Sydney Hutchinson – författare

Tigers of a Different Stripe takes readers inside the unique world of merengue tipico, a traditional music of the Dominican Republic. While in most genres of Caribbean music women usually participate as dancers or vocalists, in merengue tipico they are more often instrumentalists and even bandleaders something nearly unheard of in the macho Caribbean music scene. Examining this cultural phenomenon, Sydney Hutchinson offers an unexpected and fascinating account of gender in Dominican art and life. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and New York among musicians, fans, and patrons of merengue tipico not to mention her own experiences as a female instrumentalist Hutchinson details a complex nexus of class, race, and artistic tradition that unsettles the typical binary between the masculine and feminine. She sketches the portrait of the classic male figure of the tiguere, a dandified but sexually aggressive and street-smart "tiger," and she shows how female musicians have developed a feminine counterpart: the tiguera, an assertive, sensual, and respected female figure who looks like a woman but often plays and even sings like a man.Through these musical figures and studies of both straight and queer performers, she unveils rich ambiguities in gender construction in the Dominican Republic and the long history of a unique form of Caribbean feminism.

Focus: Music of the Caribbean presents the most important issues of Caribbean musical history and current practice, discussing thought-provoking questions in a student-friendly fashion. It uses current ethnomusicological research on Caribbean music to tell the stories of Caribbean history—those of colonialism and neocolonialism, race and nationalism, marginalization and globalization—and to explore that history’s continuing impact on the lives, cultures, musics, and dance of modern-day people in the Caribbean and beyond.In three parts, the text presents an embodied understanding of the sounds, rhythms, and movements that exemplify the history, culture, and politics of Caribbean music:I. Caribbean Music and Caribbean History establishes a framework for thinking about Caribbean musical history and the roles race and migration play II. Music and Dance in Caribbean Societies considers how contrasting forms of dance music reconcile competing ideas about Caribbean identities past and presentIII. Focusing In: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments in Merengue Típico explores the music of the Dominican Cibao region through a focus of the genre’s dominant musical instruments Accessible to all students regardless of musical background, Focus: Music of the Caribbean is bolstered by web resources, including more than sixty detailed listening guides and accompanying playlists, vocabulary lists, and student quizzes. Discussion questions and activities for each chapter are featured in the text.

Focus: Music of the Caribbean presents the most important issues of Caribbean musical history and current practice, discussing thought-provoking questions in a student-friendly fashion. It uses current ethnomusicological research on Caribbean music to tell the stories of Caribbean history—those of colonialism and neocolonialism, race and nationalism, marginalization and globalization—and to explore that history’s continuing impact on the lives, cultures, musics, and dance of modern-day people in the Caribbean and beyond.In three parts, the text presents an embodied understanding of the sounds, rhythms, and movements that exemplify the history, culture, and politics of Caribbean music:I. Caribbean Music and Caribbean History establishes a framework for thinking about Caribbean musical history and the roles race and migration play II. Music and Dance in Caribbean Societies considers how contrasting forms of dance music reconcile competing ideas about Caribbean identities past and presentIII. Focusing In: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments in Merengue Típico explores the music of the Dominican Cibao region through a focus of the genre’s dominant musical instruments Accessible to all students regardless of musical background, Focus: Music of the Caribbean is bolstered by web resources, including more than sixty detailed listening guides and accompanying playlists, vocabulary lists, and student quizzes. Discussion questions and activities for each chapter are featured in the text.

Queering Partner Dance brings work by established and emerging researchers together in one volume, exposing readers for the first time to this burgeoning field and allowing for comparison across genres and geographic areas. The contributors to Queering Partner Dance, who are dancer-scholars themselves, highlight the broad transformative potential of queer dance practices and theorize how those practices are relevant to multiple disciplines.Since the emergence and expansion of the scholarly fields of gender studies and queer studies, which transformed music and dance studies along the way, social dancers of all genders began to openly question the gendered dynamics of their art and to experiment with how they might be changed. Exploring dances like tango, ballroom, Latin hustle, and salsa, with chapters on teaching dance and queer dance spaces, the contributors show how efforts to queer dance came to mean not only different gender constellations or role distributions, but also the modification of movements and expectations, steps and techniques, and a reorientation of a dance to acknowledge those who are usually excluded.