Markus Coester & Wolfgang Bender (eds.), A Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance and Religion
Markus Coester & Wolfgang Bender, A Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance and Religion, Kingston, Ian Randle, 2015
Entrées d’index
Géographique :
Jamaïque / JamaicaGenre musical :
jamaïcaine / Jamaican musicTexte intégral
1Postcolonial critiques of knowledge formation and discourse are challenged by the fact that they are often formulated by way of recourse to Western epistemological models. Marcus Coester and Wolfgang Bender’s studies on African Jamaican popular culture present timely alternatives to avoid this pitfall. Their Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance and Religion (2015) brings together seminal articles by Jamaican scholars and anthropologists of the early to late twentieth century who examined their culture and society surrounding efforts towards cultural emancipation and after independence. Presenting the historical evidence gathered by Jamaicans surrounding their struggle for independence and cultural self-definition, Coester and Bender make a clear case for the need to examine Caribbean popular cultures on their own terms rather than borrowed concepts from either Europeanist and/or Africanist lenses.
2Coester and Bender’s anthology also attempts to rectify some of the reductionist readings of Jamaican popular or “bass” culture as simply appropriating, resisting and/or blending diverse cultural elements. Rather, they suggest that one must consider these cultural expressions as unique indigenous performance cultures that have emerged from the experience of slavery and colonialism in Jamaica. Hence, the editors define Jamaican and Caribbean popular culture via the term “accommodation.” As they assert in the introduction to the anthology:
As such, accommodation implies that a tradition or cultural practice strives to integrate elements from “outside” (for a communicative purpose) and that they are easily integrated by the practitioners, or rather that the practitioners are able to accommodate them, which leads to and shapes cultural change in a particular way, instead of either assimilating or rejecting these elements, without this effect (xix).
- 1 See my review of his book Sonic Bodies, in this collection of texts.
3Whilst many of the articles assembled here are well known to scholars in the field and some appear dated, they nonetheless offer an archive for future scholarship to assess Jamaican cultural development and practice which is now widely accessible for the first time. As such, the contributions by seminal Jamaican scholars such as Ryman, Wynter, Bettelheim, Schuler, Seaga, Chevannes, Tanna, Bilby and Lewin constitute an oral history project in itself that is the consequence of discourses surrounding cultural memory as much as the evidence of cultural practice still performed by Jamaicans today. That this is of value to the study and historical documentation of Jamaican cultural practice goes unquestioned and provides the evidence for further theorization as presented by Henriques’s book. If Jamaican “vibratory power” as such is indeed non-representational, as Sonic Bodies suggests,1 its performance event and socio-cultural clout are not, and by reading Henriques’s theoretical investigation alongside the historical documentation provided by Coester and Bender’s anthology, this is clearly evidenced.
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Référence papier
Sabine Sörgel, « Markus Coester & Wolfgang Bender (eds.), A Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance and Religion », Volume !, 13 : 2 | 2017, 202-203.
Référence électronique
Sabine Sörgel, « Markus Coester & Wolfgang Bender (eds.), A Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance and Religion », Volume ! [En ligne], 13 : 2 | 2017, mis en ligne le 21 avril 2017, consulté le 19 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/volume/5157 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.5157
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