Human-ing Out Loud: Ontologies of Disorder in a Musically Exemplified Trans-Caribbean-Thought

Jouvay, the midnight jamboree heralding the start of carnival on West Indian islands transposed to the Neerlandophone world, presents an ongoing conversation about how to human in singular-multiple ways which are sensitive to relations between so-called species, spirits, saints, mythical characters, and devils.

Another ecosystem, boundless and disenchanted by difference, is imagined and temporarily created in daaance. With three aaa’s, daaance rather than dance encompasses movement, singing, drumming, reverence, language, food, sacrifice, ritual, politics, politricks, and passion. This other ecosystem, perpetually negating systematicity, is a space and a short-offered time where inter- and intra-subjective play, sounding out, and daaance allow for different futures to be imagined and new forms of human-ing that embraces relations with non-human animals and life and death to be practiced. It is a refusal of exclusion and a move towards making inequity inexact.

In introducing Trans-Caribbean-Thought a queer cousin of decoloniality, critical race studies, postcoloniality, Marxism, and Feminism an extra option is offered for keepers of nonconformity to remain transmitters of one-pluriversal Love. 

Dr. Francio Guadeloupe is senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean studies and Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is author of Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2009) and Black Man in the Netherlands: an Afro-Antillean Anthropology (University Press of Mississippi, 2022).

Hybrid Event (see registration link below)

Keywords: Trans-Caribbean-Thought; Neerlandophone; humanocentrism; music; human-ing; relationality