Charissa Granger, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Thursday 3 October 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01
Discarded 55-gallon oil barrels were used for music-making in
1930s colonial Trinidad and Tobago – a period deeply shaped by discrimination
of these performers. Often standing at the beginning of personal and political
consciousness, music empowered participants, giving a sense of self-regard and
-respect by mixing and transforming materials and musical structures, forming
symphonic steelorchestras.
Many music-making practices throughout the Caribbean are tightly
connected to discourses of resistance. Such attempts to understand music always
depart from a conception of music in response to hegemony, marginalization, and
colonial oppression. In this colloquium, Charissa Granger wants to delink from
exclusively understanding music as resistance and to create alternatives that
reflect a border practice (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006) that embraces a
love-ethic (hooks 2000; 2001) that is not solely in response to the colonial
matrix of power, but moves beyond it through performance and music. She seeks
to analyze musical performance as the epistemology of the exteriority. Such an
exploration engages with self-knowledge, self-determination, self-critique and
self-possession and how this takes place in the communion generated by
performing together. Granger
examines steelpan music and performance as a decolonial epistemology, asking:
What would an
understanding of coloniality, decoloniality and border thinking contribute to
understanding steelband music and performance? How can we take into account
non-textual forms of knowledge, generated by marginalized people, in the
distribution of intellectual and political labor?
Considering steelband as a decolonial practice and thereby
examining the epistemology of the exterior necessarily entails understanding
the creation of strategies in music not to simply respond to the colonial
matrix of power, but to disengage from it, particularly through
recomposing/arranging music.
Charissa
Granger is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoc LEaDing Fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam,
Netherlands. Charissa’s research foci are on how Caribbean and Afro-diaspora
music-making practices generate knowledge, concentrating on music’s
relationship to postcolonial and decolonial experiences.