Freedom Sounds: Notes on Emancipation Day and Meaningful Music in Rural Jamaica
CONVERSATION: “Freedom Sounds: Notes on Emancipation Day and Meaningful Music in Rural Jamaica”
With Ted Sammons, Ph.D. Program in Anthropology
First installation of the Africana Studies Dissertation Discussions Fall 2011 -Spring 2012 | Presented by Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC)
Wednesday, February 28 | 12-2pm
The Graduate Center, Room 8301, located at 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016
Open to the public and a light lunch will be served
Admission: FREE
As part of IRADAC’s commitment, to create an environment which elevates the academic experience of students at the Graduate Center, members of the Africana Studies Group are invited to lecture to an audience, consisting primarily of their peers, on dissertation/research topics. These lectures are designed to facilitate intellectual exchange between graduate students. The general configuration of these events will be a lecture followed by discussions, comments and question & answer. All dates are on Fridays.
“Freedom Sounds: Notes on Emancipation Day and Meaningful Music in Rural Jamaica”
Ted Sammons, Ph.D. Program in Anthropology
Since the late 1990s, a central Jamaican town called Middle Rock has hosted an annual festival commemorating the abolition of slavery. Middle Rock’s Emancipation Day Festival draws crowds from the region and abroad, enticing locals and foreigners alike to spend August 1st amid its green hills and cool air. However in promotional materials it is cultural heritage, and particularly Middle Rock’s initial settlement as a coffee estate during the era of plantation slavery, that forms the foundation of the event. In fact, organizers explained, revenues are secondary to the imperative of providing an opportunity for people to consider the legacies of slavery and abolition as they exist in the present. Given the ideal that the festival should have an effect on how people imagine emancipation, this paper first briefly outlines the foundation of Middle Rock as a post-emancipation “free village,” then identifies some differences of opinion regarding how to arrange the event’s centerpiece daylong musical program in order to accomplish this most effectively.
Finally it shifts focus to consider music that was audible at the festival in 2010. What aspects of its performance and audition - what Christopher Small called practices of musicking - might unify the variety of forms which constituted the broader category of Emancipation Day music that year? If a central purpose of Middle Rock’s annual festival is to provoke those in attendance to think about the constitution of freedom, what was the nature of the music’s contribution?
