Guide to BIPOC musicians and related literature

This thesis is an ethnography and biographical study that examines the impact of the immense socioeconomic changes underway in Cuba at the turn of the 21st century and the flexible identity categories through which individuals navigate a social crisis. The biography and ethnography in this thesis are centered on the life of Violeta Aldama, an aging revolutionary and Afro-Cuban mother who struggles to make ends meet while fighting to steer her son, Brian, through a classical music education and into a music career. Amid growing racial inequalities when many Afro-Cubans are locked out of the most lucrative jobs in the new tourism sector and less likely to have family abroad sending remittances, the booming dance music industry offers the greatest promise for advancement and wealth than possibly any other profession. With the retraction of the state in a growing market economy, Violeta must scramble to build new networks of support while also coming to terms with the idea that the system she fought for all of her life will no longer be able to sustain her son. This study argues that individuals navigate through social crises through identity categories that are both socially constructed and subjectively fluid. In the process, they rely on these identity categories to build new contacts for support while also finding in them meaning and agency. I frame this thesis around three broad identity categories—race, class and national identity. The study also shows how Violeta in turn experienced these categories—as well as motherhood and her revolutionary roles—and the ways that she used them to build networks of support. The thesis is guided by the theory on lo informal developed by scholar Damián Fernández: the split in individuals between ideals and passionate beliefs versus life on the black market to help loved ones survive. The study's methodology draws from feminist ethnography, examining not only Violeta's position in society as an Afro-Cuban woman and aging revolutionary, but also my relationship with her and her son as a white, middle-class American researcher during a time when relationships with foreigners became a crucial means of social advancement. This research bridges academic areas of study regarding Cuba's growing racial inequalities and the rising economic power of the music industry. It also contributes to the academic canon on social movements by highlighting roles of individuals—not just the state or opposition alliances—as social actors.

Latinx students are underrepresented among high school music students in the United States, nationally. However, localized demographics in some parts of the country reveal secondary music programs that are comprised nearly entirely of Latinx students. Still, the experiences of such a large and racially marginalized population as Latinx students remain under-researched in the field of music education. To explore how Latinx racial identity may inform the experiences of Latinx music students and their music teachers, I conducted a post-qualitative study of students and teachers in music classes at large secondary schools in which the Latinx population is 95 percent or more. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with music students and their teachers. To guide my thinking on the role of race in the lives of the participants, I incorporated Omi and Winant’s (2015) theory of racial formation throughout the data analysis. Overall findings indicated that race informs much of the experiences of the participants in varying, sometimes subtle ways. Through racism, racial resistance, the formation of racial identity, and the incorporation of both colorblind ideology and race consciousness, the participants provided nuance as to how we may regard the role and significance of race in music education. Implications for developing a racial-justice-oriented paradigm in music education are also discussed.

Canadian universities are under increasing pressure to address systemic exclusions of Indigenous peoples and knowledges, exclusions that have been perpetrated by residential schools, day schools, and universities. Canadian universities have, increasingly, begun to engage in Indigenization efforts; however, engagement in Indigenization efforts has been inconsistent and uneven within institutions and across the sector. Higher music education, in particular, has done little in terms of engaging in Indigenization, and this research seeks to address this gap. This research engages with six Indigenous musicians who each hold at least one university degree in music in order to hear their experiences in higher music education and to envision an Indigenized higher music education in Canadian universities. This research is, in part, a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action (2015c), specifically Call 62, ii.: We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to: ii. Provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms (p. 331). Call to Action 62, ii provides a framework for thinking about and envisioning what higher music education—or post-secondary music programs—can do to respond to the TRC’s Calls to Action (2015c) in meaningful ways in collaboration with Indigenous peoples, communities, and Nations. This research engages with Ermine’s (2007) conceptualization of the ethical space and McCallum and Perry’s (2018) structures of indifference in order to conceptualize higher music education as structures of difference whereby Indigenous musics, musicians, knowledges, and musical practices are valued and included in ways that go well beyond Indigenous inclusion (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018). The final chapter includes a lengthy list of recommendations, informed by the participants’ stories, for all stakeholders in higher music education, including deans and senior leadership, chairs, faculty, staff, students, patrons and donors, and audience members. The academy has undergone very little structural change (Ottmann, 2013) and the magnitude of what will be required of higher music education in the work of Indigenization will necessitate visionary and courageous leadership.

