I am an ethnomusicologist and popular music studies scholar who retired as Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024. But my research projects are still ongoing.
Since 1980, I have done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole- and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. All of my intellectual projects are deeply informed by the distinctive history of the West Indies where colonial legacies of slavery and racism have loomed large in all arenas of musical discourse and practice. This has compelled me to focus on diasporic formations, on emergent national identities, and on the politics of representation. It has led me to write on the postcolonial conditions in which West Indians live and the systemic inequalities they have faced. But my research is not just about oppression, or emancipatory politics, or the status quo. By focusing on creative agency, I have examined a multitude of ways that musicians, their audiences, and music industry workers not only confront and resist power but also enact and deploy it in various domains. In this way my publications have consistently engaged with the politics of aesthetics and with power relations in music production and circulation. Stressing a multidisciplinary approach, I have addressed these issues in the scholarly intersections of music, anthropology, cultural studies, and history.
These issues inform my earliest fieldwork project on the politics of traditionality and modernity in St. Lucian village music. I developed these issues on a more global scale in a later project titled Zouk: World Music in the West Indies—a study that maps the complex musical network among the French-Creole speaking islands, and the vexed relations that are articulated through music between the West Indian French Departments and the Metropole, France. My next research projects draw from a long history of research in Trinidad. My book Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics explores the ways the calypso music scene became audibly entangled with projects of governing, audience demands, and market incentives. In Roy Cape: A Lifetime on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand (Duke U Press, 2014), an experiment in dialogic co-authorship with a reputed Trinidadian calypso and soca band leader, I engage the audible entanglements of circulation, reputation, work ethics, and sound. My current book project, Partying: the Aesthetics and Politics of Freedom in a West Indian Island, is not about revolutionary acts that transform daily realities overnight. What interests me is what the aesthetics and politics of freedom sound like, look like, and feel like, and which values partying encourages and cultivates in that postcolonial space. I ask, who and what do the partying expressions disturb? And, in political terms, what can be learned when partying is about feeling free to just have fun?
Over the years, I have served on several editorial boards in addition to being a board member of the Canadian Music Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Caribbean Studies Association, and the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities. During my tenure at the University of Ottawa from 1984-1998, I held affiliation as an adjunct professor with the Department of Music of York University, Ontario, for eight years; at UCB, I was affiliated Faculty with the Departments of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and African American Studies. While I have been deeply engaged in research in her academic life, I have also viewed my work with graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Ottawa and at the University of California, Berkeley, as most rewarding. For me, mentoring students has been not only a continual learning and inspiring experience, but also a privilege to be in the position to help some of these students find their own paths during their academic journey.
Key Publications
In progress Partying: The aesthetics and Politics of Freedom in a West Indian Island (single-authored)
2014 Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand. (Co-authored with Roy Cape). Durham: Duke University Press.
2007 Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [recognized as the best book on Carnival music and politics by Kevin Baldeosingh, Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, 14 February 2016)]
1993a Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [recognized as one of the ten best books in the 1990s by Lorraine Sakata, Book editor for the Journal of Ethnomusicology, 45(1), 2001]
1993b Traditional Music in St. Lucia. Washington, D.C.: Folkways/Smithsonian Institute. [compact disc of original recordings accompanied by a pamphlet (31 pages)] 40416
1987 Instruments Musicaux à St. Lucie: Contextes d'Apparition et Transmission d'un Savoir Culturel. Paris: ACCT.
1984 “Musical Events in the Lives of the People of a Caribbean Island: St. Lucia.” Ph. D. dissertation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International.
Edited Collections
2020-2025 Jocelyne Guilbault and Harris Berger, general editors of Volumes 1 to 5/6 (included) of the electronic, peer-reviewed, open access multidisciplinary journal Music Research Annual (MRA) including five articles, 10, 000 words average)
https://musicresearchannual.org/
2019 Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen (eds). Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism. Durham: Duke University Press.
2000 Jocelyne Guilbault, John Shepherd, and Murray Dineen (eds). Border Crossings: New Directions in Music Studies. Repercussion, Special Issue volume 7-8
Book Chapters
2023 “Songs that Matter: Assessing through Trinidadian Storytellings the Power of Music,
Memory, Age and Aging.” In Troubling Inheritances edited by Line Grenier, Sara Cohen, and Ros Jennings, 103-128. London: Bloomsbury.
2019 Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen. “Introduction” of Sounds of Vacation: Political
Economies of Caribbean Tourism. In Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Tourism
2019 Jocelyne Guilbault. “Sound Management: Listening to Sandals Halcyon in St. Lucia.” In Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism. pp. 161-192.
2017a “The Politics of Musical Bonding: New Prospects for Cosmopolitan Music Studies.” In Ethnomusicology or Transcultural Musicology?edited by Francesco Giannattasio and Giovanni Giuriati, 100-24. Venice: Nota Publications (in the series ' Intersezioni musicali of the Instituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini).
2017b “Music and Militarization: Soca, Space, and Security.” In Caribbean Military Encounters: A Multidisciplinary Anthology from the Humanities, edited by Shalini Puri and Lara Putnam, 331-44. London: Palgrave.
