Here is a videos of an interview with Aimé Césaire late in his life, and another of his funeral in 2008. These can help give you a sense of him as both poet and political figure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gg7q4dTBvU&feature=player_embedded
.
All posts by Laurent Dubois
Ned Sublette on the Haitian Revolution, Louisiana and the Making of American Music
Ned Sublette, who will be visiting Duke this week and coming to our class this coming Thursday, has written two books about music in Louisiana. (You can find out more about these books in this post about his visit). His books explore the ways in which the culture and music of New Orleans and Louisiana came into being, and how they have shaped American culture.
Click here to read about his approach, which he has dubbed “Post-Mamboism”
One of his arguments is that the Haitian Revolution, and the social and demographic transformations it produced in the broader Atlantic world, was “one of the generative explosions of popular music of our hemisphere.”
Here is a short excerpt from an interview he did about his work, in which expands on this idea. Read the full interview, from the magazine BOMB, here.
“Ned: I’ve started to see the Haitian Revolution as one of the generative explosions of the popular music of our hemisphere. We can see evidence for this in all kinds of ways. The tumba francesa — black antiquarian societies of eastern Cuba that dance contradanza to purely African-style drumming — have a dance that they call frenté, in which a drummer sits on his drum and plays a duet with the steps of the male dancer, who is festooned with kerchiefs. It’s almost the same dance I saw a Puerto Rican bomba group from western Puerto Rico do. Bomba — that’s a Kikongo word meaning “secret,” and it shows up in Saint Domingue, in the revolutionary hymn that Moreau-de-St.-Méry wrote down without knowing what it meant:
Eh, eh, bomba! Hen, hen
Canga bafio te
Canga moune de le
Canga do ki la…
The bomba in Puerto Rico shows strong signs of having descended from something that was going on in Saint Domingue (which is the name I prefer to use for pre-revolutionary Haiti.) And I suspect there was something going on in Congo Square very much like this.”
Drawing on this interview with Ned (and, if you wish, on the New Yorker forum) and on your reading of Avengers of the New World for this week, comment on some of the ways in which music shaped the Haitian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution shaped music.
Hope for Haiti Benefit Tonight at Duke
Ned Sublette Visits Duke and Durham February 10th-11th
(Directions to Regulator Bookshop)
Sublette is a remarkable author, musician, and producer who has written about the links between history and music in Cuba and Louisiana. His reading/concert is part of a three-day visit to Duke February 9th-11th, during which he will also participate in a pre-concert conversation with Miguel Zenon organized by Duke Performances.
You can read a preview of his visit from a local fan here.
He has published three major books: Cuba and It’s Music, a sweeping and magisterial investigation of the African, Iberian, and Caribbean sources for Cuban music; The World that Made New Orleans, a history of the city that emphasizes the links between the Caribbean, notably Haiti, and North America, and most recently a memoir on the music and culture of New Orleans, The Year Before the Flood.
A Story from the Haiti Earthquake
UNC graduate student Laura Wagner, an anthropologist who was doing research in Haiti and survived the earthquake, has just published a remarkable and beautiful piece about her experience in the online magazine Salon.
Haiti: A survivor’s story
I was sitting barefoot on my bed, catching up on ethnographic field notes, when the earthquake hit. As a child of the San Francisco area, I was underwhelmed at first. “An earthquake. This is unexpected,” I thought. But then the shaking grew stronger. I had never felt such a loss of control, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world that contained me were being crumpled.
I braced myself in a doorway between the hallway and the kitchen, trying to hold on to the frame, and then a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything as the house collapsed. I was surprised to die in this way, but not afraid. And then I was surprised not to be dead after all. I was trapped, neither lying down nor sitting, with my left arm crushed between the planks of the shattered doorway and my legs pinned under the collapsed roof. Somewhere, outside, I heard people screaming, praying and singing. It was reassuring. It meant the world hadn’t ended.
I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst — tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies.
The Peters Projection Map & Brief Explanation Courtesy of “West Wing”
We’ll begin tomorrow with a brief geographical overview of the French empire, using the now famous Peters Projection Map, which seeks to redress the distorted geographical vision spawned by European cartographers in the sixteenth century. The change is well explained in this amusing clip from “West Wing.”
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/n8zBC2dvERM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution
I worked as the historical consultant for a PBS special on the Haitian Revolution which aired last year called Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. Here (if you can stand seeing your Professor being interviewed) is a short clip from the film describing the story of Toussaint Louverture, whose remarkable life we will discuss during the lecture on Tuesday.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/yvpRpYIZXow" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
February 6th Benefit Concert for Haiti at Duke
Please spread the word and join us for this Benefit concert
PELERINAJ * PELERINAGE * PILGRIMAGE
BENEFIT CONCERT for HAITI by Erol Josue
FEBRUARY 6th, Baldwin Auditorium, Duke University East Campus, 8 p.m.
Listen to Yege Dahomen by Erol Josue
The New York Times has described Josue’s music in this way: “A Haitian singer-songwriter and a recent arrival to New York, Erol Josué has an obsession similar to that of some of his best Brazilian and Cuban contemporaries: connecting the ancient and the future, urban and country, the old and new world in one ball of modernity. On ”Régléman”(Mi5), his first album, Mr. Josué engages in what he calls ”electro-vodou,” which means juxtaposing voodoo-ritual chants with synthesizer tones, overdriven thumb-piano riffs, Afro-funk guitar rhythm, echoey textures. And yet these tracks are all sturdy at the center, folk songs with messages about exile, ecology and the persistence of cultural memory.”
The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Eugene Delacroix painted this image in 1834. It is one of the most famous Orientalist images in French art, and is now the Louvre in Paris.
What is going on in the picture? Who is the intended viewer?
Orientalism Defined by Edward Said
We’ve talked, and you’ve read about, “Orientalism” as a category in the past days. On Thursday we’ll be working through what this term really means, and talking about its usefulness in understanding different moments in French history, as well perhaps as our own. To help with this, here is an excerpt from Edward Said’s classic book Orientalism (1979), which had a major impact on scholarship in a range of fields in the past decades. Get ready — the definition is rather long and complicated!
Here is how Said defines “Orientalism” on p. 12:
. . . Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographic distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power culture (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power more (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do).
