Mary Caton Lingold
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Please join us for the 2025 James Ford Bell Lecture, “Hearing African Music Across the Early Modern Atlantic World,” presented by Professor Mary Caton Lingold, Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University.
This hybrid event is free and open to all. Please register if you plan to attend in person or online.
Register nowWhen conducting research at the James Ford Bell Library several years ago, Lingold began to notice that Europeans often described African performances witnessed in Africa very differently than the way they portrayed similar music in the context of American slavery. For example, European documentarians largely wrote favorably about monarchic and military music in Atlantic Africa, but in the Americas, these same traditions induced fear and scrutiny.
Nicolas Ponce, Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1791). Bell Call # 1791 oPo
Drums and horns in particular became emblems of enslaved resistance in the Americas, and many colonial powers instituted laws to ban their use. But in Africa, during the era when European travelers were establishing the trade networks along coastal regions that became crucial to the rise of slavery and global trade, Europeans revered these same horns, drums, and other instruments of state. This observation eventually shaped Lingold’s book, African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery, which tells the story of the influence and evolution of African musical performance during the rise of slavery and European colonization.
This presentation will focus on the subjective nature of sonic experience and the prominence of African musical performance on both sides of the Atlantic in the early modern era.
Mary Caton Lingold is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the early modern African Atlantic world. Her research and teaching involve the study of literature, music, sound, digital media, and the cultural history of slavery in the colonial Caribbean and North America.
What: 2025 James Ford Bell Lecture | “Hearing African Music Across the Early Modern Atlantic World,” presented by Mary Caton Lingold
When: Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025 | 7-8:30 p.m.
Where: Elmer L. Andersen Library and livestreaming online (hybrid event) | Parking (Lot 86)
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