Caribbean music is presented here through a series of case studies that detail some of the tensions triggered by the colonial encounter. It is in this process of reconsidering the Caribbean’s colonial past that the intricate and historically dependent nature of Caribbean music is stressed. By demonstrating the critical relationship between music and the colonial encounter, this book comes at a critical time, when such analysis is both invited and urgent. It compels me to offer a few thoughts regarding the need and timeliness of this compendium of essays.
I am a former orchestral trumpet player, an ethnomusicologist focussing on West African music and a professor and academic administrator with nearly thirty years of experience working at two prominent American public universities. During my career, I have observed the significance of decolonisation both as a notion and a process for education. I have witnessed many changes that have placed Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) in new and challenging situations relative to higher education and its institutional norms, and relative to the way music is researched and studied within and across academic disciplines. Over the past year, I have also seen the challenge of decolonising education find its voice in the Black Lives Matter movement.
For decades, machinations within the academy marginalised ideologies that challenged inequities surrounding race and ethnicity. The 60s and 70s saw the decolonisation of Africa, with colonial governments across the continent shifting toward independence, a transition marked by violence and political turmoil. For the British and the French, Africa’s civil unrest represented a global crisis brought on by imperialism, which Europe had the moral responsibility to remedy. In response, students in the United Kingdom and France organised sit-ins demanding that their universities adopt more diverse curricula and curtail the rise of racial and class discrimination across campuses. In the Caribbean, where education paradigms often mirrored those of former colonial systems, students, too, demanded change: in 1967, the University of West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica launched its first African Studies programme, and a year later, UWI in Trinidad also set up an African Studies unit. In 1969 in the United States, student activists at the University of Michigan demanded a more diversified student body and faculty membership, igniting a series of protests that, spanning some three decades, became known as the Black Action Movement.
Despite the establishment of ethnic studies programmes and departments and the hiring of BIPOC professors at predominately White institutions (PWIs), however, mainstream departments remained largely untouched. Routinely, BIPOC faculty were compelled to accept joint appointments in non-degree-granting ethnic studies programmes and a mainstream department, which often led to grave imbalances as the faculty member progressed towards decisions regarding tenure and promotion. Yet, by the turn of the twenty-first century, when institutional trends towards the marginalisation of ethnic studies began to waver, communities of scholars and students interested in Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American/Pacific Islander American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies increased to become centres of intellectual and interdisciplinary fortitude. In universities across the globe, the presence of a viable ethnic and gender studies is, in essence, challenging the colonial orientations that hindered voices of the ‘other’ being heard as essential factors in modern scholarship.
The challenges to decolonisation exist at disciplinary and institutional levels, one often fuelling the other. As an academic administrator, I spent many years facilitating diversity programmes to increase the number of BIPOC students and faculty. However, I found that representation alone does not always change how faculty teach and students learn. Changing the complexions of individuals and groups in an educational community does not always change the script in American higher education from its Euro-centric roots. To demonstrate this point, I harken back to my early days of teaching when I held a joint appointment between a music department and a Black studies department. The music department did not take advantage of my work in ethnomusicology: I was assigned to teach courses on European orchestral and chamber music literature and to coach chamber music ensembles. My ethnomusicology-oriented courses – Music in African Cultures, Music in African American Cultures, Studies in Ethnomusicology, and History of Jazz – were all taught in the Black studies department. As credits for the degree, these courses were off-limits to music majors who wanted to explore the broader dimensions of music in the African diaspora.
Over the years, I pondered ways to reconcile issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. Present-day music study in the academy is generally based on a framework that favours Western classical traditions. Although there has been a rise in the number of jazz studies and world music courses, and even the establishment of ethnomusicology departments and programmes on numerous university campuses, they are few compared to those with a relatively narrow focus on Western music. After years of grappling with the complexity of issues surrounding diversity, teaching, and learning, I adopted the mantra, ‘Is the curriculum set in stone?’ This became the opening salvo for many of my presentations at the meetings of professional organisations in higher education. Without a potent infusion of intellectual diversity into the curriculum, I determined that we fall easily into what has been labelled the ‘Ted Turner Syndrome’, which is the practice adopted by Turner beginning in 1994 of colourising previously filmed black-and-white movies. Among many others, Turner colourised the iconic 1942 classic Casablanca. Though the movie was transformed into a colourised version, the script did not change. The lines for leading stars – Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Peter Lorre – were not affected, and they all remained in character. Nothing changed but the colour. In higher education, much must be done to step beyond the single factor of BIPOC representation. The script has to change. Decolonising efforts must provide exposure and voice to ‘others’ whose concepts, ideas, and values about music should be a mainstay in teaching and learning.
The essayists in this volume are script changers. Their work represents transformative examples of decolonised scholarship, creating new spaces that stand to liberate and enrich music research and ethnic studies curricula. The writers, in many respects, accomplish what the post-modernism of the mid-to-late twentieth century failed to do regarding the furtherance of scepticism and irony associated with grand narratives and ideologies. The overall thrust of this volume is to decolonise research, teaching, and learning in the social sciences and humanities; it asks fundamental questions on essential matters in modern, post-modern, and decolonised contexts. Each essay presents a robust measure of objectivity regarding insider or native perspectives on music and culture. Collectively, the essays have a powerful impact, challenging the leading sentiments of Euro-focussed research and curricula in music studies, and ushering in a more enlightened model for decolonising the study of music.
Ethnic studies offer multidisciplinary foci on the experiences of people whose voices were misinterpreted or altogether silenced by an over-arching European-based ideology that pervaded teaching and scholarship for decades. This volume significantly contributes to the ethnic studies literature by fostering a decolonising narrative in Caribbean diasporic studies. The essays offer resolutions to many methodological, pedagogical, and philosophical issues confronting decolonisation in the academy and music scholarship. They also help prepare the next generation of scholars to challenge barriers to the inclusion of diverse voices and orientations for a more enlightened perspective on the world’s music.
Given the current foci of music departments across the globe, the battle between the Western music canon and the decolonised approach to music studies has some way to go before it can be resolved. No one expects overnight changes in philosophy or curricula. However, if we heed the messages of the writers in this volume, it will compel us to rethink how we present, in our lectures and writings, the ways people perceive music around them. Therein is at least a part of the solution.
Finally, this compendium of essays extends the coverage of music in the Caribbean and the wider Caribbean diaspora from three influential volumes: Peter Manuel’s Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (2006), Mark Brill’s Music of Latin America and the Caribbean (2nd ed., 2017), and Robin Moore’s Musics of Latin America (2012). What sets this compendium apart is the interdisciplinary foci of the essayists and their extended coverage of music genres in various Caribbean islands and sub-regions. The writers are ethnomusicologists, music educators, linguists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, indicating the saliency of interdisciplinary approaches to music studies. Moreover, they masterfully raise and address issues confronting the colonising methods and scope of music scholarship in previous generations, precisely as they pertain to research and curricula reform in higher education.
While progress is being made on several fronts to remedy the marginalising effects of the past in higher education, much remains to be done. As a community of scholars, we must foster a new framing to studies of music of the ‘other’ and provide a revitalising insider’s voice in music scholarship. We learn from this volume how excellent streams of knowledge could produce new narratives and strategies to research Caribbean diasporic music, allowing readers to contemplate different approaches to research methods that allow the voices of insiders to speak forthrightly. As such, this book stands as a model for establishing new frameworks for what we do as scholars to bring forth the musical discourses of people whose voices have been stifled under the aegis of colonising forces.
