A Musical Translation of Movement: Jérôme Camal on Guadeloupean Gwoka and (Post) Coloniality

Madison BookBeat

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with musician and scholar Jérôme Camal on his monography Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics (2019, University of Chicago Press).

Jérôme Camal is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his research and teaching focus on music, dance, and postcoloniality across the French Atlantic world. Broadly speaking, he investigates how postcolonial ways of knowing and ways of being are created and transmitted through the body. In Creolized Aurality, Camal details how the practice and sounds of gwoka—Guadeloupe’s secular drumming tradition—illuminate the somewhat contradictory demands for sovereignty and citizenship that inherently accompany Guadeloupeans’ position as French citizens at the margins of the nation-state. While gwoka has been associated with anticolonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. Charting the entangled interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation in gwoka, Camal theorizes “creolized auralities”–that is, expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.

Image courtesy of Jérôme Camal