2014 Afterword, in Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean, edited by Timothy Rommen and Daniel Neely. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 306-315.
2011a “Interpreting World Music: A Challenge in Theory and Practice.” Reproduced in Non-Western Popular Music, edited by Tony Langlois in The Library of Essays on Popular Music Series. Surrey: Ashgate.
2011b “On Redefining the 'Local' Through World Music.” Reproduced in Popular Music, volume 4, edited by Chris Rojek (Brunel University). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications (SAGE Benchmarks in Culture and Society).
2007 “Globalizzazione e localismo” [in French, “Mondialisation et Localisme”] In L’Unité de la Musique, vol. 5 in the encyclopedia Musiques. Paris: Actes Sud. [translated in French from the Italian version; see 2005b below]
2005a “Making and Selling Culture: Calypso Music during Carnival.” In Caribbean Popular Culture & Globalization, edited by Christine Ho and Keith Nurse, 141-61. Temple University Press/ Ian Randle Press.
2005b “Globalizzazione e localismo.” In Enciclopedia della musica:
L’unità della musica, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 5: 138-56. Turino: Enaudi.
2002 “The Politics of Calypso in a World of Music Industries.” Popular Music Studies, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, 191-204. London: Arnold Publishers.
2001a “World Music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith and Will Straw, 176-192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Also published in Chinese and Korean.
2001b “Making and Selling Culture: Calypso Music during Carnival.” In Cahiers de la Société du Québec Recherche en Musique 5(1-2): 129-137.
2000 "Racial Projects and Music Practices in Trinidad, West Indies." Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (with a Foreword by Houston A. Baker, Jr.) 435-58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1996a "The Role of Zouk in the French Antilles." In B. Anderson, (ed.).Music of the Caribbean. New York: McGrawhill Co. College Custom series, 73-95.
1994 "'Authority' revisited: The 'Other' in Anthropology and Popular Music Studies," (with Line Grenier) in B. Diamond and R. Witmer (eds), Canadian Music, Issues of Hegemony and Identity. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 203-21. (First appeared in 1990; see below)
1990 "On Interpreting Popular Music: Zouk in the West Indies." in John Lent (ed.). Caribbean Popular Culture. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 79-97.
Articles
2026 “Transformative Outreach: Rhoda Reddock’s Life Work.” Small Axe 79 (3)
2019 “Party Music, Affect, and the Politics of Modernity.” Journal of World Popular Music 6(2): 173-192. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.40172
2017 “Roy Cape’s Labor of Love: Theorizing Work Ethics Through Musical Biography.” Popular Music 36(3): 353-69.
2015 “Review Essay: Living Politics, Making Music: The Writings of Jan Fairley, edited by Frith, Simon, Stan Rijven, and Ian Christie (eds). Popular Music34(3): 485-92.
2014 “Politics of Ethnomusicological Knowledge, Production, and Circulation.” Ethnomusicology 58(2): 321-26.
2011a “The Question of Multiculturalism in the Arts in a Postcolonial Nation-State.” Music and Politics5 (1) an online journal
http://www.music.ucsb.edu/projects/musicandpolitics
2011b “Beats of Pleasure amidst Everyday Violence: The Cultural Work of Party Music in Trinidad.” MUSICultures 38:7-26.
2010 “Music, Pleasure, and Politics: Live Soca in Trinidad,” in Small Axe: Journal of Criticism. Vol. 31: 16-29.
2005 “Audible Entanglements: Nation and Diasporas in Trinidad’s Calypso Music Scene.” Small Axe (Journal of criticism). Volume 17: 40-63.
2002-03 “Beyond the ‘World Music’ Label: An Ethnography of Transnational Musical Practices”, a 31-page typescript, in volume 34 of Criterios, one of the leading academic journals of cultural studies published in Spanish.
1997a "Interpreting World Music: A Challenge in Theory and Practice." Popular Music 16(1): 31-44.
1997b "Créolité and Francophonie in Music: Socio-Musical Repositionings Where It Matters." With Line Grenier, Cultural Studies 11(2): 207-34.
1997c "The Politics of Labeling Popular Musics in English Caribbean." Trans III (electronically-produced musicological journal published in Spain) https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/about-trans
1995 "On Redefining the Local Through World Music." PopScriptum (in German) 3: 30-44. (First appeared in 1993; see below)
1994a "Interpretation Out of Contradiction: A World Music in the West Indies." Canadian University Music Review, volume 14: 1-17.
1994b "Créolité and the New Cultural Politics of Difference in Popular Music of the French West Indies." Black Music Research Journal 14(2): 161-79.
1993 "On Redefining the Local Through World Music." World Music (35)2: 33-47.
1992a “Sociopolitical, Cultural and Economic Development through Music: Zouk in the French West Indies.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies17(34): 27-40.
1992b “A World Music Back Home: The Power of Mediations." Popular Music Perspectives 3: 131-40.
1991 "Ethnomusicology and the Study of Music in the Caribbean." Studies in Third World Societies 45: 117-40.
