Sounding Carnival -- Mixed Modes and Performance Codes of Political Demonstrations and Carnival -- Wyclef's Score: Popular Motion, Emotion, and Commotion -- Sweet Micky's Allure : Vagabonds, Vulgarities, and Street Politics -- The Konpa President's Government on Parade -- Ti Lili and Nèg Bannann nan (the Banana Man) -- The Population's Bacchanalia -- Response from the Roots: Still Not Afraid -- Re-Sounding Mizik Angaje.
Abstract: This long-awaited special issue on the environment is a collaborative effort involving many people, especially Lois Wilcken and Rose Elfman. Proposed after years of prompting by our visionary elder LeGrace Benson, this volume has unfolded during a period that has seen many dramatic and complicated changes in Haiti, across the world at large, and in the individual lives that are woven through and touched by these pages. We've collectively been unsettled by the COVID pandemic, the political violence that has marred daily life and governance in Haiti and well beyond, and the uncertainty of a world struggling to look forward while wrestling with its messy past and present. While the urgency of day-to-day survival constricts the breath of so many, often making it impossible to see beyond immediate circumstances, the once seemingly far-off threats from anthropogenic global warming, climate change, and environmental destruction now loom mightily.
Abstract: The music video for "M pral plante yon pye bwa" (I will plant a tree) (2020), by BIC with Kompè Filo, was a component of the project "Field to Media: Applied Musicology for a Changing Climate" supported by the Mellon Foundation and Humanities without Walls consortium initiative on "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate." Haiti team leaders for this music video were Rebecca Dirksen (co-PI), Kendy Vérilus, Anthony Pascal (Kompè Filo), and Roosevelt Saillant (BIC).
Abstract: The music video for "Desitire fatra" (Get rid of trash), by Samy-Gee, was a component of the project "Field to Media: Applied Musicology for a Changing Climate" supported by the Mellon Foundation and Humanities without Walls consortium initiative on "The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate." Haiti team leaders for this music video were Rebecca Dirksen (co-PI), Kendy Vérilus, and Samuel Vicière (Samy-Gee).
"Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression--storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of people's responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people's critical perspectives--gained through intimate struggle with life-altering force--to the global dialogue surrounding humanity's response to climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental catastrophe. Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope, Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front lines of today's global emergency"--
