Calypso Soundscapes: intimate acoustics and defiant language in Kamau Brathwaite and Mighty SparrowTools Harris, Mark. 2017. 'Calypso Soundscapes: intimate acoustics and defiant language in Kamau Brathwaite and Mighty Sparrow'. In: Caribbean Insecurities, The British Library. The British Library, United Kingdom 25-26 June, 2017. [Conference or Workshop Item] No full text available
Official URL: https://www.bl.uk/events/caribbean-in-securities-a...
Abstract or DescriptionThe comingling of defiant sounds and language in calypso is key to understanding histories of the Caribbean. What acoustics propel Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants and ‘Calypso’ as sonic dissections of colonial rules for acceptable speech and sound? The familial environmental acoustics that impact Brathwaite’s writing reveal alternative paradigms of intimacy and precarity compared to the found sounds of 1970s Vancouver composers Hildegard Westerkamp and Murray Schafer, to whom the term ‘soundscape’ is credited. Similarly, from the late 50s, Mighty Sparrow’s voice and lyrics draw from urban environmental sounds to undermine a secure colonial culture. He constructs Mr. Herbert and Simpson by incorporating conversational fragments of Port of Spain residents sharing close quarters of limited privacy. A song like Dan Is The Man In The Van, that mocks the banality of colonially prescribed school literature, offers the timbre of half-yelled, half-sung phrases that hurl sonic aberrations and mischievous concepts into an irreverent reinvention of English language.
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