Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World - A Conference

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Brooklyn College

Conference Venues: Brooklyn College Library Auditorium and Levenson Recital Hall

Conference Times: 10am-5:30pm, concert at 8pm

Directions: No. 2 Subway to Flatbush Ave., enter at Nostrand Ave. and Campus Rd.

A related exhibition, Calypso Music in Postwar America, will be on display at the Brooklyn College Library from 10/04/04 to 12/12/04.

The conference, concert, and exhibition are free and open to the public.

The Institute for Studies in American Music will collaborate with the Historical Museum of Southern Florida to present a one-day public conference at Brooklyn College, titled Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World. The conference will explore how migration, travel and mass media transformed a local Trinidadian music into a major form of popular music that was performed in countries throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa in the course of the twentieth century.

The conference will devote particular attention to New York City as a central locale in this transformation, given the city’s significance as an arts/media center and a primary destination of Anglophone Caribbean migration. West Indian calypso singers began visiting the city in the 1920s, became regular fixtures in the city’s nightclubs and concert venues during the 1930s and 1940s, and spearheaded the popular "calypso craze" of the 1950s. Following the 1965 changes in immigration law, Brooklyn emerged as the North American center of West Indian settlement and culture. Over the past three decades, the borough has become home to a number of calypso singers and important West Indian recording companies, and host to the largest West Indian Carnival celebration outside of the Caribbean.

Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World will feature distinguished scholars of Caribbean music and culture including Ray Allen (Brooklyn College), Kenneth Bilby (Center for Black Music Research), Geraldine Connor (University College of Leeds), Ray Funk (Independent calypso researcher, Fairbanks, Alaska), Jocelyne Guilbault (University of California, Berkeley), Donald Hill (State University of New York Oneonta), Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool (University of the Virgin Islands), Gordon Rohlehr (University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad), Les Slater (Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts Institute, New York), Stephen Stuempfle (Historical Museum of Southern Florida), Keith Warner (George Mason University), and Kenneth “Wrangler” Wynne.

The 2004 Calypso King, calypsonian/scholar Hollis "Chalkdust" Liverpool, will present an evening concert.

Funding for Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World is made possible by a generous grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.

Click here to view the conference schedule

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