The Sámi are Indigenous peoples of northern Fenno-Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia). While today the political and cultural initiatives of the Sámi function both nationally and internationally, the Sámi are, and have always been, a group of peoples with their own internal diversity of language, traditions, and lifeways. Similarly to many other Indigenous groups around the world, colonization and exploitation have affected the Sámi, and their homeland Sápmi, since the seventeenth century. Popular genres of music have since the mid-twentieth century been outlets for protesting the unfair treatment of the Sámi, and remain vibrant modes of expression today, used to voice challenges against institutionalized colonialism and the stereotypes and expectations of Indigeneity. Previous scholars in musicology and anthropology have focused their research mostly on the iconic Sámi vocal tradition of joik or reindeer husbandry. However, this dissertation is concerned with how contemporary popular music and multimedia productions by and about Sámi artists, whether they include these explicit ethnic markers or not, engage in forms of decolonial activism or protest, particularly in relation to Sámi conceptions of intersectional ethnicity and gender. Sámi popular music now exists in a variety of multimedia forms, such as music videos, social media content and discourses, feature films, and multimodal activist collaborations with other Indigenous musicians and activists around the world. In these venues, the artists challenge ethnic and gendered assumptions, practice global Indigenous networking and solidarity, and contribute to goals expressed by the Sámi Parliaments such as language and cultural revitalization, environmental protection, and suicide prevention. Online and digital networks created by Indigenous activists often lead to collaborations in the corporeal world as well, where musicians and other artists collaborate as parts of larger projects and festivals. This dissertation examines the overlaying structures and issues, as well as several case studies, of each of these types of multimedia expressions, and provides insight into the topics, aesthetics, and political causes that are relevant to Sámi artists making music in twenty-first century Fenno-Scandinavia.

This dissertation examines the role an arts-based educational program played in unleashing youth's creativity as they confront various structures of power that become challenges to social identity, belonging, and self, under different local and national circumstances. My research questions considered how Indigenous youth utilized a photography and hip hop based educational program as a resource to explore social identity and relations, indigeneity, place/space, and the legacy of settler colonialism on education. I also considered how the findings from this study informed and contribute to decolonize Indigenous youth studies and how programs such as mine help Indigenous youth comprehend crisis in the urban environment. This critical ethnography found that in some cases cultural and racial identity existed more internally than externally for youth, with the complexities and contradictions the Indigenous Young Adults (IYAs) face when coming to terms with their social identity. The results showed how much youth grapple with the idea of looking Native and the desire to be more phenotypically Indian as defined by dominant society. The stories of the IYAs became vital to learning about the challenges they faced and obstacles they have overcome, including fighting for recognition under the Indian Act, border politics within Canada and the US, not knowing one's traditional land, and barriers to migrating to the city independently of one's family. Regarding the legacy of settler colonialism on education, of particular interest was how schooling upholds settler colonial ideals and what we can do to dismantle these ideals so that our students are represented in truthful ways. The findings indicated how youth learned about Indigenous cultures in schools and how they were represented in the curriculum. Throughout this project the intent was to propose ways to decolonize education through the arts. It also revealed the positive accomplishments that IYAs worked towards and the ways they show extreme resilience in the light of legacies of settler colonialism on their communities.

The dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of black subjectivity. Using selections from popular artists Erykah Badu, OutKast, and Janelle Monáe as case studies, I demonstrate how these artists use Afrofuturist speculative thought to inform their music, videos, and overall aesthetic, especially as it relates to style, form, and temporality. Scholarship of black popular music in general, specifically rap and hip-hop, is typically musicological or ethnomusicological in nature, focusing on extra-musical aspects like history, linguistics, and cultural impact. This project incorporates theoretical analysis so as to bring into sharper relief the complex intertextualities within black popular music. My methodology melds pre-existing interdisciplinary literature with traditional and non-traditional musical analysis to better analyze unique sonic phenomena employed by Afrofuturist musicians as well as contextualizing these phenomena in what I call “Afrofuturist space.” These analyses demonstrate how future scholarship on Afrofuturist music can remain sensitive to its Afrofuturist context, while expanding theoretical frameworks to better deal with issues of teleology, cyclicity, and interconnected musical narrative in black popular music.

