Black Music Research Journal最新文献

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}

{"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}