Caribbean transculturations and their global impact

Fernando Ortiz coined the word “transculturation” and introduced it into anthropology in his landmark 1940 book, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, for which Malinowski wrote the introduction; one could therefore say that Ortiz’s numerous works on Afro-Cuban music constitute the beginning of transcultural music studies. Beginning with Ortiz in Cuba and continuing up to 21^st-century postcolonial interventions, this course considers how Caribbean musical sounds and anthropological thought have transformed music, dance, and music studies around the world. Lectures draw on Dr. Hutchinson’s own field and archival research to explore big topics including contact, exploitation, escape, extraction, movement, and postcolonial transformations and to consider genres from sarabande to salsa. Students will be invited to engage with five hundred years of Caribbean sounds, movements, and ideas through listening, dancing, and reading texts in Caribbean and transcultural music studies. Through this process, we will be forced to confront and reconsider European imaginings of the Caribbean and their continuing impact on the ways we hear and think about the world.