Event details

African and African-descended women appear fleetingly and anonymously as musicians and listeners in physical sources created during slavery, what we might call the traditional historical record. When they do appear, they are usually represented as dancers and as singers. Sometimes they are extravagantly dressed, sometimes almost nude. They listen on the edges of rooms, they captivate rooms. They are fertile, they have mysterious powers to control their wombs. They instruct violinists on tunes of their own invention, they sell tickets to balls. They are beautiful, they are vile. They are refined, they are base. They are seductresses, they are work horses. They are rude, they are coy. They are everywhere and nowhere.

This is a talk about women, because to talk about music in scenes of slavery one must always be grounded in slavery’s most fundamental logic: that it was reproductive slavery. In the legal becoming of property, enslaved people held no rights to their own reproductive systems—their children were chattel. The very condition and profitability of slavery was predicated on the possibility, reality, and necessity of sexual violence. And yet, many of us are only here today because of that violence, and the global musical landscape has been indelibly shaped by it. In this talk I explore enslaved women’s listening practices in the British colonial Caribbean at the same time as critiquing the evidence—in this case, watercolors, journals, slave registers, and contemporary publications—that allow me to examine such women’s lives. Metaphors of silence, voice, and listening recur throughout recent writings on slavery, but such terms have limits as metaphors for those of us trying to focus on music and sound. How then, can we write music histories about enslaved people that acknowledge the very deliberate omissions of colonial archives without reinscribing silence, listening for voices that the historical record was never designed to capture?