. --D'Angelo, Jet Magazine This current volume of Black Music Research Journal posits that, despite the great diversity of New World African cultures, examining their religious and musical practices can reveal noteworthy similarities. The trope of Call-Response, outlined in Samuel Floyd Jr.'s landmark The Power of Black Music (1995), provides an important hermeneutic for uncovering such connections. As a metaphor for the expressive economy of musical practices, ideas, and experiences across the Diaspora, Call-Response tropes focus our attention on the perseverance of African cultural memory within the United States and Caribbean (95-97). This essay examines the mobilization of African cultural memory in the work of neo-soul musician Michael "D'Angelo" Archer. Voodoo (2000), the much anticipated follow-up to D'Angelo's 2995 debut album Brown Sugar, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and went on to win the 2001 Grammy Award for Best RB Farley 2000). Because of his upbringing, D'Angelo stresses a responsibility toward the "power of music," specifically "the drums," and notes how when used properly as in "voodoo" they can "evoke spirit. …
{"title":"D’Angelo’s Voodoo Technology: African Cultural Memory and the Ritual of Popular Music Consumption","authors":"Loren Y. Kajikawa","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0137","url":null,"abstract":"The execution of Call-Response tropes opens the symbolic field, where reside the long-standing, sublimated conflicts, taboos, and myths of personal and group emotional experience and our relationships to them. --Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music Voodoo is an ancient African tradition. We use \"voodoo\" in the drums or whatever, the cadences and call-out to our ancestors and that in itself will invoke spirits. And music has the power to do that, to evoke emotions, evoke spirit. --D'Angelo, Jet Magazine This current volume of Black Music Research Journal posits that, despite the great diversity of New World African cultures, examining their religious and musical practices can reveal noteworthy similarities. The trope of Call-Response, outlined in Samuel Floyd Jr.'s landmark The Power of Black Music (1995), provides an important hermeneutic for uncovering such connections. As a metaphor for the expressive economy of musical practices, ideas, and experiences across the Diaspora, Call-Response tropes focus our attention on the perseverance of African cultural memory within the United States and Caribbean (95-97). This essay examines the mobilization of African cultural memory in the work of neo-soul musician Michael \"D'Angelo\" Archer. Voodoo (2000), the much anticipated follow-up to D'Angelo's 2995 debut album Brown Sugar, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and went on to win the 2001 Grammy Award for Best RB Farley 2000). Because of his upbringing, D'Angelo stresses a responsibility toward the \"power of music,\" specifically \"the drums,\" and notes how when used properly as in \"voodoo\" they can \"evoke spirit. …","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122436312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0095
David W. Stowe
The 1973 release of The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) announced a new era in the transatlantic flow of African music of the Americas. The Jamaican film quickly became a campus cult classic, bringing its heady mix of reggae music, ganja, and gunslinging urban rudeboy style to an enthusiastic youth audience in North America and Europe. The film's soundtrack, featuring songs by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Desmond Dekker, became a phenomenon in its own right, helping pave the way for the global success of Bob Marley. For many outside Jamaica, it was an enticing introduction to reggae music. In addition to launching the international career of the film's star, Jimmy Cliff, the soundtrack was a boon to a Jamaican group called the Melodians. Heard twice in the film, their song "Rivers of Babylon" reworked Psalm 137 over a jaunty bass line. With its message of defiance amid social dislocation, the song offers a subtle commentary on an important relationship early in the film: the conflict between Ivan, a young man recently arrived in Kingston "from country" and the autocratic Christian preacher for whom Ivan briefly works and aggressively challenges before beginning his short career as a songwriter and ganja trader. No song text has exerted a more sustained