Sillages Sonores
A media project giving voice to the music and cultures of the French overseas territories. Artist portraits, in-depth features, and academic perspectives on Caribbean popular music, written by a doctoral researcher in History and Art History.
A growing selection, translated with care
Sillages Sonores is written and researched in French. The articles below have been translated into English — a first pass by AI, reviewed and verified by the author — so that this research can reach a wider audience. More articles are added over time.
Available in English
Bouyon, From One Island to Another
The history of a Caribbean music in motion — from Dominica's Roseau to Guadeloupe's dancefloors, and the questions of debt and cultural appropriation it raises.
Read the article →Slackness Between Jamaica and Martinique
Gender, the body, and postcolonial resistance — from Jamaican dancehall to Martinican shatta, in dialogue with Donna P. Hope's scholarship.
Read the article →Speakers on the Move
How sound system culture traveled from Jamaica to London, Paris, Marseille, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.
Read the article →Is Shatta Subversive?
Body, language, and power in postcolonial Martinique, read through Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Dick Hebdige.
Read the article →Between Virilism and Emancipation
Shatta as a laboratory of gender — how the genre stages, and unsettles, masculinity and femininity in Martinique.
Read the article →The Afro-Descendant Body in the French Antilles
Colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics, from hair and doudouism to carnival, theater, and contemporary politics.
Read the article →What Is Hypersexualization?
A reflection on hypersexualization in shatta — affecting women and men alike — and what artists are doing with it.
Read the article →