Conference Agenda

The reggae band Lauwarm (“lukewarm”) became a media sensation in 2022 when its concert at the local cooperative bar Brasserie Lorraine in Bern, Switzerland, was abruptly stopped at intermission due to concerns over cultural appropriations. Audience members had complained that the rasta dreadlocks and African clothing of the band’s members made them feel “uncomfortable.” What would have long been viewed as unremarkable accessories of a reggae band’s presentation became suddenly the flashpoint of a national debate–and legal argument–of what constitutes racism and discrimination. In this presentation, I demonstrate how this band’s stunning shift from alternative left-wing scene to right-wing media darling symbolizes a deeper struggle to redefine identity in a liminal state.

The media debate following the aborted concert mostly neglected the fact that Dominik Plumettaz, the band’s lead-singer and creative mind, read as white but has an Angolan and Brazilian family background. Would an audience feel less “uncomfortable” knowing this and react differently to the band’s references to Rastafarianism? As Jessica Bissett Perea shows in Sound Relations, audiences tend to struggle to sort out their assumptions about who can claim authenticity to which music when confronted with mixed-race musicians, and it is exactly these musicians who are most often denied the right to define themselves and pressed into a concept of identity that others constructed for them.

Instead of trying to affix a singular identity to Plumettaz, I argue that it is more helpful if instead we examined the “density of truths” (Perea) of the story. I reveal a more nuanced understanding of mixed-race identity through interviews I conducted with the musicians, and, using Diamond’s “alliance studies”, Perea’s “sound relations”, and Thomassen’s “liminality” models, I analyze how Plumettaz’s multitude of experiences challenges a traditional view of how reggae and people of color are situated in Switzerland: they are now no longer simply an exotic “other”, but are transitioning to become part of the fabric of a more diverse population.

This paper examines how Caribbean popular music (CPM) serves as a critical site for identity formation within diasporic communities. Drawing on postcolonial and musicological analysis, I demonstrate how New York City’s Afro-West Indian community engages with Jamaican dancehall and Trinibagonian soca, establishing musical contact zones that facilitate transcultural dialogue while preserving cultural heritage. Despite existing scholarship on Caribbean American demographics and cultural influences on musical preferences, the role of music-making as a site for transcultural engagement in U.S.-based Afro-West Indian communities remains underexplored.

To address this gap and investigate how musical experiences mediate cultural adaptation, I integrate Mann's embodied cognition (2015) and Butterfield's selective acculturation (2003) theories into my Pluralized Identity model. Through a close examination of two contemporary female dancehall artists, Shenseea and Stefflon Don, and their respective songs, “Be Good” (2021) and “Clockwork” (2022), I argue that their musical practices enable the construction and preservation of cultural identity across transnational boundaries.

Consequently, this paper uncovers the complex conditions involved in the production and performance of CPM by situating both artists within a theoretical underpinning of postcolonial and identity politics. My analysis contributes to broader discussions of diaspora, cultural hybridity, and artistic agency within musicology, suggesting a conceptualization of cultural identity that attends to the role of musical practice in shaping and reflecting Caribbean cultural globalization while facilitating complex identity negotiations within diasporic communities. As music of the current moment increasingly engages with transcultural practices, developing musicological scholarship that culturally situates these experiences is essential for understanding the social and political dimensions of contemporary popular music.

The expansion of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean brought not only military and economic domination but also attempted to impose cultural hegemony, with segregation becoming imposed in Cuba and through the dissemination of jazz. Yet, the very music that accompanied these occupations became, over a generation, a space where afrodiasporic resistance was reimagined by musicians who forged a new social and political space that thought beyond US hegemony and capitalist imperialism. This paper examines how jazz became a counter-imperial soundscape in the hands of radical artists such as Cuban trumpeter Julio Cueva, who would serve in the Spanish Civil War’s Republican army; Tito Enríquez, a socialist banjoist and jazz club owner in Oaxaca, Mexico; and Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés, who fled antisocialist persecution by moved to Haiti, joining his talents with the Palestinian-Haitian "Vodou Jazz" bandleader Issa El Saieh.

Invoking Haitian economist Jean Casimir's notion of the "counter-plantation," I suggest these counterhegemonic forms resonated because of a shared social struggle with Black workers in the US South. Cueva’s compositions infused Afro-Cuban son, echoing the struggles against Francoism and U.S. economic dominance. Enríquez, based in the Oaxacan city of Ixtepec—where a neighborhood still bears his name—blended Indigenous Mixtec traditions with jazz while mobilizing workers against corporate land grabs linked to U.S. interests. In Haiti, Jazz des Jeunes, emerging post-occupation, wove jazz with rara and Vodou rhythms, repurposing a music introduced by U.S. Marines into a vehicle of national and cultural affirmation.

Musicians thus resisted empire, subverted its own cultural exports, and transformed jazz into a weapon of insurgency. From the Panama Canal’s West Indian laborers to the Cuban sugar fields, from Tehuantepec’s radical banjoists to Port-au-Prince’s carnival processions, jazz’s trajectory in the Caribbean was one of contradiction: a sound of occupation refashioned into a sound of revolt. This paper traces how these artists, through migration, war, and collaboration, turned jazz into a form of political struggle, destabilizing the very meaning of its commodity form. In doing so, I argue, they both complicate and expand the art's forms ties to what Cedric Robinson calls the Black radical tradition within the United States.

By the 1890s, the black middle-class in Trinidad had reached a position prominent enough to give credence to their rising claim for influence within a political arena which remained predominantly white—a position the group achieved chiefly through their access to education. Hindered in their attempts at greater inclusion, they saw in Carnival an instrument to amplify their voice and highlight their contributions to local culture. Drawn to dignifying a black heritage, the group sought to magnify their association with Carnival but also to transform the cultural practice and its music. As the black middle-class participated more and more in the season’s festivities, they claimed association with black popular culture; reexamined Carnival’s cultural heritage; and, to legitimize their rising position, transformed the cultural phenomenon by encouraging supposed improvements, fundamentally altering, in the process, Carnival’s musical background. Black middle-class interest in popular culture, however, was much more of an effort to value their own historic roots—even if invented or imagined—than it was an attempt at drawing closer to the black masses to form a unified front within a frustrating political setting. Among the shifts buttressed by the group were singing in English; organization of tents for developing communal music; greater use of European instruments; investment in so-called fancy bands; support for the double-tone calypso form; and the discouragement of women in competitions. These late-nineteenth century shifts supported the development of what, in the final years of the 1890s, would be called calypso. A popular music on the rise throughout the 1890s—and persecuted by elite newspapers and authorities—the burgeoning style came of age at a moment when the black middle-class was clearly engaged in Carnival, and in their involvement the group contributed to shape its musical characteristics despite the music’s continued persecution by the state. Through this, the group engendered important changes toTrinidadian popular music and, also, to the nascent calypso style.