Nanette De Jongh | Tracking Creolisation: The Tambú from Curaçao

Event details

Speaker: Nanette de Jongh (University of Newcastle)

Date: Thursday 23 March 2023

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

Tambú is a music and dance ritual from the Dutch island of Curaçao.  Comprising multiple, often contradictory origins, Tambú intertwines sacred and secular, private and public, and a myriad of traditions from Africa and the ‘New World.’  This presentation investigates Tambú through its variegated history.  Emphasising the ritual’s creole origins and development, it asks questions around how rituals strengthen community bonds to perceived pasts, and, moreover, what happens to communities when their rituals for remembering or reclaiming history assume new and different subtexts.   

Biography

Nanette De Jongh is a professor of socially engaged ethnomusicology at the International Centre for Music Studies, School of Arts and Cultures, University of Newcastle.  A prolific scholar of the musics of the Caribbean, Southern Africa and the African diaspora, she is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music (2022).

Links

The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music (ebook, external link; access available via University of Edinburgh Library)