To demonstrate the contested and complex nature of "black" music in the 1980s and 1990s—a time in which representations of blackness played an increasingly prominent role in U.S. popular culture—this dissertation comprises a series of four case studies exploring the work of various musicians in multiple genres. Analyzing the artistic strategies, discursive tensions, and historical legacies informing their work, each chapter treats black music as a cultural practice deeply embedded at the center of twentieth century life, including numerous racialized contexts. The first chapter documents the influence of Black nationalism and avant-garde jazz in the creative lives of Asian American jazz musicians, showing how, in the 1980s, they were inspired by the music of the 1960s to cultivate their own musical identities. The second chapter compares producer/rapper Dr. Dre's seminal album The Chronic (1993) to his work on gangsta rap group N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton (1988), exploring how the sound and imagery of gangsta rap responded to particular facets of Los Angeles's urban geography. The third chapter explores how soul singer D'Angelo opposes the male-centered materialism of mainstream rap music by offering listeners a reconstructed musical experience of Afro-Diasporic spirituality. The fourth and final chapter analyzes Eminem's use of parody as an artistic strategy for authenticating himself as a white rapper, revealing that his ironic performance of white identity provided a site where listeners could debate the continuing significance of whiteness vis-à-vis blackness. Like race itself, black music is a socially constructed phenomenon. Paying attention to its sounds, as well as the discourse surrounding it, grants us insight into how musicians, fans, and critics negotiate, and at times contest, issues of race and politics through music.

A look at Southern New England Native American communities by looking at the whaling industry and how they defined their sense of community with African Americans during the seventeenth century to early nineteenth century. This study looks at how Native peoples defined their own communities and identities and founds ways to resist the larger Anglo-American narrative that emphasized identity being defined race.

his dissertation explores the active roles of ritual music known as xochitl sones (flower-musical pieces) or sones de costumbre (musical pieces of the tradition), in the context of la costumbre Nahua religion of eastern Mexico. This multi-sited research is based on twelve months of ethnomusicological research conducted in 2010-2011 among several Nahua towns in the municipality of Chicontepec, Veracruz. The main focus of research is the town of Ixcacuatitla located at the foothill of the Postectli Mountain, an active ceremonial center for Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua ethnic groups. By primarily looking at conceptualizations concerning the chicomexochitl ceremony offered to mountains, this study shows how ritual music articulates participation and emotional engagement in order to bring the rainfall that is essential for agricultural production. The musical repertoire consists of about 150 musical pieces that are arranged according to the events, actions, and deities represented in the ceremony. The characteristics of the musical elements and the large structure of pieces paralleling the events configures the engagement of the participating audiences in the performance of the ceremony. Over a period of days, congregations and dedicated ritual specialists gather to prepare and present large amounts of offerings including food and animal sacrifices. While all engage in the different activities, dancing together to the rhythm of the violin, jarana and huapanguera is one of the most representative aspects of participation, where emotions such as weeping and joy are offered to the Chicomexochitl deity. This dissertation argues that the relevance of music and dance in articulating such emotional involvement directly corresponds to the value attributed to participation in the system of communal reciprocity, which is a basic principle of socialization in these Nahua towns and further enables an interaction with the sacred landscape.

This thesis examines how music can function as an anti-colonial weapon. By adopting an Indigenous anti-colonial framework, this thesis critically examines how music as a public medium can transgress dominant, racist narratives and create powerful avenues through which Aboriginal identity can be articulated and experienced by Aboriginal people. Ten formal interviews were conducted with Aboriginal musicians, traditional singers, and behind the scenes music industry people involved with the Aboriginal community of Toronto. Interview candidates included singers from local drum groups, such as Eagle Heart Singers, Red Spirit Singers, Morning Star River, and Spirit Wind. Award winning musicians such as Lucie Idlout, Leela Gilday, and Derek Miller also contributed their insights, as well as the founder of Rez Bluez, Elaine Bomberry. These interviews uncovered that, within Toronto, music is building vital connections to Aboriginal cultures, generating visibility of contemporary Aboriginal identities within public realms, and fostering relationships between Black and Aboriginal communities through musical genres such as blues and hip-hop. Overall, this thesis argues that music has the potential to be a revolutionary tool that Aboriginal people can use to decolonize themselves and their nations.

