Free and Open to the Public. Please RSVP here.
Join esteemed anthropologist and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Dr. Deborah A. Thomas and filmmaker and percussionist, Junior Wedderburn in an immersive exploration into the practices of Kumina and other rituals that nurture connections with our ancestors. In this insightful gathering, we’ll delve into how these traditions offer pathways to a deeper understanding of existence, unlocking profound possibilities for life.
Benefiting from Thomas and Wedderburn’s extensive knowledge and experience, participants will engage in enlightening discussions on the transformative nature of Kumina and similar rituals. Through interactive dialogue and shared perspectives, we will uncover the ways these practices foster ancestral connections, providing access to invaluable wisdom and guidance. At the heart of the event lies the tradition of “reasoning,” where community members come together to discuss important issues before releasing them through the rhythmic beats of Kumina drumming. Inspired by this tradition, we will embark on a contemporary reasoning session, release, and reverence for our ancestors. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute and foster a deeper understanding of the intersections between culture, identity, and social change.
Organized by Jennifer Jones, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation James Gallery Fellow and student in the Ph.D. Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center.
Made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Participants
Junior Wedderburn
Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn is an accomplished percussionist who has performed and recorded with a variety of well-known reggae artistes and dance companies, and who has also composed percussive scores for dance and film. He was the composer, co-director and co-producer for the films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which was on view at the Penn Museum from November 2017 to October 2020. Wedderburn was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and grew up around Afro-Jamaican ritual drumming practices. At the age of three, he was selected at his infant school to drum for their Jonkonnu celebrations, and in primary school, he began drumming for the school choir and the folkdance groups who were part of the national festival competition. When Wedderburn began secondary school, he met Neville Black, who, with Rex Nettleford and Eddie Thomas, founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. His involvement with Black introduced him to cultural luminaries across the island, including Kapo, Olive Lewin and the Jamaican Folk Singers, Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy, Ivy Baxter, Lavinia Williams and others, with whom Wedderburn drummed and conducted workshops. At the same time, he performed with groups like the Jolly Boys Mento band at the new hotels that were being built in the area. Neville Black had two kumina drummers working with him, and they made Wedderburn his first kumina drums. At 16, Wedderburn began attending the Jamaica School of Music, and playing for (and touring with) the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. He left the School during the height of the political violence that emerged in the run-up to the 1980 elections, and he went back to Port Antonio, where he founded Dominion Percussion, a group of drummers who played Afro-Jamaican ritual traditions. With Dominion Percussion, Wedderburn won several gold medals from the National Festival Commission, and the Jamaica Tourist Board took the group to Florida to represent Jamaica during their promotional tours. Artists across Jamaica came to Port Antonio and asked Wedderburn to perform with them, and his repertoire broadened to include West African rhythms and chants. At the same time, he began performing with reggae artiste Burning Spear, which led him to New York City. In New York, he founded Ancient Vibrations, a percussion group that presents traditional Afro-Jamaican rhythms and chants, the roots of reggae music. Between 1990-1995, Wedderburn toured extensively with Urban Bush Women, performing and creating percussive scores for both repertoire and evening-length pieces. He has played with The Lion King on Broadway since it began development in 1997.
Deborah Thomas
Deborah A. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, is also a Research Associate with the Race:Gender:Class Centre at the University of Johannesburg. Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (2019), was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021, the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020. She is also the author of Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004). She is co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements (2023), Citizenship on the Edge: Sex, Gender, Race (2022); Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton (2022); and Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). Thomas co-directed and co-produced two films: BAD FRIDAY: RASTAFARI AFTER CORAL GARDENS (with John L. Jackson, Jr. and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn), a documentary that chronicles the history of violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community – Rastafari – and shows how people use their recollections of the Coral Gardens “incident” in 1963 to imagine new possibilities for the future; and FOUR DAYS IN MAY (with Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Deanne M. Bell), an experimental documentary that juxtaposes archives related to the “Tivoli Incursion” in May 2010, when Jamaican security forces entered West Kingston to arrest Christopher Coke, wanted for extradition to the United States, and killed at least 75 civilians. She also co-curated a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston, which opened at the Penn Museum in November 2017. Thomas has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals across the disciplines.
Prior to her life as an academic, Thomas was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women, a company that is committed to using art as a means of addressing issues of social justice and encouraging civic engagement, and that brings the untold stories of disenfranchised people to light through dance from a woman-centered perspective and as members of the African Diaspora community. Thomas was also a Program Director with the National Council for Research on Women, an international working alliance of women’s research and policy centers whose mission is to enhance the connections among research, policy analysis, advocacy, and innovative programming on behalf of women and girls. From 2016-2020, she was the Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, and was co-editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology from 2007-2010. She currently also sits on the Editorial Committee of the Caribbean-based journal Social and Economic Studies. Thomas has contributed to a number of professional associations, having been a member of the Executive Council for the Caribbean Studies Association from 2008-2011, on the board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (2012-2017), and the Secretary of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 2010-2014. She is currently the co-chair of the AAA Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains.