Author: Peter Lamarche Manuel
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781439905708
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
East Indian Music in the West Indies
Author: Peter Lamarche Manuel
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781439905708
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781439905708
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tãn-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tãn-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music. Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture. Author note: Peter Manuel, an authority on the music of both North India and the Caribbean, is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Music, and Philosophy at John Jay College. He is the author of several books, including Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford University Press), Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, and Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Temple University Press).
Mobilizing India
Author: Tejaswini Niranjana
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388421
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.
Music of Hindu Trinidad
Author: Helen Myers
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226554532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora. Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226554532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
Like many other small towns in Trinidad, Felicity is populated almost entirely by East Indians. In their Caribbean exile, the residents of Felicity have created and recreated the music of their Hindu ancestors. Music of Hindu Trinidad is a fascinating account of the history and cultural significance of Hindu music that explores its symbolic, aesthetic, and psychological aspects while asking the larger question of how this music has contributed to the formation of identity in the midst of their great diaspora. Myers details the musical repertory of Felicity, which is based largely on north Indian genres including the traditional Bhojpuri folk songs and drumming styles brought by the first indentured laborers in 1845. In her engaging exploration of the fate of Indian classical music and new popular styles such as Hindi calypso, soca, and chutney, she even finds herself at the ancestral home of Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul in India. Copiously illustrated and accompanied by a compact disk, Music of Hindu Trinidad is a model ethnographic study.
Zouk
Author: Jocelyne Guilbault
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226310428
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
With its irresistible dance beat, strong bass line, and straightforward harmonies and lyrics, zouk has become wildly popular in the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. This book—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—provides a thorough introduction to the sound, lyrics, choreography, and social milieu of this vibrant and infectious new music. "This invigorating reference work and companion CD of the Antilles' sexy zouk dance sound will lift readers out of their easy chairs and their complacency about the nonreggae aspects of Caribbean pop. . . . [Zouk] is a landmark achievement."—Timothy White, Billboard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226310428
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
With its irresistible dance beat, strong bass line, and straightforward harmonies and lyrics, zouk has become wildly popular in the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. This book—complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations and musical examples—provides a thorough introduction to the sound, lyrics, choreography, and social milieu of this vibrant and infectious new music. "This invigorating reference work and companion CD of the Antilles' sexy zouk dance sound will lift readers out of their easy chairs and their complacency about the nonreggae aspects of Caribbean pop. . . . [Zouk] is a landmark achievement."—Timothy White, Billboard
Knowing how to Know
Author: Narmala Halstead
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845454388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
"Through the idea of the 'extended field', this volume examines current issues in fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of ethnographic knowledge construction. It is a text for new fieldworkers, established researchers and those looking for material to support modules on these issues. Nine anthropologists reflect on their experiential processes of knowing by considering how different aspects of fieldwork and the writing-up process informed their accounts. Drawing on both theory and empirical material, this volume actively engages with the dilemmas faced by fieldworkers and relates them to current debates and the notion of crisis in academe, whilst illustrating the complexities of knowing how to know by probing material from different historical periods and various regions."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845454388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
"Through the idea of the 'extended field', this volume examines current issues in fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of ethnographic knowledge construction. It is a text for new fieldworkers, established researchers and those looking for material to support modules on these issues. Nine anthropologists reflect on their experiential processes of knowing by considering how different aspects of fieldwork and the writing-up process informed their accounts. Drawing on both theory and empirical material, this volume actively engages with the dilemmas faced by fieldworkers and relates them to current debates and the notion of crisis in academe, whilst illustrating the complexities of knowing how to know by probing material from different historical periods and various regions."--BOOK JACKET.
Caribbean Currents
Author: Peter Manuel
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592134645
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
The classic introduction to the Caribbean's popular music brought up to date.
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592134645
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
The classic introduction to the Caribbean's popular music brought up to date.
The Music and Dance of the World's Religions
Author: E. Rust
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313033358
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
Despite the world-wide association of music and dance with religion, this is the first full-length study of the subject from a global perspective. The work consists of 3,816 references divided among 37 chapters. It covers tribal, regional, and global religions and such subjects as shamanism, liturgical dance, healing, and the relationship of music, mathematics, and mysticism. The referenced materials display such diverse approaches as analysis of music and dance, description of context, direct experience, observation, and speculation. The references address topics from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, medicine, semiotics, and computer technology. Chapter 1 consists of general references to religious music and dance. The remaining 36 chapters are organized according to major geographical areas. Most chapters begin with general reference works and bibliographies, then continue with topics specific to the region or religion. This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in music, dance, religion, or culture.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313033358
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
Despite the world-wide association of music and dance with religion, this is the first full-length study of the subject from a global perspective. The work consists of 3,816 references divided among 37 chapters. It covers tribal, regional, and global religions and such subjects as shamanism, liturgical dance, healing, and the relationship of music, mathematics, and mysticism. The referenced materials display such diverse approaches as analysis of music and dance, description of context, direct experience, observation, and speculation. The references address topics from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, medicine, semiotics, and computer technology. Chapter 1 consists of general references to religious music and dance. The remaining 36 chapters are organized according to major geographical areas. Most chapters begin with general reference works and bibliographies, then continue with topics specific to the region or religion. This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in music, dance, religion, or culture.
Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums
Author: Peter Manuel
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096770
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096770
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture. Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.
Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History REANNOUNCE/F05: Volume 2: Performing the Caribbean Experience
Author: Kuss, Malena
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292784987
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 572
Book Description
The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean is treated with unprecedented breadth in this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. From these texts, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs beliefs, and challenges received aesthetics. More than two decades in the making, this work privileges the perspectives of cultural insiders and emphasizes the role that music plays in human life. Volume 2, Performing the Caribbean Experience, focuses on the reconfiguration of this complex soundscape after the Conquest and on the strategies by which groups from distant worlds reconstructed traditions, assigning new meanings to fragments of memory and welding a fascinating variety of unique Creole cultures. Shaped by an enduring African presence and the experience of slavery and colonization by the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch, peoples of the Caribbean islands and circum-Caribbean territories resorted to the power of music to mirror their history, assert identity, gain freedom, and transcend their experience in lasting musical messages. Essays on pan-Caribbean themes, surveys of traditions, and riveting personal accounts capture the essence of pluralistic and spiritualized brands of creativity through the voices of an unprecedented number of Caribbean authors, including a representative contingent of distinguished Cuban scholars whose work is being published in English translation for the first time in this book. Two CDs with 52 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this volume.
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292784987
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 572
Book Description
The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean is treated with unprecedented breadth in this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. From these texts, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs beliefs, and challenges received aesthetics. More than two decades in the making, this work privileges the perspectives of cultural insiders and emphasizes the role that music plays in human life. Volume 2, Performing the Caribbean Experience, focuses on the reconfiguration of this complex soundscape after the Conquest and on the strategies by which groups from distant worlds reconstructed traditions, assigning new meanings to fragments of memory and welding a fascinating variety of unique Creole cultures. Shaped by an enduring African presence and the experience of slavery and colonization by the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch, peoples of the Caribbean islands and circum-Caribbean territories resorted to the power of music to mirror their history, assert identity, gain freedom, and transcend their experience in lasting musical messages. Essays on pan-Caribbean themes, surveys of traditions, and riveting personal accounts capture the essence of pluralistic and spiritualized brands of creativity through the voices of an unprecedented number of Caribbean authors, including a representative contingent of distinguished Cuban scholars whose work is being published in English translation for the first time in this book. Two CDs with 52 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this volume.
Reggae & Caribbean Music
Author: Dave Thompson
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879306557
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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.
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879306557
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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.