This is an ethnography of contemporary Ainu music; i.e. aural expression in the lives of people who identify as descendants of the original inhabitants of Hokkaido and other regions in and around northern Japan. Many of the Ainu people described here are activists who are committed to preserving their ancestors’ songs, which reference traditional human/animal relationships and pre-colonial ways of life. There are also Ainu people who are ambivalent towards this repertoire but nevertheless connect with their ancestral lands and align with current political debates through aural techniques that their ancestors developed and passed on. Importantly, this research is also about non-Ainu people, particularly environmentalists who are interested in, and committed to, learning Ainu traditions, often directly from Ainu people. In many cases, they view these traditions as closer to nature than their own customs for reasons discussed throughout. In the following pages, I address an influx of support for Ainu music among non-Ainu environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, especially after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. I use ethnographic case studies to show how, even when Ainu aural expressions are misunderstood by outsiders, the intellectual legacy of Indigenous ancestors is accessible and presently undergoing rapid development by way of the music-making practices of contemporary Ainu people. While, as one Ainu language teacher put it, “Ainu are not ecologists,” my interlocutors have, indeed, encouraged many people in contemporary Japan to rethink categories like nature, music, and humanity.

This multiple-case study explores the intricacies of three Community Music (CM) initiatives in Puerto Rico—La Junta, Decimanía, and Taller Tambuyé—and realizes comparisons between them, specifically as related to theories of music pedagogy. The research focuses on the teaching and learning dynamics of three of Puerto Rico’s traditional musical genres—Plena, Bomba, and Música Campesina—which have survived for centuries through oral transmission and enculturation within community settings. Seldom have these communal dynamics or the learning processes that occur in such environments been studied. The research found that, even though the idiosyncrasies and modus operandi diverge among the initiatives, the ways in which community educators, participants, and leaders learn have little variation. The educational practices and the sustainability efforts of the Community Music initiatives provide a fertile ground for the development of higher level and K-12 music education programs rooted in Puerto Rican music.

There have been moments in our history when certain groups of people have unjustly been deprived of their freedom. This especially rings true for Black people who have endured over 100 years of slavery and still continue to experience institutionalized racism.This thesis addresses how the musical styles of the Spirituals, Gospel, the Blues, Reggae, Rap and Hip Hop have created a powerful venue for Black people of African descent to express their feelings regarding racial discrimination and society at large. It includes analysis of the origins of the these genres of music and examines the various ways that they have served as a means of resistance, voice and social transformation.In order to deal with the horrors of slavery, this disenfranchised group of people resorted to other outlets that served as a means of survival; their music. Thus, music came to represent not only a form of entertainment, but a mode of communication, resistance, voice and essentially survival. It is about the spirit of enslaved people and their ability to overcome.

In the decade after the end of World War I, popular music and musicians traveled rapidly along a vast imperial entertainment circuit stretching along the Asian littoral from Bombay to Yokohama. Manila was a central node in this circuit and Filipinos, in particular, were critical to the emergence of what we might call colonial Asia’s jazz age. Filipinos, along with performers and dancers from the U.S., England, Australia, and Hawaii, formed a new class of musical workers that arose from and contributed to the transformations of local music economies and leisure practices largely brought about by the imperial circulation of popular music and practices of colonial governance. Focusing on various facets of the world inhabited by these migrant musicians allows us to craft a new story about the circulation and significance of jazz. By bringing into alignment three analytical orientations – musical circulation, racial ideologies, and musical labor – I argue for an approach to jazz in 1920s colonial Asia as an anarchic imperial force whose unpredictability so often mapped out patterns of contradiction. I explore how jazz became both a force of U.S. empire yet also a medium of possibility in the production of multiple social forums and fields. I examine different facets of colonial Asia’s jazz age – including the work of Filipino migrant musicians, composers of popular music in Manila, Filipina professional dancers, and African American musicians in Asia – to reveal the various cultural contradictions that emerged from the circulation of popular music in the 1920s. I seek to show how jazz was both dominating yet enabling, neither solely a music of anticolonial revolution nor a musical force that only perpetuated U.S. empire. Recognizing and parsing out the ambiguous nature of imperial popular music is critical for understanding how jazz acquired meaning in colonial Asia. I suggest that it is only by unveiling the contradictory workings of jazz that we can begin to grasp the significance of its performance and experience as a modern musical practice.

