Music and the performance of identity on Marie-Galante, French Antilles
By: by Ron Emoff.
Series: SOAS musicology series
Publisher: Ashgate; Routledge
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Burlington, VT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 210
ISBN-13: 9780754665656
Subjects: Folk music -- Guadeloupe -- Marie-Galante -- History and criticism; Marie-Galante (Guadeloupe) -- Social life and customs
Description: "Marie-Galante is a small island situated in the Caribbean to the south of Guadeloupe. The majority of Marie-Galantais are descendants of the slave era, though a few French settlers also occupy the island. Along with its neighbours Guadeloupe and Martinique, Marie-Galante forms an official departement of France. Marie-Galante historically has never been an independent polity. Marie-Galantais express sentiments of being 'deux fois colonise', or twice colonized, concomitant with their sense of insularity from a global organization of place. Dr Ron Emoff translates this pervasive sense of displacement into the concept of the 'non-nation'. Musical practices on the island provide Marie-Galantais with a means of re-connecting with other significant distant places. Many Marie-Galantais display a 'split-subjectivity', embracing an African heritage, a French association and a Caribbean regionalism. This book is unique, in part, with regard to its treatment of a particular mode of self-consciousness, expressed musically, on a virtually forgotten Caribbean island. The book also combines literary, narrative, historical and musical sources to theorize a postcolonial subsurreal in the French Antilles."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: An out-of-the-way island; title: Tradition and official versions of history; title: Aimé Césaire, language, and the subsurreal; title: Gwo ka drumming and claiming a sound place; title: Being/not being French : Kadril; title: Mayoleur, the festival stage, Rastafarianism; title: Conclusion : histories within histories.