Peter Hoesing, David Garcia, Patricia Tang

Peter Hoesing
Claflin University, South Carolina

Peter Hoesing serves as Assistant Professor of Music History and Ethnomusicology at Claflin University. He received a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Florida State University College of Music in 2011. His background as a singer and percussionist inform a variety of teaching and research interests ranging from choral music history to the music of Ugandan spiritual healers. He is presently working on a book manuscript entitled Kusamira: Music and the Social Reproduction of Wellness in Uganda. His research has been generously supported by Florida State University, Fulbright-Hays, the Mellon Foundation, the Smith Educational Trust and UNCF Mellon Programs. Hoesing’s published work appears in African Music, the Journal of Africana Religions and Ethnomusicology.

A World Culture in African-American Music: the Struggle for Identity in the Ugandan Diaspora

In Ugandan diasporic communities around the United States, religious gatherings and life-cycle events such as weddings and funerals constitute primary venues for cultural expression. Frustrated by younger generations’ disinterest in preserving continental African identity, these communities often use music and dance to retain youthful interest. Music at social gatherings bridges generational gaps. It creates opportunities for historic revival and ongoing innovation in the formation of cultural identity. Ultimately, it reveals moments of both social fission and cultural fusion.

This paper follows the marriage of two Ugandan expatriates. It begins in Boston with the performance of a kinship ritual wherein the bride introduced the groom to her family. The weekend involves a variety of Ugandan and English-language church music, traditional and popular selections at the introduction, and more popular styles at the after-party. Musical performance and reception reveal both inter-generational cleavage within the families and cultural unity in Boston’s broader Ugandan community. Two years later, the couple’s wedding ceremony and reception in Chicago again highlights the prominence of music in the negotiation of diasporic identities. These events reveal links among diasporic Ugandan communities in the U.S. and provide compelling opportunities to examine how musical life informs and reflects cultural identity.

David Garcia
University of North Carolina

David Garcia is an Associate Professor of Music in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the music of Latin America and the United States with an emphasis on black music and history. He teaches undergraduate courses in the music of Latin America, world music & jazz and graduate seminars in ethnomusicology, music of the African diaspora and popular music. His book Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006) was awarded a Certificate of Merit in the category Best Research in Folk, Ethnic or World Music by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in 2007. He is currently writing his second book titled The Logic of Black Music’s African Origins: Music, Africa, and Race in the mid-Twentieth Century which critically examines the constructions of black music’s African origins in mid-twentieth century discourse. 

“Negroes Sing Their Pain”: Arsenio Rodríguez and the Afro-Latin Presence in the United States during the Black Power Movement

In 1969 Afro-Cuban composer Arsenio Rodríguez stepped onto the stage at the Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. to perform music of the Abakuá, Congo, and Lucumí. Prior to taking the stage, Rodríguez had a conversation with the program organizer, Bernice Reagon, correcting her assumption that he would be singing in Spanish by saying “No, no! No Spanish. Lucumí! African! African!” This paper documents Rodríguez’s performances at the Festival of American Folklife and the Newport Folklife Festival in 1964 and analyzes these performances’ significance in the context of the emerging Black Power movement. The perspectives Rodríguez articulated at these performances concerning racial discrimination, black cultural nationalism, urban poverty, and black consciousness anticipated those which Black Power activists would take up. Rodríguez also had a direct impact on African American activists such as Reagon who identified with the goals of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Rodríguez’s performances at these festivals suggest that Civil Rights and Black Power scholars need to consider the perspectives of Afro-Latin@s whose experiences with racism demonstrate both commonalities and differences with those of their African American counterparts.

Panel Chair: Patricia Tang
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

An Associate Professor of Music at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Patricia Tang received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2001. She is an ethnomusicologist specializing in West African music. She is the author of Masters of the Sabar: Wolof Griot Percussionists of Senegal (Temple University Press, 2007) and  founder and co-director of Rambax, MIT’s Senegalese drum ensemble. She received an AAUW American Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2006-2007 for her second book project, Africa Fête and the Globalization of Afropop. As a violinist, she has performed and recorded with African artists Nder et le Setsima Group, Positive Black Soul, Balla Tounkara, Balla Kouyate and Lamine Touré & Group Saloum.

Talk Title: African Sounds, American Identities: African Continental Streams of Influence in the Music of the African Diaspora

African-American cultural expressions have often drawn heavily from African sources as diverse as the continent itself. This panel investigates three different incarnations of African musical influence in twentieth century America. The music of Randy Weston and Arsenio Rodriguez typifies a broader effort in the 1960s to render African roots accessible to a diasporic population whose experience had been shaped by the tragic disjuncture and oppressive cultural erasure of the Middle Passage. Two generations later, we examine the continuing relevance of continental streams of influence in an East African population who came to the U.S. under drastically different circumstances. These studies use archival, ethnographic and historical methodologies to celebrate the profound diversity of African Diasporic musical artistry in the United States.