Music and Festival Culture: Connections, Interconnections and Disconnections across the diaspora

• In Event: Music, Performance, and Memorialization of Ritual

Description for Program

This paper will place focus on the connections, interconnections and disconnections between expressions of festival culture between Trinidad and Tobago and New York City. Festival culture will be operationalized to mean “festival music” and as a subset of that, the genre which will be explored will be Calypso and its various hybrid forms of kaisofusion like Calypso-jazz, Calypso-R&B and Calypso-pop. The backdrop for this work is set against ongoing research taking place on the musical relationships and synergies between musicians, songwriters, Calypso orators, background singers, Calypsonians and other contributors to Calypso music who participate in the festival culture of Trinidad Carnival who were birthed in Trinidad and Tobago but migrated and now reside in New York City.
Important to this scholarship is the perspective that festival culture is not limited to time or space but can be realized, created and re-created where the performer is. Further, credit must be given to the impact of migratory movements and the reality of cultural transfer and their ability to shift the power differentials and transform cultural expressions in new places and spaces.

Authors

• Meagan Sylvester, Queens College - CUNY

• Chenzira Davis Kahina