This is a past event
Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora details the history, repertoire, and socio-political significance of tassa drumming in Trinidad & Tobago. The film profiles the life and work of noted tassa drummer Lenny Kumar and his family while also developing the notion of tassa performance practice as a metaphor for Indian Trinidadian cultural and national identity. In the process, the film traces tassa’s movement from India to the Caribbean, summarizes its transformation in diaspora, and speculates about its future. Proceeding from analysis of tassa repertoire in Muslim and Hindu performance contexts, the film explores tassa’s physical and conceptual transformations in diaspora and the ongoing push to make tassa a co-national instrument alongside steel pan. In this regard, interviewees discuss the implication of tassa as “foreign”—despite more than 150 years of Indian presence in the Caribbean—and therefore unsuitable as a co-national instrument alongside steel pan. The film’s conclusion emphasizes tassa as an encapsulation of Indian identity: tassa’s performance contexts and performance practice signal India as a place of origin. Yet these very same aspects, by virtue of their persistence in diaspora, equally signal Trinidad and Tobago as home. Christopher L. Ballengee is an ethnomusicologist and Lecturer in the American Literature and Culture Department at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland). He has researched Indian music in Trinidad and the Trinidadian community in Florida since 2007 and was the inaugural Diego Carpitella Visual Ethnomusicology fellow at the Giorgio Cini Foundation (Venice, Italy) which supported the production of the feature-length documentary film Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora (2019). He is editor of the volume Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South (2022) and co-editor of the Music and Sound in Visual Media series at Lexington Books.
- Venue
- MacRobert Building - MR051, Ground Floor.
- Contact
-
Free to attend, just turn up