Ceremonies of being: Caribbean music, poetics and philosophy for climate futures                    

Presentation Ceremonies of being: Caribbean music, poetics and philosophy for climate futures, by Island(er)s at the Helm researcher Dr. Charissa Granger (The University of the West Indies).

This paper explores how Caribbean intellectual and musical traditions contribute vital perspectives to climate research on being. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, I consider how her redefinition of the human, away from colonial categories and toward a more relational conception of being, opens new ways of thinking climate beyond technocratic and scientific frames, casting the humanities and arts as a critical contributor to climate thought and research. Caribbean music, from string bands, calypso, and muzik di zumbi to ritualized practices of sound and gathering like carnival, embody what I call ceremonies of being: collective modes of sensing, knowing, and reworlding that foreground intimacy, creativity, and reinvention.

These ceremonies offer not only aesthetic forms but also epistemological tools for apprehending climate crisis in its affective, and planetary dimensions. By placing Wynter’s philosophical interventions in dialogue with Caribbean sonic practices, this paper argues for a climate research that is attuned to cultural practice as a site of knowledge and to futures that  can potentially emerge from within Caribbean world-making.

Charissa Granger is a musicologist and lecturer in cultural studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad and Tobago) whose teaching and research focuses on Afro-Caribbean and diasporic music-making and performance as decolonising practices