Anthropology Colloquium: Opacity, Rézonans, and the Politics of Bearing Witness in Anthropology

Presentation by Professor Jerome Camal, Department of Anthropology, UW-Madison.

This talk explores the politics of bearing witness through ethnography – asking anthropologists to acknowledge and confront our discipline’s entanglements and complicity with structures of dispossessions inherited from the colonial plantation system. The talk is based on research on music, dance and nationalism in Guadeloupe, and former colony (and now overseas department) of France.

Jerome Camal is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on music, dance, and postcoloniality across the French Atlantic world. He is the author of Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics, published by the University of Chicago Press. He holds a PhD in musicology with a specialization in ethnomusicology from Washington University in Saint Louis.