Listening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños (Roundtable Transcript)

Let's start somewhere near the beginning, or at least at a site of return. In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Caribbeanist ethnomusicologists gathered virtually for a roundtable at the Society for Ethnomusicology's (SEM) annual meeting. That roundtable, titled “(Re)Positioning the Caribbean: Practical and Theoretical Issues in Caribbean Ethnomusicology,” marked an effort to name the ongoing limitations shaping Caribbean music scholarship. Even within SEM's Latin America and Caribbean section (LACSEM)—founded in 2007 as a space of support for the region's scholarship—research, it seemed, remained fragmented. The Spanish-speaking Caribbean often floated apart from work on the Anglophone or Francophone Caribbean. Meanwhile, the prevailing narrative on Anglophone Caribbean music disproportionately emphasized music from a key set of large island spaces, flattening the region's sonic diversity and leaving vast geographies and practices underengaged. This reality did not reflect the desires or personal politics of the society's membership. These elisions were a matter of method and not individual oversight, rooted in inherited disciplinary frameworks and institutional habits of listening. These issues, of course, did not begin with SEM or LACSEM. They reflect longer colonial legacies of language, governance, institutionalized value, and the durable effects of what I have elsewhere called “continental logics”: the gravitational pull toward singularity, centralization, and grand scale.1 From that 2020 roundtable emerged the desire for more: more conversations, more crossings, more listening. When Tony Rasmussen invited David Aarons to organize a new event for the LACSEM Speaker Series in 2024, he and Charissa Granger conceived of a roundtable explicitly focused on listening to music and to people from and in the Caribbean region, breaking from US-centric models of the past. The final panel included Danielle Charlemagne (University of Georgia), Dominique Cyrille (independent scholar), Charissa Granger (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine), and Sean Samad (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine). The discussion was moderated by David Aarons (University of North Carolina, Greensboro).Foregrounding listening as a way of entering into relation, of making the Caribbean audible across islands, disciplines, and positionalities, this publication revisits the transcript of that 2024 roundtable, entitled “Listening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños.” Livestreamed and recorded on Webex on August 7, 2024, the conversation brought together scholars based in the Caribbean and others representing its diaspora (i.e., descendants of the Caribbean) to reflect on listening as a method, metaphor, and practice. This article is a transcript of the roundtable. Rather than massage the ideas in the transcript into a traditional article, the preservation of the dialogue's form seemed crucial to the panel itself. In this way, the transcript draws inspiration from Kamau Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey's 1999 publication ConVERSations, a collaborative text in which two artist-scholars think together across the grain of voice and print.2 That work preserves not just what was said but the tonal shifts, hesitations, and layered responses that animate the act of conversation and allow for after-the-fact metacommentary and reconsideration, and the present transcript follows suit.Throughout the panel, participants drew on multiple, situated genealogies of listening theory and practice to ask what listening “asks of us as Caribbean people” and what it might make possible. Many of these frameworks confront questions of positionality and power directly, drawing inspiration from three influential pieces of recent scholarship. Rolando Vázquez's work on decolonial listening—including his widely cited 2019 interview with Zoë Dankert—insists that listening begin with an acknowledgment of our entanglement in modernity/coloniality; it refuses translation or mastery and instead makes room for irreducible difference.3 The fact that Vázquez's intervention appears as an interview matters: The form enacts the orientation it theorizes. Dylan Robinson's Hungry Listening, though centered on Indigenous–settler relations in Canada, offers another potent lens for rethinking the structures of listening within and beyond the academy.4 His critique of settler aesthetic expectations—listening for coherence, possession, and comfort—echoed the panel's concerns about scholarly representation and extractive attentiveness. Finally, archipelagic listening, as I proposed in 2020, traces its roots to early-2000s Caribbean streaming radio networks that allowed listeners on smaller islands to tune across the entire archipelago. It emerged in opposition to the increasingly “continental” playlists and DJ circuits that foregrounded the larger islands and compressed the region's musical history into a narrow canon. At its simplest, archipelagic listening urges us to hear beyond national or single-island borders—a routine practice for audiences in places such as St. Kitts and Nevis. In broader terms, it names the ethical labor and aesthetic practice of attending to the uneven tempos, silences, and asymmetries that have always shaped Caribbean circulation.Caribbean music and performance scholarship (and Caribbean ethnomusicology in particular) depends on intense, situated practices of listening. 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