Race, Music, and Slavery in the British Colonial Caribbean: Research Beyond Recovery

Samuel Felsted's Jonah, written in Jamaica and published in London in 1775, was rediscovered in the final decades of the twentieth century. It is widely considered the first oratorio composed in the Americas, yet initiatives to perform and record such a significant creole work have tended only to situate it on the fringes of the European musical canon. Scholarship on Felsted has not sought to comment on the musical soundscape and social contexts in which the composer, a white Jamaica-born and Kingston-based organist, conceived his music. 
Clues about the world of Samuel Felsted can be found in the surviving subscription list included with the published score of Jonah. This list positioned Felsted and his music at the heart of a network spanning both sides of the Atlantic. Naming some two hundred individuals, from municipal organists and clergy, to physicians, plantation owners, and merchants of Jewish Iberian descent among others, the list offers a fascinating insight into the shared musical activities of Jamaica's colonial elite.
Absent from the Jonah subscription list, however, are the Black inhabitants of Felsted's world, enslaved and free, who have so far remained silent in modern discourses about his works. Seeking to interrogate the liminal space in which Felsted's oratorio was created, performed and interpreted, this paper attempts to enunciate perceptions of both the white Euro-Jamaican musical activity evidenced by Felsted's creative output, and the Afro-Jamaican musical activity preserved in the musical discourses of Felsted's contemporaries.
Using a rare collection of contemporary song and dance music transcriptions surviving in the Edward Long papers held by the British Library, this paper investigates how musical activities around the period of Jonah's composition intersected with (and shaped) contemporary theories of race, as well as shedding light on Afro-Jamaican responses to European musical activity. Through a nuanced understanding of how Felsted's contemporaries rationalised, interpreted and encoded performative experiences involving music, I therefore offer a framework for interrogating questions of creole identity, Afro-Jamaican alterity, and Jamaican musical life at the time.

Searching for enslaved Black women in traditional archives often requires patience, creativity, an eye for detail, and an ear that can listen for the things unspoken but still present. Sources representing enslaved women need to be disentangled from the white colonial logics through which they were produced, while being open to the possibility that enslaved women may have practiced dissemblance both to shield themselves from the very real violence inherent in chattel slavery as well as the epistemological violence of being represented without consent or possibility of reply. Colonial logics operate in the most seemingly sympathetic iconographic sources as much as they do in the perfunctory lines of plantation records. In this paper I take as my starting place two such images of enslaved Black women in Jamaica created in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In one, four Black women dance freely to the music of a distant British military band, each dancer absorbed in her own gestures. In another, an enslaved woman pensively plays a violin for her companion, a dancing woman draped in white muslin with her back turned to the viewer. What can these depictions of enslaved Black women pursuing music and dance tell us both about how enslaved women may have experienced music in the British colonial Caribbean, and about how Black women's musical thinking has been underexamined and underplayed in histories of music in America?
            Fortunately, these are not questions that I have to grapple with alone. Black women have been theorizing music since their forced arrival on American shores, and though the violence of slavery meant that theories of enslaved women are overwhelmingly unwritten and irrecuperable, we inherit a rich legacy of over one hundred and fifty years of Black women in America writing about music as practice, strategy, and metaphor. Inspired by recent work by Marisa Fuentes, Brittney Cooper, and Saidiya Hartman, this paper imagines what narratives might emerge about the intersections of race, gender, and music in scenes of slavery through a Black feminist-centered reading of colonial sources.

Mr. Baptiste was a musician living in late seventeenth-century Jamaica who transcribed music portraying African traditions as they were performed by enslaved musicians on the island. These three compositions, "Angola," "Papa," and "Koromanti" were published in Hans Sloane's influential travelogue and natural history of Jamaica (1707). Until recently, scholars assumed that Baptiste was a white French colonist of elite standing like Sloane, but I argue he was far more likely to be a free person of African descent native to the West Indies. Mr. Baptiste is, to my knowledge, the first published Jamaican composer of written music, and may also be one of the earliest published Black composers in the world. His compositions also represent a significant record of early African diasporic music and potentially the earliest notated record of African genres. However, the records documenting Baptiste's life that I uncovered in the Jamaica National Archives challenge each of these categories, making it all the more difficult to substantiate his contributions and legacy. Baptiste's biography raises important questions about how to study early Caribbean music history. By considering the textual records of Baptiste's life alongside recent interpretations of his music, I construct a preliminary portrait of Mr. Baptiste that emphasizes the abundant and diverse legacy of enslaved and free performers of the British Caribbean. (Contemporary interpretations of Baptiste's pieces are available online at a website I co-created with Laurent Dubois and David Garner, www.musicalpassage.org.) Mr. Baptiste's story demands that we reexamine colonial sources with a fresh eye and ear to the role that marginalized performers had in creating them.