This thesis explores the symbolic place occupied by a racialized neighbourhood within the Uruguayan national imaginary. I study the conventillos (tenement buildings) of two traditionally Afro-Uruguayan neighbourhoods in Montevideo, Barrio Sur and Palermo. These neighbourhoods are considered the cradle of Afro-Uruguayan culture and identity. The conventillos have been immortalized in paintings, souvenirs, songs, and books. Over the years most of the residents were evicted due to demolitions, which peaked during Uruguay's military dictatorship (1973-1984). I address the paradox of how a community can be materially marginalized, yet symbolically celebrated, a process that is evident in other American nations (Brazil, Colombia, etc.). I show how race, class, and gender are entangled in folkloric depictions of the conventillo to constitute a limited notion of blackness that naturalizes the relationship between Afro-Uruguayans, music, sexuality, and domestic work. The folklorization of the space and it residents is shown to be a "fetishization" which enhances the whiteness of the national identity, while confining the parameters of black citizenship and belonging.Utilizing a methodology that draws on cultural geography, critical race, postcolonial, and feminist theory, my dissertation analyzes the various ways that the Barrio Sur/Palermo conventillo has been imagined, represented, and experienced. Specifically, I examine 1) autobiographical, literary and popular (media, songs) narratives about these neighbourhoods; 2) the depiction of the conventillo by a prominent artist (Carlos Paez Vilaro); 3) spatial practices; 4) the performance of a dancer who emerged from the conventillo to become a national icon (the Carnival vedette Rosa Luna); and 5) interviews with nine key informants. My analysis focuses on how bodies, subjects, and national belonging are constituted through relations to particular spaces. By foregrounding the "geographies of identity" (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996, p. 27), I show that the symbolic celebration of black space goes hand in hand with material disavowal. This study thus connects the imagining of a local, racialized space to how national belonging is constituted and experienced.

This research is an ethnography exploring the contemporary music practices of the indigenous people of Taitung, a southeastern county in Taiwan. Indigenous people make up a large proportion of the population of Taitung, and their music has in recent years been used in international and local events to potray a unique Taiwanese identity. I discuss how indigenous and other Taiwanese have collaborated to create this identity - the Taiwanese-ness - and how they have done so with tangled webs of concerns for authenticity, hybridisation and Otherness. I examine two opposite approaches in heredity and maintenance of the tradition: first, sticking to locality, and therefore passing down the tradition in a functional way; second, endorsing and appropriating transnational pop practices in order to garner commercial success. I argue that living experience - the familiarity to a musical culture which Mantle Hood (1982) considered the way that enabled ethnic groups to understand and evaluate their own musical traditions - is essential and irreplaceable. Hence, affiliation to a homeland, as depicted through notions of mountain and sea, becomes a key element in the self-identity of musicians as 'indigenous' (yuanzhumin in Mandarin, meaning 'original inhabitants'), and that the homeland, as the place of ancestors, allows indigenous groups to safeguard their traditions. However, indigenous Taiwanese are comfortable with and uphold a shared culture that was brought to the island by Han migrants, and this is evident in the influences of trans-cultural commercial and global Mandopop. Musicians tend to apply elements of their traditions such as indigenous languages, pentatonicism, ancient songs, specific rhythms and the incorporation of non-lexical vocables, wherever they can, using a bricolage approach. At the same time, musicians enrich the music culture, keeping tradition alive by adding to it in reciprocal ways elements from the outside, but also introducing the po­tential for cultural 'grey-out' as elements of traditional music are altered. Keywords: Taitung, indigenous people, music practices, mountain and sea, Taiwanese-ness.

This dissertation studies traditional and popular music of the Wixárika (a.k.a. Huichol) people of western Mexico, focusing especially on the phenomenon of Wixárika musicians who intentionally represent themselves as indigenous “Huichol” people yet perform popular Mexican music primarily for non-indigenous audiences. This phenomenon markets ethnic identity within regional and transnational music industries, following in the footsteps of Wixárika people who have successfully inserted their arts and crafts into global markets. The process of becoming indigenous cosmopolitan capitalists is partly the result of direct assimilatory projects directed by early Mexican anthropologists and the indirect outcome of over a century of Huichol identity construction for consumption, aided greatly by foreign ethnographers and other outsiders. On one hand, the commodification of identity through handicrafts, art, and music generates income for the Wixárika people, and the resultant visibility—sometimes international in scale—may strengthen them politically as Indigenous people. Conversely, the process simultaneously supplants some of the very elements they consider central to Wixárika culture. Musicians often leave their homelands to pursue their craft, making it difficult or impossible to participate in community affairs and ceremonies, and leaving their children bereft of Wixárika language and “customs.” Such people who represent the “customs” but do not practice them are sometimes disparaged as “half disqualified” or “Huichol de pirata” (pirated Huichol), illuminating identity's commodity form. As the first Engliss-language study of Wixárika music, this dissertation examines the paradox of identity commodification, developing a tripartite model of identity that shows the vital (albeit sometimes inadvertent) role of ethnography in defining the essence of the commodity form of Huichol identity.