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Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban Latin and salsa to disco and rap, is overwhelmingly neo-African. Created in the midst of war and military invasion, and filtered through a largely European outlook, these musical forms are completely modern in their sensibilities: they are in fact the very sounds of modern life. But the African religious philosophy at their core involved a longing for earlier eras - ones that pre-dated the technological discipline of labor forced on captive populat...

While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences-notably anthropology-an...

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh read out the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence over a makeshift wired loudspeaker system to thousands of listeners in Hanoi. Five days later, Ho's Viet Minh forces set up a clandestine radio station using equipment brought to Southeast Asia by colonial traders. The revolutionaries garnered support for their coalition on air by interspersing political narratives with red music (nhạc đỏ). Voice of Vietnam Radio (VOV) grew from these communist and colonial fou...

One of the largely unseen consequences of the European colonisation of Aotearoa was that the playing of, and knowledge about the traditional musical instruments of the Maori almost completely disappeared. In the 1970s a young Pakeha schoolteacher, Richard Nunns, started asking questions of his Maori friends about these instruments, which sparked a 40-year journey of rediscovery. Over that time Richard has become internationally recognised as the leading figure in the revival of taonga puoro, alo...

Poems in praise of Kālī, Hindu deity; translated from Bengali with notes.

The century of English musical history covered here is notorious for its failure of creativity, yet the concurrent obsession with music as a commodity belies the notion of England as "the land without music". This book is a social history of music at that time. It focuses on the Castells, a family of English musicians in Ireland, England, Mauritius and Australia over five generations. Drawn from personal letters and documents, their story, at once picaresque and tragic, is fascinating in its own...

Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first book to situate non-Western music within the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It covers many crucial issues -- race,orientalism, otherness, evolution -- and explores the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music. The book also considers a wide range of other writings of the period, from psychology and travel literature to musicology and theories...