Event details

The Musicology Colloquium presents a talk by Benjamin Barson.

Abstract

This talk introduces new research from my current book project, "Jazz Against Fascism," which traces how musicians, dockworkers, broadcasters, and anti-imperialist organizers transformed popular African American-derived music into a medium of solidarity across the circum-Caribbean world. Building from my first book, Brassroots Democracy, the talk follows brass bands, dance orchestras, radio infrastructures, labor movements, and Black internationalist networks linking New Orleans, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and the wider Caribbean under the shadows of European fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and a recalcitrant U.S. empire. Following work by Ana María Ochoa and Jean Casimir, I develop the concept of the “radio-plantation complex” to understand how musical circulation moved through infrastructures of occupation, sugar, railroads, ports, and broadcasting. This talk centers Julio Cueva, a Cuban trumpeter, bandleader, and Spanish Civil War veteran whose career linked Havana dance music, Republican Spain, and antifascist radio.

Biography

Benjamin Barson is the Samuel L. Williams Endowed Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University. A historian, saxophonist, composer, and cultural organizer, his work explores jazz, Black internationalism, social movements, and the political life of sound across the Americas. He is the author of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, published by Wesleyan University Press, which has received multiple honors, including the Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society and the Barry and Claire Brook Award from the CUNY Graduate Center. In the fall of 2026, he will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Tickets

Free, Unticketed