This paper examines Vodou vocality and vibration as embodied technologies of resistance and worldmaking within Haitian Vodou. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners, ritual specialists, and sound archives, it foregrounds the voice, breath, rhythm, and percussive utterance as epistemic forces that exceed language and textuality. In Vodou ceremonial contexts, vocal sounds, chants, cries, seemingly unintelligible utterances, call-and-answer patterns, and breath-inflected exhalations operate not merely as expressive media but as vibrational acts that reorganize space, time, and relationality. These sonic practices call lwa yo (Vodou spirits), activate ancestral memory, and recalibrate the body toward balance, producing what practitioners describe as alignment rather than belief. By centering the animation of vocality in Vodou, this paper examines how vocal performances function within the liturgical cycle, their role in sustaining cultural memory, and their capacity to mobilize both spiritual power and social solidarity. It examines instances of divine interaction as conveyed through vocal sonorities and the responses elicited from listeners. It highlights the expertise of Vodou priests, who provide insight into the significance of voice and the interpretations of performances of Vodou liturgical songs. Situating Vodou vocality within Black Atlantic histories of enslavement, colonial violence, and epistemic suppression, the paper argues that vibration functions as a counter-archive: a mode of transmission that resists capture by colonial grammars and survives through repetition, resonance, and corporeal attunement. Vocal vibration becomes a practice of fugitivity, enabling practitioners to sustain worlds that colonial modernity sought to silence or eradicate.

Bullerengue is a musical tradition and epistemic site sustained by cantadoras—elderly women singers—in the Afro-Colombian Maroon Caribbean. In advanced age, cantadoras cultivate a vocal materiality shaped through lifelong performance, communal responsibility, and ancestral inheritance, gradually resembling their ancestresses’ vocalities and ethics of care. This paper ethnographically analyzes how the bullerengue-voice is inherited, matured, and socially enacted through two lineages of cantadoras represented by octogenarians Juana Rosado and Petrona Martínez. While Western biomedical discourse frequently frames aging as bodily decline (Powell and Gilbert 2009), cantadoras instead understand aging as privilege, authority, and accumulated wisdom. The bullerengue-voice enables them to remain productive, creative, and indispensable within family and community life.

Drawing on the concept of worlding—“ways of knowing, practicing, and making [a] distinct world” (de la Cadena)—this paper argues that voice and worlding are mutually constitutive through an “acoustemology” (Feld 2015) that illuminates how deep listening to Maroon territory and matriarchal positionality generates knowledge through performance. I propose the concept of epistemic aurality of voice to describe this reciprocal relation between the bullerengue-voice and worlding. Framed through Escobar’s notion of ontological design (2018)—where humans design worlds that in turn design them—the bullerengue-voice emerges as an ongoing life project attuned to relational existence. Such developments allow cantadoras to build constructive ontologies in the face of adversity, as exemplified by their ethos of “las penas alegres,” a poetic construction that casts singing as a vehicle to assuage the adverse existential effects of marginality and life itself.

This paper examines the role of colonial-era music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage in the wake of the economic and ideological crisis known as the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of colonial-era Catholic sacred music that emerged in the 1990s sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto the restored colonial spaces of Havana. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work in Havana, I demonstrate how this musical revival is intrinsically tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities since the 1990s. Focusing on the restoration of the colonial Paula Church as a concert hall and on the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s early music revival, I demonstrate how performances of—and writings about—colonial music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the postcolonial present. This imaginative, presentist perspective conveys two ideas: cultural and racial mixing as inherent in Cuban identity, and a sense of agency for contemporary Cuba in infusing hegemonic European culture with subaltern cultural practices. I argue, therefore, that the revival of colonial-era music seeks to enroll the fraught colonial past in the needs of the present to foster local identity in place and to project a sense of belonging at times of profound change and uncertainty, yet it highlights the tensions between whose pasts are silenced and sounded.

Sankofa, a prominent element of the Akan Adinkra system, is embedded in Jamaican Maroon worldviews as both a conduit to asserted Akan origins and a framework for self-definition. This paper treats Sankofa’s imperative—to look back, reclaim what was left behind, and use it to build a better future—as a lived philosophical orientation sounded, embodied, and transmitted through Maroon cultural traditions. Building on scholarship on Maroon political structures, histories of resistance, and expressive cultures, I examine the possibilities and limits of a Sankofa-informed approach to advancing Maroon cultural, political, and economic interests in the twenty-first century and beyond. Jamaican Maroons activate their historical archives through music and dance during annual treaty commemorations. However, fulfilling Sankofa’s mandate to “go back and get it” also requires sustained engagement with Jamaica’s less celebratory histories of fugitivity, freedom, victory, and betrayal. How might Sankofa instead be fully enacted through Maroon cultural traditions? Reading between the lines of Maroon songs about war, treaties, life, and death, I ask two questions: How do performances within state-sponsored national celebrations alter their meanings? And how do cultural icons function simultaneously as Jamaican Maroon historical traces and Jamaica’s nationalist symbols? I argue that using music and dance to promote a curated national memory can obscure and displace historical truths deemed disruptive. Nevertheless, the persisting unresolved tensions shape identities, fuel muted grievances, and complicate political claims that ultimately constrain Sankofa’s forward-facing transformative potential. I reveal how music is used to promote curated memory in the negotiation of difficult pasts.