CARIBBEAN SOUNDSCAPES: A CONFERENCE ON CARIBBEAN MUSICS AND CULTURE
Tulane University
New Orleans, LA: March 12-14, 2004
"In the Caribbean, before the verb, there were the drum, rhythm and movement"
Angel Quintero Rivera
Salsa, sabor y control
The Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute at Tulane University, in conjunction with the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Newcomb Department of Music, is pleased to announce CARIBBEAN SOUNDSCAPES, to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 12-14, 2004.
Popular music has often been singled out as a central defining characteristic of the Caribbean imaginary. This conference responds to the need to expand our scholarly paradigms in this area, recognizing intense regional transnationalization and change in the region in recent years.
Speakers and participants will address several key questions: what is the significance of the Caribbean as a specific locale for the production and circulation of popular music? What role does popular music play in the
creation and continued performance of national identities throughout the circum-Caribbean and other zones, such as continental Latin America, northern North America, and Europe?
The conference will feature several plenary speakers, among them Prof. Gerard Béhague (University of Texas at Austin) and Prof. Juan Flores (Hunter College, CUNY). Further details about the conference will be available on
line at http://cuba.tulane.edu
Proposals for papers and panels are invited in a wide range of areas including, but not limited to:
- New approaches to questions of national identity, political resistance and "foundational fictions" in Caribbean popular music
- The culture industry and Caribbean music: histories and practices
- Crossing borders and seas: traveling with and through popular Caribbean music
- Popular music and tourism: selling the Caribbean
- Music and dance as cultural practices: performances of Caribbean rhythms
- The place of Caribbean music in the "lettered city"
- The politics of gender, race and class in Caribbean popular music
- Transculturations, mestizajes, and hybridities: inter-Caribbean, intra-national, inter-national
- Popular Caribbean music as world music
- Rap, hip hop, rock and punk: new trends in Caribbean popular musics
We invite proposals for papers and panels that examine particular case studies and phenomena (especially in innovative juxtapositions), propose new conceptual frameworks or periodizations, reflect on historiographical and theoretical issues, or rethink conventional narratives. We also invite cultural producers (musicians, performers, promoters, producers, dancers, filmmakers, writers and other artists) working on caribbean popular music themes to present or reflect on their work. Proposals for panels (consisting of three or four papers and possibly a discussant) are encouraged, but individual paper proposals will receive equal consideration.
For individual papers, proposals should include a 300 word abstract and detailed personal information (Name, mailing address, email address, phone and fax numbers, institutional affiliation). Panel proposals should include all of the above for each individual paper as well as a separate top sheet identifying the panel title, panel organizer and a 200-300 word panel description.
Please email proposals to lopez@tulane.edu and dramil@tulane.edu by December 15, 2003. Accepted papers/panels will be announced by December 31, 2003.
Conference Organizers:
Prof. Ana M. López, Director
Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute
lopez@tulane.edu
Prof. Javier León
Newcomb Department of Music
jleon@tulane.edu
Prof. Marilyn Miller
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
mgmiller@tulane.edu
Gerard Béhague
Gerard Béhague has been a professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin since 1974, where he holds the Virginia Murchison Regents Professorship in Fine Arts. He was raised and educated in Rio de Janeiro, graduating from the National School of Music of the University of Brazil and the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. He studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the Sorbonne in Paris (1959-63), and then at Tulane University (New Orleans) for his doctoral studies and received his Ph.D. in 1966. A past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, he was the editor of the journal Ethnomusicology and founded the Latin American Music Review that he has been editing since 1980. He is the author of several books and dozens of scholarly articles on the various traditions of Latin American music. He has carried out field research primarily in Northeast Brazil on Afro-Brazilian religious music and culture and in West Africa. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim, Ford, and Carnegie-Mellon Foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Juan Flores
Juan Flores is professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) and in the sociology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his B.A. from Queens College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1970. His research and teaching focus on social and cultural theory, popular culture and ethnicity and race, especially Puerto Rican and Latino studies. Flores is the author of Poetry in East Germany (Choice magazine award), The Insular Vision (winner Casa de las Americas award), Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity and From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. He also is the translator of Memoirs of Bernardo Vega and of Cortijo's Wake by Edgardo Rodriguez Juliá and co-editor of On Edge: The Crisis of Latin American Culture. His work has appeared in numerous journals and newspapers in the United States and Latin America, including Daedalus, Journal of Ethnic Studies, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Harvard Educational Review, and Modern Language Quarterly. He is co-editor of two book series, one on cultural studies of the Americas for University of Minnesota Press, the other on Puerto Rican studies with Temple University Press. He has served on editorial boards for several journals, including The Americas Review, Black Renaisssance and The Latino Review of Books, as well as on the boards of directors of the New York Council on the Humanities, the Recovering the Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and the Latin Jazz Project of the Smithsonian Institution.