
Faculty Lecture Series: Corinna Campbell
Thu, February 13th, 2025
4:15 pm - 5:30 pm

Associate Professor of Music Corina Campbell presents “Moving Beyond Words: Perspectives from Suriname Maroon Music and Dance” as part of the spring 2025 Faculty Lecture Series. Lectures will begin at 4:15 p.m. and take place in the Lawrence Hall Auditorium (L-231). Enter via the main WCMA entrance or through the Art Department corridor. Students, faculty, staff, community members – all are welcome!
When does an interaction between a drummer and a dancer become a conversation, and what is at stake in labeling it as such? The Suriname Maroon dance genre awasa is intensely interactive, and much of performers’ expressive work could be described as having some kind of conversational aspect. Even so, the genre’s use of rhythmic cues and phrases in the drummed language apinti, and the Maroon population’s diminishing fluency in apinti, have prompted heated debates over what exactly is being communicated in awasa, and how those interactions relate to other expressive practices. In this case, the shift from drummers and dancers being in a conversation to interacting in a way that resembles a conversation can signal the loss of deeply valued cultural knowledge. I argue that the subtleties of message and meaning in awasa only fully come to light relative to a wide array of particularities in language, syntax, gesture, and word play that collectively constitute a Maroon communicative matrix. Such an approach prompts a closer examination of how choreo-musical interactions in awasa relate to speech, but also how effective communication in apinti extends well beyond the percussive rendering of words.
Corinna Campbell is an ethnomusicologist and Associate Professor of music at Williams College. She holds degrees in ethnomusicology from Northwestern University (BM), Bowling Green State University (MM), and Harvard University (Ph.D). Her research focuses primarily on music and dance as practiced by Suriname Maroons (descendants of Africans who escaped slavery), addressing themes including music/dance interconnections, Surinamese cultural nationalism, culture-representational/folkloric performance, and the politics of performance. She is author of The Cultural Work: Maroon Performance in Paramaribo, Suriname (Wesleyan University Press 2020). Her research has appeared in publications including The Journal of Folklore Research, Ethnomusicology, Small Axe, and the Latin American Literary Review.
This talk is presented as part of the Spring 2025 Faculty Lecture Series. The series was founded in 1911 by Catherine Mariotti Pratt, the spouse of a faculty member who wanted to “relieve the tedium of long New England winters with an opportunity to hear Williams professors talk about issues that really mattered to them.” From these humble and lighthearted beginnings, the Faculty Lecture Series has grown to become an important forum for tenured professors to share their latest research with the larger intellectual community of the college.
The Faculty Lecture Series is organized by the faculty members of the Lecture Committee. The aim of the series is to present big ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries. All lectures will begin at 4:15 p.m. They are free and open to the public.
Upcoming Faculty Lectures
February 20 — Man He: “Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre”
February 27 — Bob Rawle: “The Molecular Biophysics of Viral Infection”
March 6 — Ralph Morrison: “Bézout’s Theorem, Algebraic and Tropical”
March 13 — Justin Shaddock: “Kant and the Problem of Happiness”
March 20 — Joel Lee: “On the Art of Caste Concealment”