pull on the political imagination of Americans than Psalm 137. Contained in the Hebrew Bible, the psalm figured in the worship of the English Puritans who settled New England. It appeared in the first English-language book published in North America. Almost a century and a half later, it served as the basis for a patriotic song of national independence by early America's first significant composer, William Billings. The psalm was the centerpiece of Frederick Douglass's great abolitionist oration, "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July." More than a century later, it reappeared in a completely new musical guise, the protoreggae version first recorded in 1969 by the Melodians. Since then, Psalm 137 has been covered numerous times by groups representing a variety of musical styles: gospel, disco, country rock, alternative, hip hop. Why such longevity? Like many stories and passages from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 137 is highly adaptable, open to a variety of interpretations. Its central question--How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?--has been central to the peopling of the Americas. The psalm deals with cultural dispossession and exile, pervasive experiences for large numbers of people over the course of American history. It offers a memorable image of uprooted people languishing beside a river, called to make music but unsure how to proceed. Its Babylon can stand for any oppressive power or force of injustice, whether political, cultural, or spiritual. While these meanings were resonant for early Anglo-Americans, who often perceived themselves as a persecuted people for religious or political reasons, Psalm 137's more recent history positions it in antiracist and anticol
1973年发行的《更难来了》(The Harder They Come)导演。佩里·亨泽尔(Perry Henzell)宣布了美洲非洲音乐跨大西洋流动的新时代。这部牙买加电影迅速成为校园崇拜的经典，将雷鬼音乐、大麻和城市粗鲁男孩风格的令人兴奋的混合带给了北美和欧洲热情的青年观众。这部电影的原声音乐由Toots and The maytal、Jimmy Cliff和Desmond Dekker演唱，它本身就成为了一种现象，为Bob Marley的全球成功铺平了道路。对于牙买加以外的许多人来说，这是雷鬼音乐的一次诱人的介绍。除了让电影明星吉米·克利夫(Jimmy Cliff)走上国际舞台之外，这部电影的原声也给牙买加乐队Melodians带来了福音。他们的歌曲《巴比伦河》(Rivers of Babylon)在电影中出现了两次，在欢快的低音线上翻唱了《诗篇》第137篇。这首歌传达了在社会混乱中反抗的信息，对影片开头的一段重要关系进行了微妙的评论:伊万是一个刚刚“从乡下”来到金斯敦的年轻人，他与专制的基督教传教士之间的冲突。伊万短暂地为后者工作，并积极地向后者挑战，后来他开始了短暂的歌曲创作和大麻贸易生涯。没有哪首歌曲能像《诗篇》137篇那样，对美国人的政治想象产生如此持久的吸引力。这首诗篇收录在希伯来圣经中，是在新英格兰定居的英国清教徒崇拜的诗歌。它出现在北美出版的第一本英语书中。大约一个半世纪后，这首歌成为早期美国第一位重要作曲家威廉·比林斯一首国家独立爱国歌曲的基础。这首诗篇是弗雷德里克·道格拉斯(Frederick Douglass)伟大的废奴演说的核心内容，“7月4日对奴隶来说意味着什么”。一个多世纪后，它以一种全新的音乐形式重新出现，这是由Melodians于1969年首次录制的原始雷鬼版本。从那时起，诗篇137被代表各种音乐风格的团体多次翻唱:福音、迪斯科、乡村摇滚、另类音乐、嘻哈。为什么如此长寿?就像希伯来圣经中的许多故事和段落一样，诗篇137篇具有很强的适应性，可以有各种各样的解释。它的中心问题是——我们如何在一个陌生的地方唱上帝的歌?——一直是美洲人定居的中心。这首诗篇讲述了文化上的剥夺和流放，这是美国历史上许多人普遍经历的事情。它提供了一个令人难忘的画面:背井离乡的人们在河边苦苦挣扎，被召唤去创作音乐，但不知道如何进行。它的巴比伦可以代表任何压迫性的权力或不公正的力量，无论是政治的、文化的还是精神的。虽然这些含义引起了早期盎格鲁-美国人的共鸣，他们经常认为自己是因宗教或政治原因而受到迫害的人，但诗篇137的近现代历史将其置于加勒比海地区非裔美国人的反种族主义和反殖民运动中。从严格的清教徒崇拜习俗到流行的舞厅热门歌曲，描绘了诗篇的演变过程，突显了非裔美国人对传统欧洲二元界限的挑战:神圣与世俗，精神与政治，思想与身体，高雅与低俗文化。在《诗篇》137中，这种对划分的挑战是通过创造性地解读《诗篇》的政治含义而产生的。反殖民压迫的斗争始于美国独立战争，但在加勒比海沿岸反对奴隶制和白人统治美国黑人的运动中有所加速，它已成为消解欧洲基督教传统二元对立的一种溶剂。圣经诗篇只有九节，分为三部分，分别是四节、二节和三节。开头部分最为人所知，在后来的音乐版本中被广泛使用:我们在巴比伦河边坐下，是的，当我们想起锡安时，我们哭了。…
{"title":"Babylon Revisited: Psalm 137 as American Protest Song","authors":"David W. Stowe","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0095","url":null,"abstract":"The 1973 release of The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) announced a new era in the transatlantic flow of African music of the Americas. The Jamaican film quickly became a campus cult classic, bringing its heady mix of reggae music, ganja, and gunslinging urban rudeboy style to an enthusiastic youth audience in North America and Europe. The film's soundtrack, featuring songs by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Desmond Dekker, became a phenomenon in its own right, helping pave the way for the global success of Bob Marley. For many outside Jamaica, it was an enticing introduction to reggae music. In addition to launching the international career of the film's star, Jimmy Cliff, the soundtrack was a boon to a Jamaican group called the Melodians. Heard twice in the film, their song \"Rivers of Babylon\" reworked Psalm 137 over a jaunty bass line. With its message of defiance amid social dislocation, the song offers a subtle commentary on an important relationship early in the film: the conflict between Ivan, a young man recently arrived in Kingston \"from country\" and the autocratic Christian preacher for whom Ivan briefly works and aggressively challenges before beginning his short career as a songwriter and ganja trader. No song text has exerted a more sustained pull on the political imagination of Americans than Psalm 137. Contained in the Hebrew Bible, the psalm figured in the worship of the English Puritans who settled New England. It appeared in the first English-language book published in North America. Almost a century and a half later, it served as the basis for a patriotic song of national independence by early America's first significant composer, William Billings. The psalm was the centerpiece of Frederick Douglass's great abolitionist oration, \"What to a Slave is the Fourth of July.