Guest Speaker
Dr. Jerome Camal
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Humanities 2411
Based on interviews with musicians in Guadeloupe, France, and the United States, this presentation analyzes three different instances of the complex and ambiguous relationships
between Guadeloupean gwoka and jazz musicians in order to highlight the contested nature of
diaspora formations. If diasporas disrupt easy formulations of national essence, the entanglement
of jazz and gwoka challenges what several scholars have already identified as a latent
essentializing tendency in some formulations of the African diaspora. Indeed, by highlighting
each musician’s relative position within a global music economy, and thus their very tangible
differences of both social and financial capital relative to each other, I caution that any recourse
to metaphors of diaspora or creolization should not mask differences of power that shape these
transatlantic exchanges: the Black Atlantic is an uneven playing field.
Yet these differences need not negate the possibility of diasporicity. Rather they point to what Brent Edwards calls a “décalage,” a gap or time lag that allows for the articulation of difference within diasporic unity. In the examples presented here, the décalage between the French West Indian experience and the Afro-diasporic—mostly anglophone—world of jazz confirms that, for postcolonial West Indians, diaspora functions through a strategic embrace of “elective affinities,” to borrow Barnor Hesse’s formulation. Furthermore, by considering the structures of power at play within diasporic habitus rather than focusing on questions of attachment to an imagined homeland and debates over retention and transmission of knowledge, I respond to Michaeline Critchlow’s call to creolize diaspora . Doing so allows us to neutralize any aspiration to purity within diasporic formulations without losing track of the specific experience of racialized subjects.
Yet these differences need not negate the possibility of diasporicity. Rather they point to what Brent Edwards calls a “décalage,” a gap or time lag that allows for the articulation of difference within diasporic unity. In the examples presented here, the décalage between the French West Indian experience and the Afro-diasporic—mostly anglophone—world of jazz confirms that, for postcolonial West Indians, diaspora functions through a strategic embrace of “elective affinities,” to borrow Barnor Hesse’s formulation. Furthermore, by considering the structures of power at play within diasporic habitus rather than focusing on questions of attachment to an imagined homeland and debates over retention and transmission of knowledge, I respond to Michaeline Critchlow’s call to creolize diaspora . Doing so allows us to neutralize any aspiration to purity within diasporic formulations without losing track of the specific experience of racialized subjects.
Posts
