PERMANENT SEMINAR OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON ETHNOMUSICOLOGY AND STUDIES IN POPULAR MUSIC
22.09.2025 | 2h30 pm | João Branco Amphitheater | Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro | Room Zoom
Free entrance, both online and in presence.
Tassa Drumming and the Aesthetics of Creole Solidarity in the Indian Caribbean
Christopher L. Ballengee | Akademia Wincentego Pola
This talk examines how Indian Caribbean musical performance remembers, reinterprets, and re-enacts legacies of indenture. Focusing on tassa drumming competitions, I argue that musical structure, performance practice, and staged spectacle together form a vernacular archive through which participants express diasporic identity in part by centering and reimagining memories of ancestral arrival. Drawing on Khal Torabully’s notion of coolitude, the talk traces how tropes of the ship and the plantation function as symbolic anchors in Indian Caribbean cultural memory, even as they are recontextualized through the lens of creolization. I analyze how the repertoire of tassa drumming encodes a narrative of the voyage into indenture, the moment of arrival, and post-plantation transformations. I contextualize the narrative aspects of tassa drumming competitions through comparison with other intermedial examples to demonstrate how musical performance reflects the desire for a shared creolized destiny by reframing the concept of jahaji bhai (ship brotherhood) in multicultural terms, all while the music remains recognizably Indian to Caribbean listeners. In the end, this work reveals how sound, memory, and visual iconography converge in a diasporic aesthetics of creole solidarity that brings the past to bear on belonging in the present.
Christopher L. Ballengee | Ethnomusicologist and amateur filmmaker focusing on music and culture of the Caribbean and South Asia. He directed the film Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora (2019); and is editor of Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South (2022) and the forthcoming volume Shooting Back: Documentary Film in Latin America and the Caribbean (University Press of Mississippi). Based in Lublin, Poland, he lectures at Akademia Wincentego Pola and serves as cultural director of American Corner at Maria Curie