1990a "On Interpreting Popular Music: Zouk in the West Indies." The Folk Research Centre/Plas Wichach Folklo Bulletin (2)2: 4-31. (First appeared in book chapter; see above)
1990b "'Authority' Revisited: the 'Other' in Anthropology and Popular Music Studies." Ethnomusicology 34(3): 383-98.
1987a "Fitness and Flexibility: Funeral Wakes in St. Lucia, West Indies." Ethnomusicology 31(2): 273-99.
1987b "The La Rose and La Marguerite Organizations in St. Lucia: Oral and Literate Strategies in Performance." Yearbook for Traditional Music 19: 97-115.
1985 "St. Lucian Kwadril Evening." Latin American Music Review 6(1): 31-57.
Courses Taught:
Undergraduate: Studies of Musics of the World; Musics of the Caribbean; Musics, Politics, and Pleasure
Graduate: Introduction to Music Scholarship: Ethnomusicology; Research Design for Ethnomusicologists; Theory and Methodology in Popular Music Studies; Social and Cultural Theory in Music Studies; Interpretive Theories in Music
CV
Education
1984 Ph.D. in Musicology (Ethnomusicology), University of Michigan
1980 M.A. in Musicology (Ethnomusicology), Université de Montréal
1976 B. M. in Music Education, Université de Montréal
Academic Positions
2024 Professor Emerita
2017-2024 Distinguished Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) UCB
1998-2024 Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley
1999-2024 Affiliate Professor, African American Studies, UCB
2009-2024 Affiliate Professor, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UCB
1994-2002 Adjunct Professor, Department of Music, York University, Ontario, Canada
1993 Visiting Professor, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley
1991-1998 Associate Professor, Department of Music, University of Ottawa
1985-91 Assistant Professor, Department of Music (tenure track) University of Ottawa
1984-85 Assistant Professor (one-year replacement), Department of Music University of Ottawa
Recognition and Grants
2025 Honorary Doctorate from McGill University
2019-2022 International Consultant for the four-year project titled “Orfeu (1956-1983): The
Politics and aesthetics of popular music production and consumption in modern Portugal” funded by the Portugal Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal
2016 Townsend Center grant, UC Berkeley
2007-2013 Member of the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities
Research Institute at Irvine
2007-2010 Henry and Julia Weisman Schutt Chair in Music
2003-2006 SSHRC Research grant with Bob White (U of Montreal, Canada), Steven Feld (U. of
New Mexico, Timothy Taylor (UCLA), and Martin-Denis Constant (Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris, France)
2002 (Spring) Fellowship at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at Irvine
1999-2003 COR Research Enabling Grant
1999 Ford Grant Foundation for African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley
Several grants from SSHRC Research grants from 1987 to 1996
Several research grants from the University of Ottawa
Selected Professional Activities
Member of several editorial boards over the years, including Caribbean in Transit, SEM journal, MUSICultures, Black Music Research Journal (BMRJ), Critical World: Thinking Globalization through World Music; Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Blackwell Publications); Revue de Musique des Universités Canadiennes
Participation in SEM as Second-Vice President and Chair of the Nominating Committee for the elections of SEM Board of Directors; in Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) as member of the Executive Council; in IASPM as member of the Program committee for conference in Cuba and member of the Editorial Committee for the Journal of the International Association for the Studies of Popular Music; in the Canadian University Music Society as treasurer
Fieldwork ranging from three weeks to one year at the time
Trinidad (1993-every year to the present); Toronto (1996-99, 2001, summers 2007, 2008, 2010), Antigua (1996-1999); Barbados (1996-99); Ottawa (1996-99); Montreal (1996-99); Martinique (1987-1991); Guadeloupe (1987-1991); Dominica (1987-1991); St. Lucia (1979-1986; 2015)
Dissertation Chaired
2026 Caitlin Belem Brown Romtvedt (May 2026); 2026 Jonathan Wu (August 2026)
2024 Sarah Plovnick; 2023 Jacob Wolbert; 2023 John Walsh; 2022 Nour El Rayes;
2021 Christina Azahar; 2019 Jiselle Rouet; 2018 Andrew Snyder; 2015 Jose Neglia;
2013 Kendra Salois; 2013 Allan Mugishague; 2012 Carla Brunet; 2010 Rebecca Bodenheimer;
2010 Marié Abe (co-chair); 2009 John-Carlos Perea; 2007 Jeff Packman
Dissertation committee member
2023 Rebecca Lomnicky; 2023 Susan Bay; 2020 Hong-June Park; 2020 Kendra Van Nyhuis;
2017 Ian Goldstein; 2016 Ofer Gazit; 2015 Laurence Coderre (Chinese Studies);
2014 Pablo Palomino (History); 2012 Miki Kaneda; 2011 Josh Shapiro (Geography);
2011 Priscilla Layne (German); 2011 Christopher Tonelli (Music Dept. UC San Diego);
2010 Petra Rivera (African American Studies); 2009 Shalini Ayyagari;
2008 Eliot Bates; 2006 Zavier Livermon (African American Studies);
2005 Marlon Bailey (African American Studies); 2005 Donna Kwon;
2003 Wang, Oliver S. (Ethnic Studies); 1996 Julian Harris Gerstin (Anthropology)