“…To refer to the culture of the Caribbean geographically–other than to call it a meta-archipelago–is a debilitating and scarcely productive project…” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 24). Recent trends in ethnomusicology have included a greater emphasis on the study of translocal cultural formations, social processes, and musical idioms, as well as on the processes of globalization and intercultural exchange, and often less emphasis on bounded geographical specificity. This graduate seminar will explore the implications of this shift by examining how various scholars have approached “the Caribbean” through locally situated ethnographic research and how they have engaged with locality, transnationalism, and the conditions of coloniality and post-coloniality? We will consider what value “area studies” still holds in ethnomusicological research? How does one identify an“area” in globalized spaces? And more generally, how and where do we locate “the Caribbean?” We will begin by surveying a number of important early scholars working in the Caribbean basin (Carpentier, Cesaire, Herskovits,Ortiz, among others), assessing how their influence has shaped our present conceptions. We will then turn to a number of scholars from outside of ethnomusicology whose work has exerted considerable influence on more recent scholarship (Benítez-Rojo, Clifford, Duany, Flores, Gilroy Hall, Roach, et.al.). We will finally turn our attention to a number of recent ethnomusicological studies of the Caribbean (Averill, Guilbault, Largey, Moore,Manuel, Ochoa, Veal, Wade, among others) analyzing how each author grapples with the larger questions of place and the post-colonial conditions fully reverberant with varied notions of homeland, diaspora, cultural pride, alienation, and displacement.

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