\" More than a century later, it reappeared in a completely new musical guise, the protoreggae version first recorded in 1969 by the Melodians. Since then, Psalm 137 has been covered numerous times by groups representing a variety of musical styles: gospel, disco, country rock, alternative, hip hop. Why such longevity? Like many stories and passages from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 137 is highly adaptable, open to a variety of interpretations. Its central question--How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?--has been central to the peopling of the Americas. The psalm deals with cultural dispossession and exile, pervasive experiences for large numbers of people over the course of American history. It offers a memorable image of uprooted people languishing beside a river, called to make music but unsure how to proceed. Its Babylon can stand for any oppressive power or force of injustice, whether political, cultural, or spiritual. While these meanings were resonant for early Anglo-Americans, who often perceived themselves as a persecuted people for religious or political reasons, Psalm 137's more recent history positions it in antiracist and anticol","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129082726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-03-22DOI: 10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0161
Martha Davis
The island of Hispaniola--the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo and first colony in the New World--was the inifial diasporal crucible and cultural bridge of the Americas. Santo Domingo has since become the contemporary Dominican Republic on a divided island in which the later French colony of Saint Domingue became Haiti (Figure 1). On this island, culture has been forged from over five hundred years of cultural contacts, acculturation, and adaptive responses to local circumstance. The early demise of the native Taino (Arawak) inhabitants and Spain's abandonment of the island for mainland mineral wealth led to a degree of neglect and depopulation that required master and African slave to cooperate for mutual survival. In addition, in Santo Domingo there was a lack of critical masses of specific African ethnic groups, in contrast with Havana or Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, for example--indeed in contrast with neighboring Haiti, which was intensively developed with African labor in the eighteenth century. So, taken as a whole, Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taino beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodu deity of the "black" (2) Guede family, Santa Marta la Dominadora. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In the domain of music, the well-known merengue social dance is emblematic of the hybridity of Dominican national culture (Davis 2002, 2006). But today's merengue is actually two subgenres: the orchestrated, commercially known merengue and the folk merengue tipico. Likewise, in the music of the folk-Catholic religious context, the Salve is also comprised of two subgenres: the liturgical Salve Regina ("Hail, Holy Queen"), popularly called the Salve de la Virgen,--a cappella, melismatic, and antiphonal or responsorial--and the nonliturgical Salve, an Africanized evolution of its progenitor, which is polyrhythmic, instrumentally accompanied, and in call-and-response form. These two subgenres of the Salve--the one Spanish and conservative, the other creole and constantly changing--coexist in the saint's festival, indeed in a single event. Furthermore, together they co-occur in a saint's festival with the African-derived semisacred long drums (palos) and other musical genres, as well. In addition, this configuration is not static. The input and articulation of component religions and musical elements have been constantly changing throughout the history of Hispani
