Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean __gwoka__ music—a secular, drum-based tradition—captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island’s decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In __Creolized Aurality,__ Jérôme Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality. "In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music - a secular, drum-based tradition - captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island's decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Aurality, Jerome Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple--and often seemingly contradictory--cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are "creolized auralities"--expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality." Quatrième de couverture In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music - a secular, drum-based tradition - captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island's decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Aurality, J r me Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple--and often seemingly contradictory--cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are "creolized auralities"--Expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality From colonialism to anticolonialism, from nationalism to postnationalism, this text explores how gwoka participates in five auralities, fields of sonic relations that make audible multiple - and often seemingly contradictory - cultural belongings and political longings. Drawing from Edouard Glissant's poetics of relation and re-interpreting creolization as a double play of resistance and accommodation, 'Creolized Aurality' moves away from narratives of anticolonial rupture and overcoming to elucidate (post)coloniality as an unstable relational matrix from which emerges a politics caught in the tension between a struggle for sovereignty and demands for full citizenship Contents 8 List of Online Resources 10 Introduction / Listening for (Post)colonial Entanglements 12 One / The Poetics of Colonial Aurality 42 Two / Building an Anticolonial Aurality: Gwoka modènn as Counterpoetics 70 Three / Discrepant Creolizations: Music and the Limits of Hospitality 100 Four / Diasporic or Creole Aurality? Aesthetics and Politics across the Abyss 126 Five / Postnational Aurality: Institutional Detour and the Creolization of Sovereignty 154 Coda / Bigidi 186 Acknowledgments 188 Basic Gwoka Rhythms 192 Notes 194 Discography 222 Bibliography 224 Index 236