Project MUSE®: American Music - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Music.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 27 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: American MusicTWOProject MUSE®American Music1945-23490734-4392Latest articles in American Music. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Guest Editor's Introduction: Resonance, Repetition, and Futurity Across the West Indian Archipelago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983807
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In 1963, the Grenada-born, Trinidad-honed Mighty Sparrow stepped onto the Grand Stand stage at Queen's Park Savannah and sang "Dan Is the Man in the Van," a buoyant calypso stitched from English schoolbook verses. Carnival spectators already knew the drill—this was Sparrow's fourth Calypso Monarch title, but his first after Trinidad and Tobago's 1962 independence from Britain. By yoking British children's rhymes to a slow and steady calypso form, he exposes how deeply British colonial pedagogy had burrowed into Caribbean muscle memory. The song opens on a dubious promise of upward mobility:
According to the education
You get when you small
You will grow up with true ambition
And respect from one and all …
But
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallGuest Editor's Introduction: Resonance, Repetition, and Futurity Across the West Indian Archipelago2026-02-25text/htmlen-USGuest Editor's Introduction: Resonance, Repetition, and Futurity Across the West Indian Archipelago2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®441582026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25Rézonans: Guadeloupean Dance as Fugitive History in the French Capital
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983808
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In France and its territories, there is a strange tension regarding colonial history. On the one hand there are the openings of museums dedicated to the slave trade, like the Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe. On the other are the greatly muted discussions of French colonialism in the curriculum. There is a proliferation of days commemorating the victims and abolitions of slavery.1 And yet there is a persistent refusal to engage with the legacy of racial discrimination born alongside and within colonial plantations. As Ann Laura Stoler points out, the French seem to suffer from collective colonial aphasia.2 More than amnesia, they struggle to build a consistent vocabulary with which to address the nation's colonial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallRézonans: Guadeloupean Dance as Fugitive History in the French Capital2026-02-25text/htmlen-USRézonans: Guadeloupean Dance as Fugitive History in the French Capital2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®961792026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25Calypso Rose, Trailblazer and Caribbean Icon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983809
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The subject of this article is the extraordinary career of Linda McCartha Monica Sandy-Lewis, best known by her calypso sobriquet, Calypso Rose.2 She is the most celebrated and awarded female calypsonian in Caribbean history, serving as a trailblazer for women in the calypso art form. Rose is widely regarded as one of the greatest calypsonians of her generation and has written approximately eight hundred songs and recorded more than twenty albums to date. This article focuses on representative examples of the rich body of musical works Rose has composed, recorded, and performed for over five decades. Rose's songs have addressed many topics, including aspects of gender relations, advice to women, and female sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallCalypso Rose, Trailblazer and Caribbean Icon2026-02-25text/htmlen-USCalypso Rose, Trailblazer and Caribbean Icon2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®904832026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25Futurity and the Dancehall Queer/Quare: Shenseea's Reclamations of Feminine Power
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983810
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"Queerness is always on the horizon."1"Why would a culture that thrives on the new repeatedly go back to the old?"2Analyzing songs and music videos by dancehall performer Shenseea, I offer a critique of modern Jamaican dancehall music's formations of gendered performance and quare identity. I use E. Patrick Johnson's term "quare" to acknowledge Black LGBTQIA existence in the Caribbean and explore homophobia alongside the quiet, though impactful, contributions of quare individuals in dancehall music and the spaces its sound governs.3 I argue that lyrical messages and visual performances of female agency and sexual power in modern dancehall music are reclamations of sensual knowledge that articulate shifting cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallFuturity and the Dancehall Queer/Quare: Shenseea's Reclamations of Feminine Power2026-02-25text/htmlen-USFuturity and the Dancehall Queer/Quare: Shenseea's Reclamations of Feminine Power2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®1108812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25Listening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños (Roundtable Transcript)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983811
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Let's start somewhere near the beginning, or at least at a site of return. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Carib-beanist ethnomusicologists gathered virtually for a roundtable at the Society for Ethnomusicology's (SEM) annual meeting. That roundtable, titled "(Re)Positioning the Caribbean: Practical and Theoretical Issues in Caribbean Ethnomusicology," marked an effort to name the ongoing limitations shaping Caribbean music scholarship. Even within SEM's Latin America and Caribbean section (LACSEM)—founded in 2007 as a space of support for the region's scholarship—research, it seemed, remained fragmented. The Spanish-speaking Caribbean often floated apart from work on the Anglophone
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallListening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños (Roundtable Transcript)2026-02-25text/htmlen-USListening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños (Roundtable Transcript)2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®843332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25"Ghost Sounds": Don Cherry's Trumpeting as a Haunting of the Human
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983812
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The magnificent trumpet tones of Hebrew Scripture, transmuted and oddly changed, became a strange new gospel. All that was Beauty, all that was Love, all that was Truth, stood on the top of these mad mornings and sang with the stars. A great human sob shrieked in the wind, and tossed its tears upon the sea,—free, free, free.1The question of what makes music sound human haunts contemporary culture and has become increasingly important to music scholars in recent years.2 For many of jazz's most prominent innovators, the question of "sounding human" arose amid the dehumanizing logics of racism. Frequently rendered infrahuman by primitivist discourses, musicians as diverse as Bubber Miley, Tricky Sam Nanton, B. B.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmall"Ghost Sounds": Don Cherry's Trumpeting as a Haunting of the Human2026-02-25text/htmlen-US"Ghost Sounds": Don Cherry's Trumpeting as a Haunting of the Human2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®1334252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25Black Holograms: Techno-Necropolitical Performance of Blackness and Its Eradication
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983813
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I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.Eram quod es, eris quod sum.1A fervent and outspoken fanbase thinks that the likes of Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson are still alive, living out their days shrouded in secrecy, under assumed names. Such conspiracies partly fueled the first pop music resurrection. In 2012, Tupac made a surprise appearance at Coachella,2 though he had been dead for over a decade. And Michael Jackson moonwalked straight out of the great beyond into a 2014 performance at the Billboard Music Awards,3 performing "Slave to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/448/image/coversmallBlack Holograms: Techno-Necropolitical Performance of Blackness and Its Eradication2026-02-25text/htmlen-USBlack Holograms: Techno-Necropolitical Performance of Blackness and Its Eradication2026-02-252026TWOProject MUSE®1235872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-25