伊斯帕尼奥拉岛是西班牙在圣多明各的殖民地，也是新大陆的第一个殖民地，是美洲最初的移民熔炉和文化桥梁。从那以后，圣多明各成为了现在的多米尼加共和国，在一个分裂的岛屿上，后来的法国殖民地圣多明各成为了海地(图1)。在这个岛上，文化是在五百多年的文化接触、文化适应和对当地环境的适应反应中形成的。土著泰诺(阿拉瓦克)居民的早期死亡和西班牙为了大陆的矿产财富而放弃了该岛，导致了一定程度的忽视和人口减少，这需要主人和非洲奴隶合作共同生存。此外，圣多明各缺乏特定非洲族群的关键群体，这与哈瓦那或巴西的萨尔瓦多达巴伊亚(Salvador da Bahia)形成鲜明对比——实际上与邻国海地形成鲜明对比，后者在18世纪大量利用非洲劳动力进行发展。因此，作为一个整体，多米尼加文化和社会可以被描述为一个混合体，其性质表现在各个领域。例如，占全国人口90%左右的民间或民间天主教，总的来说是一种文化融合。但解构后，可以看到它保留了各种因素对其折衷结构的贡献:不同地区，不同阶级的西班牙人，天主教的宗教秩序，甚至是西班牙民间天主教中保留的犹太教和伊斯兰教特征;西非和中非不同种族的人;土著泰诺信仰和习俗的延续;和其他的起源，比如可能的东印度起源的巫毒神的“黑色”(2)Guede家族，圣玛尔塔la Dominadora。[图1略]在音乐领域，著名的梅伦格交际舞是多米尼加民族文化混合的象征(Davis 2002, 2006)。但今天的梅伦格实际上有两个分支:商业上著名的编曲梅伦格和民间梅伦格提皮科。同样，在民间天主教宗教背景下的音乐中，圣歌也由两个子流派组成:礼仪圣歌(“万岁，神圣的女王”)，通常被称为圣母圣歌(Salve de la Virgen)，即无伴奏、旋律、对唱或回应;非礼仪圣歌，其祖先的非洲化演变，是多节奏的，有乐器伴奏，以呼唤和回应的形式。这两个Salve的分支——一个是西班牙的，保守的，另一个是克里奥尔的，不断变化的——共存于圣人的节日中，实际上是在一个单一的事件中。此外，它们还与源自非洲的半神圣的长鼓(palos)和其他音乐流派一起出现在圣徒的节日中。此外，这个配置不是静态的。在整个伊斯帕尼奥拉岛的历史上，组成宗教和音乐元素的输入和表达一直在不断变化。例如，在西南部，内巴山脉以南，圣人的节日过去只由神圣的萨尔维·里贾纳组成，整夜唱着无数的旋律，就像在西班牙北部地区一样(Cibao)。然后，大约四十年前，从北部的圣胡安山谷引进了长鼓。然而，今天在圣胡安山谷广泛使用的palos也可能是20世纪中期的一种相当新的现象。民俗学家埃德娜·加里多·博格斯(Edna Garrido Boggs, 1913-2009)是圣胡安德拉马瓜纳主要城镇的本地人，她证明，在她年轻时(直到1950年)，该镇周围的农村社区都是白人，而帕洛斯只有在洛斯班科斯(城镇南部)的黑人社区才知道。因此，我们今天所看到的不过是不断演变的风俗的一个缩影。回到全球的角度来看，国际多米尼加移民创造了多米尼加民间宗教和音乐的新散居维度。…
{"title":"Diasporal Dimensions of Dominican Folk Religion and Music","authors":"Martha Davis","doi":"10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/BLACMUSIRESEJ.32.1.0161","url":null,"abstract":"The island of Hispaniola--the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo and first colony in the New World--was the inifial diasporal crucible and cultural bridge of the Americas. Santo Domingo has since become the contemporary Dominican Republic on a divided island in which the later French colony of Saint Domingue became Haiti (Figure 1). On this island, culture has been forged from over five hundred years of cultural contacts, acculturation, and adaptive responses to local circumstance. The early demise of the native Taino (Arawak) inhabitants and Spain's abandonment of the island for mainland mineral wealth led to a degree of neglect and depopulation that required master and African slave to cooperate for mutual survival. In addition, in Santo Domingo there was a lack of critical masses of specific African ethnic groups, in contrast with Havana or Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, for example--indeed in contrast with neighboring Haiti, which was intensively developed with African labor in the eighteenth century. So, taken as a whole, Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taino beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodu deity of the \"black\" (2) Guede family, Santa Marta la Dominadora. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In the domain of music, the well-known merengue social dance is emblematic of the hybridity of Dominican national culture (Davis 2002, 2006). But today's merengue is actually two subgenres: the orchestrated, commercially known merengue and the folk merengue tipico. Likewise, in the music of the folk-Catholic religious context, the Salve is also comprised of two subgenres: the liturgical Salve Regina (\"Hail, Holy Queen\"), popularly called the Salve de la Virgen,--a cappella, melismatic, and antiphonal or responsorial--and the nonliturgical Salve, an Africanized evolution of its progenitor, which is polyrhythmic, instrumentally accompanied, and in call-and-response form. These two subgenres of the Salve--the one Spanish and conservative, the other creole and constantly changing--coexist in the saint's festival, indeed in a single event. Furthermore, together they co-occur in a saint's festival with the African-derived semisacred long drums (palos) and other musical genres, as well. In addition, this configuration is not static. The input and articulation of component religions and musical elements have been constantly changing throughout the history of Hispani","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124693158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2011-10-26DOI: 10.7591/9781501731150-001
C. Wilkinson
{"title":"Editor's Note","authors":"C. Wilkinson","doi":"10.7591/9781501731150-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501731150-001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":354930,"journal":{"name":"Black Music Research Journal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115941204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：