This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework. We will explore a series of Caribbean musical practices by illustrating the many ways that social and cultural issues and questions of identity are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts/concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, memory, belief, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the week, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music, ranging from calypso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dancehall to zouk. We will complete our survey by reading Mek Some Noise, a book that explores a very specific nexus of music and belief that illustrates all of these themes in a more focused, ethnographic context. At the conclusion of this course, you will have listened to a great deal of music, you will have debated the central issues that arise from the readings, and you will be poised to formulate your own, informed opinions regarding Caribbean Musics and Diaspora.

Timothy Rommen is a specialist in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, diaspora, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Rommen is particularly interested in exploring the connections that continue dynamically to grow between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. He was a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center for Black Music Research (2004-2005). His first book, entitled "Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007), was awarded the Alan P. Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2008. The prize recognizes the most distinguished, published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology. He is a contributing author to and editor of Excursions in World Music, and a contributor to the Cambridge History of World Music (forthcoming). His articles and reviews appear in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, the Black Music Research Journal, the Latin American Music Review, The World of Music, The New West Indian Guide, the Journal of Religion, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Journal of Anthropological Research, the International Dictionary of Black Composers, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. His current projects include a monograph, entitled "Funky Nassau": Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (forthcoming, University of California Press); an edited collection in collaboration with Dan Neely, entitled Sun, Sound, and Sand: Reflections on Music Touristics in the Circum-Caribbean; and a musical ethnography of the West Indian community in Philadelphia.