Music & Dutch Coloniality seminar series presents Dr Charissa Granger (University of the West Indies)

27 March, Bolognalaan, room 1.075 – 15.30-17.00

Music for Livability: A Caribbean Sonospoetics for Climate Research 

Revelling in the idea that “study is what you do with other people” (Moten and Harney), this paper takes as its problematic that poetic knowledge (Césaire) and the education of feeling (Lamming) are underexamined in Caribbean climate research. Drawing on critical Caribbean thought, this inquiry engages with music practices to theorize the role of feeling in climate research. It proposes that creative arts, poetics, and expressive political imaginaries—articulated through cultural practices—can become integral to Caribbean climate inquiry. How might Caribbean sonospoetic ways of knowing our built and natural environments transform our relationship with climate events, climate change, and quality of life amidst climate catastrophe?

Positioning music as a site of salvage and reinvention, the paper critiques the neglect of sonospoetic knowledge in Caribbean climate scholarship. I argue that creative practices allow islanders to access otherwise hidden dimensions of life, inaugurating alternative socialities and epistemologies of being. By focusing on the materiality and innovation of musical instruments and the organization of humans, the paper suggests that music shapes and nurtures island interiorities that promotes a more attuned, compassionate, and relational way of inhabiting the world. Examining how sensuous experiences, arising from Caribbean music practices, function as epistemologies that generate new philosophical and political possibilities, I posit that embracing sonospoetic knowledge in Caribbean climate research opens new avenues and thresholds for envisioning Caribbean futures.

Dr. Charissa Granger analyses Afro-Caribbean music as liberatory practices, examining music epistemologies, aesthetics, love ethics, and erotic knowledge. Granger earned a bachelor’s in visual and performing arts from Northern Illinois University and a master’s in cultural musicology from The University of Amsterdam. With a cultural musicology doctorate from Georg-August Universität Göttingen, Granger held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at Erasmus University Rotterdam and is a lecturer in cultural studies at The University of the West Indies. As a postdoctoral researcher in the NWO-funded Island(er)s at the Helm project, Granger collaborates on research for sustainable and inclusive solutions to climate challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean. Granger is co-editor of Music Moves: Musical dynamics of relation, knowledge and transformation (Georg Olms Verlag 2016) and their published work can be found in the Langston Hughes Review, Contemporary Music Review, Conflict and Society, and Esferas Journal. Granger’s teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses on Caribbean cultural studies and cultural thought, Theorizing Caribbean culture, and Methods of inquiry in Caribbean research.