In 2022 for the first time the National Football League featured American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters in the live televised performance of the Superbowl halftime show, one comprising performances by Dre, Snoop, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. While the inclusion of such hiphop and pop music luminaries was read by some as a reluctant concession in the wake of the organization’s fumbling of Black Lives Matter advocacy, the move inadvertently highlighted the confluences between the speech forms of African American English (AAE) and Black Sign Language (BSL); the gestural, visual, highly nuanced, and specifically embodied nature of BSL interpretation; and the question of racialized linguistic propriety. Conversations around Lamar’s recent Superbowl performance, also accompanied by live BSL interpretation, as exemplary of conscious hiphop’s resistive ideals again brought attention to the enduring distinctions between white and Black soundscapes or sonic ways of being (Stoever 2016, Eidsheim 2019). In this presentation I adapt Sarah Cervenak’s proposal of “Black gathering” (2021) and suggest a corporeal relation to one’s sound ecology as opposed to one’s physical ecology/surroundings as an opportunity to enact collective unboundedness in opposition to a Lockean philosophy of Black regulation. Analyzing the BSL interpretation of Lamar’s hiphop performance, I interrogate the possibility for the execution of this embodied speech form to realize a site for the expression of inextractable Black togetherness. This project addresses concerns of disability and access within hiphop studies and ethnomusicology more broadly and offers new ways to imagine musicking in light of pervasive auditory chauvinism.

This short documentary explores the philosophy underlying Trinbagonian soca music and carnival focusing on the late soca artiste Dexter “Blaxx” Stewart (1962-2022). It presents the carnival in Trinidad and Tobago as a space where dualities- celebration and resistance, tradition and modernity, revelry and reflection, chaos, and order not only exist but include the in-betweens. The result has been an experience that makes it difficult to place soca artistes and their experiences in neat boxes that are typically used to define festivals and popular culture. Blaxx, as an artiste, faced being defined by standards that work in other cultural spaces, such as those in the global North. While praised as a brilliant artist, he was often confined by industry standards because of his appearance, particularly his Blackness and obesity. Blaxx’s position in soca reflects the attempts to market carnival within the aesthetic of the global North as it pertains to skin color and ideal body type. Also brought to the fore are other issues of dualities that complicate the carnival space, such as music competition and collaboration, marketing and obscurity, and spirituality and commercialism. Blending primary interviews with scholars and practitioners in the fields of carnival and soca sourced from a 2023 symposium, alongside secondary footage, the documentary examines how these dualities shape the art, identity, and culture of Trinidad and Tobago as seen through Blaxx and his work.

Like in many postcolonial states, the indigenous and transplanted groups of people in pre- independence Trinidad and Tobago became victims of ‘linguisticide’ on account of colonial language policies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Out of the crucible of colonization however, formerly enslaved and indentured peoples engaged in the reconstruction of endonormative linguistic forms: Creoles, indigenized Englishes, pidgins, mixed-codes, (home) signs etc. (Ali et al, 2022). Each group of people that came to the region brought with them knowledge of their musics, including their accompanying instruments and dances, and they carried on their artistic practices in spite of ever-changing restrictions (cf. Cowley, 1996; Henry, 2008; Liverpool 2001; Rohlehr, 1990).

The musics most associated with Carnival are usually sung using Caribbean Creole codes and a main theme in a number of these songs is identity. This paper will first trace the linguistic history of Trinidad and Tobago and illustrate the concomitant development of the language of Carnival musics. It will then examine the theme of identity through various linguistic techniques in three songs: The Mighty Conqueror’s (1962) Trinidad Dictionary; Riki Jai’s (1989) Sumintra; and Bunji Garlin’s (2021) Trini Lingo. These songs represent three different genres of Carnival music with two and three decades respectively between them, allowing for an examination of changes in attitudes toward Trinidad Creole over time as well as to discuss representations of social practices and constructions of identity between the persona in the songs and the intended hearers.

Afro-dancehall is a syncretized Ghanaian genre wedged between the mimicry of Jamaican dancehall and the embrace of Nigerian afrobeats - the first globally audible instance of African musical self-representation. African popular music has continuously interfaced with diasporic genres since the emergence of highlife (a core ingredient in Fela Kuti’s afrobeat, originally branded highlife-jazz) in response to Caribbean polyrhythmic grooves played in Gold Coast ballrooms. In the 1990s, hiplife injected an explicitly African aesthetic into hip-hop, as Reggie Rockstone and other innovators rapped in indigenous languages and sampled classic highlife and afrobeat songs. Soon after, dancehall became the more effectual musical vehicle to express the aspirations of Ghana’s subaltern, with Jamaican artists like Vybz Kartel referring to a shared worldwide struggle as “Gaza,” a meaningful symbol of global "ghetto youth" solidarity. Ghanaian dancehall was branded by many as afro-dancehall, with the prefix surging in relevance contemporaneously with the meteoric rise of afrobeats. Afro-dancehall artists like Stonebwoy have increasingly incorporated afrobeats elements to attract listeners with an appetite for afrobeats, while purists like Shatta Wale have eschewed such syncretization as betraying pure, authentic dancehall – two distinct approaches in a rivalry between the two artists that has dominated the Ghanaian music industry since 2014. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over the past decade, including interviews with top artists, producers, and early pioneers, this paper explores the nuances of afro-dancehall’s crisis of authenticity as the genre continues to be massively popular domestically but struggles to attract dancehall and afrobeats fans on a global scale.