
Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in Trinidad
Kevin K. Birth
Birth draws on fieldwork he conducted in one of Trinidad’s ethnically diverse rural villages to explore the relationship between music and social and political consciousness on the island. He describes how Trinidadians use the affective power of music and the physiological experience of performance to express and work through issues related to identity, ethnicity, and politics. He looks at how the performers and audience members relate to different musical traditions. Turning explicitly to politics, Birth recounts how Trinidadians used music as a means of making sense of the attempted coup d’état in 1990 and the 1995 parliamentary election, which resulted in a tie between the two major political parties. Bacchanalian Sentiments is an innovative ethnographic analysis of the significance of music, and particular musical forms, in the everyday lives of rural Trinidadians.
Product Details
About Kevin K. Birth
Reviews for Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in Trinidad
Dylan Kerrigan
Caribbean Review of Books
“Bacchanalian Sentiments explores the multiple ways that music, politics, and ethnicity intersect in Trinidad, and it does so through a deeply engaging and highly nuanced ethnography of a rural community located near Sangre Grande.”
Timothy Rommen
Journal of Anthropological Research
“Birth’s Bacchanalian Sentiments. . . seamlessly synthesizes rich observation with a rigorous, compelling and theoretically innovative analysis of music and political community. . . . Birth’s study makes an original contribution to debates on music in Trinidad, and to wider discussions on pluralism and creolization in the Caribbean and on racialized subjectification.”
Yasmeen Narayan
Ethnic and Racial Studies
“I recommend Bacchanalian Sentiments highly to those searching for new approaches to the representation and analysis of expressive culture. It is an important contribution to Caribbean anthropology and ethnomusicology due to its emphasis on music’s affectivity and the close relationship between the experience of music and the region’s political history. This text is an important addition to the literature on Trinidad and Tobago’s history. . . .”
Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
“This book makes gains for a wider audience across disciplines and geographic focuses. . . . As one who is concerned with culture and nationalism, I believe that Birth's exploration of Trinidadian sense of nation drawing on ethnographic research in rural villages serves as a reminder that colonial Trinidad was divisive but relatively fluid, causing constant dialogues between different segments. This has been seriously disregarded in the urban- and state-focused studies of 'nation-building'.”
Teruyuki Tsuji
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute