Angélique Kidjo's Celia: Tribute Album as Black Diasporic Study

• In Event: Refusing the Nation, Theorizing Black Belonging - Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, pt. 2

Description for Program

Angélique Kidjo’s 2019 album, Celia, pays homage to Celia Cruz, covering ten songs from the Afro-Cuban singer’s time with the Sonora Matancera in 1950s Havana, to the 1970s with the Fania All-Stars, and her crossover success in the 1990s. With stripped down instrumentation, changes in time, added call-and-response, and the melding of Afro-Cuban genres with Afrobeats, Kidjo's joyful riffs on Cruz demonstrate a careful study of her songbook. Further, Kidjo's renditions underscore the undeniable Africanness of Cruz's original sound, one which has historically been taken up as a soundtrack to Latinidad and its narratives of racial harmony through mestizaje that place blackness in a folkloric past. Alongside notable black tribute albums, from Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Duke Ellington Songbook (1957) to Meshell Ndegeocello's 2024 tribute to James Baldwin, Kidjo’s record offers a unique opportunity to interrogate the tribute album as a method of black diasporic study. Engaging the album’s musical and visual stylings and Kidjo’s reflections on Cruz, this presentation will show how Kidjo’s recitation contributes to our understanding of the ongoing cultural exchange shared between Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa and how the tribute album, as black feminist archival performance, expands our knowledge of Cruz herself.

Author

• John Mundell, Washington University in St. Louis