TALK-IP
Talk-ip is a format of conferences or conference recitals where postgraduate students present and discuss their work. Through this discussion, they can hear ideas, points of view and contributions from their peers for the work they will be defending in the future. Talk-ip is part of the Post-ip Group, made up of doctoral students from INET-md.
1.07.2025 | 3 pm | CCCI Auditorium | Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro
Free entrance and in person.
Calling the Orisha: Sound, Affect, and Trance
Ahkeel Mestayer | Universidade de Berkeley
While much of the literature on Cuban batá music focuses on the musical analysis or the performers/practitioners, little attention has been paid to the relation between sonic modalities and trance in ritual performance. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork and embodied practice in Santería religious communities throughout the state of California and Matanzas, Cuba, this article investigates the ways that Batá ritual musicians, omó alañá, engage in musical processes that I call affective attunements as a means of inducing trance. By closely analyzing their performance techniques, song choice, and intentionality directed towards the person to undergo trance as well as the spiritual co-presences to be called to the ritual, I argue that these processes serve as the catalyst for ritual añá drummers to induce ritual trance by provoking affective responses from the practitioner and the spiritual co-presences known as orisha. By enfolding these analyses into philosophies of practice that inform ritual performers’ ethics and poetics of performance, I show how their modalities of affective attunement compel us to rethink the questions of agency, intentionality, and interrelations among not only the performers and attendees but also spiritual co-presences, sound, objects, and the environment. As such, this research aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogues in post-humanist studies and how musical sound practices might give us insights for conceptualizing affect and the non-human.
The seminar will take place in English.
Ahkeel Mestayer | Ahkeel Mestayer is a professional musician and ethnomusicologist from San Francisco. His research and performance interests are Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian music. Ahkeel has traveled across Europe and Latin America performing and is a voting member of the Grammy Academy. His current research project is a comparison of musical transculturation processes in Matanzas, Cuba and Salvador, Brazil. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the concept of Black Cosmopolitanism across African ethnic groups in Cuba and Brazil and its relationship to music.
