Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics

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 Aurality, J r me Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple--and often seemingly contradictory--cultural belongings 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.