Making modernity in the hinterlands: new Maroon musics in the Black Atlantic

Abstract

Introduction

Born in mortal opposition to the peculiarly modern forms of slavery that helped to usher in a new era of European world domination, the Maroon societies of the Americas have long provided theorists of identity operating in the realm that has come to be known as the Black Atlantic with a potent symbolic currency. Nowhere has this currency acquired higher value than in the Caribbean region, where questions of identity are so fundamentally bound up with histories of plantation slavery.

The runaway slave has had a special place in the literature of the anglophone Caribbean; and francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean writers have all displayed a similar fascination with the Maroon epic. In more recent times, popular music – a medium that has played a primary role in the constitution of a truly diasporic sense of identity spanning the Black Atlantic – has helped to carry consciousness of a heroic Maroon past across the globe. Both practitioners of Caribbean (or other Afro-American) popular musics and those who write about them continue to reference the Maroons of yore, often tracing the rebellious thrust of much of today's music to these original Black warriors, whose defiant spirit, it is felt, continues to inhabit and motivate the collective memory (Aly 1988, pp. 55–7, 65; Zips 1993, 1994; Leymarie 1994).