Announcing Creolized Aurality

Self-promotion doesn’t come easy to me, so it is with both a bit of pleasure and a lot of reluctance that I announce that my book Creolized Aurality will come out this Spring with the University of Chicago Press. It is a great honor to have my work sit in the same collection as so many of the titles that have inspired me since I started doing research on Caribbean music.

Je ne suis pas du genre à vanter mon travail. C’est donc avec un peu de plaisir et pas de réticence que j’annonce la sortie ce printemps de mon livre, Creolized Aurality, publié par la University of Chicago Press. C’est un grand honneur que de voir mon livre publié dans la même collection que tant d’autres titres qui m’ont inspiré depuis que j’ai commencé ma recherche sur les musiques de la Caraïbe.

Camal Revised Cover Final

From the press catalog:

In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music—a secular, drum-based tradition—captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island’s decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Auralities, Jérôme Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belonging and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.