Event
Laura Donnelly and Ben Dupriest will present two papers as part of our student workshops. You are invited to join us and share your thoughts on their work. Snacks and beverage will be served.
Abstracts:
Laura Donnelly: “Haïti, je connais”: Music, Social Entrepreneurship, and Media in Haitian Paris
The Haitian community in Paris, a minority population in a post-colonial metropole, is multiply marginalized: as a racial minority, as a less dominant Caribbean group than those from the French Antilles, and through western media’s proliferation of a highly stigmatized image of Haiti. Haitians in Paris respond to these challenges by developing broader access through social media and encouraging solidarities between and among minority communities through social entrepreneurship and activism. This paper contributes to ethnomusicological research on diaspora, mobility, and immigrant communities (Allen 1988; Turino 2004; Zheng 2010; Dueck 2011), while foregrounding minority networks and their agency, using ethnographic data to discuss efforts within the Haitian community in Paris to “build up Haiti’s image,” or increase the value of the community. Integral to this process is social outreach by investing time and money into greater good of community, as well as involvement in organizations, planning festivals, events, and designing smarphone apps, all with music as a driving force, making music paramount to social mobility and increasing solidarity in Haitian Paris. Through twoubAkoustik, a grass-roots concert series, and “Haïti, je connais,” a game show that includes musical performances, I argue that Haitians in Paris strategically use their music’s appeal, both among Haitians and other minority groups in the city, to create minority networks with other marginalized communities, and ultimately benefit from these minor-transnationalisms.
Ben Dupriest: Listening to Lomax: New Auditory Engagements With Parchman Farm and the Black Southern Folk;
When Alan Lomax traveled to the upper Mississippi Delta to record prisoners at Parchman farm, he sought pure black musical expression. For Lomax, the musical black body, at work in forced exile, represented a powerful connection to the past. Evoking the Herskovitzian Africanisms of his formal training, Lomax theorized black southern musical practice within the monolithic, folkloric paradigm that has since been effectively problematized. Nevertheless, the paradox of his leftist political stance and essentialist, dehistoricizing functionalism maintains a complicated presence in the academy. In the wake of a recent re-release of Lomax's Parchman recordings (Dust-to-Digital; DTD-37, 2014), I will argue for the potential rethinking of his archive through new modes of listening. As Ana María Ochoa-Gautier (2014) has recently shown, reconstructing auditory practices can lead to new biopolitical understandings. Historical listenings to black bodies have been significantly overprescribed by scholars like Lomax; these recordings, however, compel a rethinking of auditory engagement as a biopolitical project that could reconcile Lomax's paradoxical means and humanistic ideals. In this paper I will suggest new ways of listening that will eschew retentionist theory, recognizing the place of these musical expressions in evolving understandings of black southern music and popular music in the early twentieth century that undermine established generic demarcations of race and regionality. This paper emphasizes the place of listening in the technical processes of constructing histories through memory, beginning work towards more nuanced understandings of black musical practice in the early twentieth century American South.