About Dr. Camal
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Jérôme Camal is an ethnomusicologist working on music and postcolonial politics in the Francophone Caribbean. Specifically, Prof. Camal has been studying gwoka, the secular drum and dance tradition of Guadeloupe since 2007. His first book, Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019) demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.
Dr. Camal is currently working on an ethnography of gwoka dance workshops in France and Guadeloupe. Through the study of dance, Camal explores postcoloniality as an embodied practice. In the process, he sketches an ethnography of Relation critically inspired by the work of Edouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, and Black feminist scholars such as Audre Lorde and Sylvia Wynter. An article on this topic is set to be published in American Music.
In addition, Prof. Camal’s writings on the sonic aspects of Caribbean tourism have appeared in Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean (edited by Timothy Rommen and Daniel T. Neely, Oxford University Press, 2014) and Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism (edited by Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen, Duke University Press, 2019). Other articles and book reviews have been published in Esclavages et Post-Esclavages, New West Indian Guide, Journal of Intangible Heritage Studies, Journal of Festive Studies, Journal of African Literature Association, Sound Studies, and Labour/Le Travail. He is a contributor to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and the Oxford Bibliographies Online.
Prior to joining the faculty of the School of Music, Jérôme Camal was associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2011-2013, he was visiting assistant professor of musicology and a Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at UCLA.
A dedicated jazz saxophonist, Prof. Camal has studied jazz performance with Paul DeMarinis, Ed Petersen, and Terence Blanchard. In Saint Louis, he benefited from the mentorship of local legend Willy Akins. He has performed with numerous Guadeloupean artists, including Klod Kiavué, François Ladrezeau, and Wozan Monza. He is currently working on a musical project tentatively titled Schizophonic Ethnographia that blends field recordings and interviews, electronic music, and live improvisation.
Education
BMUS in jazz studies, Webster University; MM in jazz performance, University of New Orleans; PhD, musicology with a specialization in ethnomusicology and a certificate in American Cultural Studies, Washington University in Saint Louis.