Education
| PhD MA BA |
University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Los Angeles |
Bio
Peter Manuel is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the musics of India, the Caribbean, and Spain, about which he has published extensively. Three of his eight books have earned prestigious awards, and one, Popular Musics of the Non-Western World, has been translated and published in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His award-winning book Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae has sold over thirty thousand copies and is widely used as a textbook and reference book. Aside from his earlier book on Indo-Caribbean music and his forthcoming book on contradance in the Caribbean, his more than seventy scholarly articles include works on flamenco, chutney, the history of salsa, Puerto Rican music and identity, Indian classical music, Afro-Cuban song forms, the use of “riddims” in dancehall reggae, and other topics. An amateur sitarist, jazz pianist, and flamenco guitarist, he has also served as a copyright consultant on several cases involving Latin music and Indian music.
Scholarly Work
Books
Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.
East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-
Caribbean Culture. Temple University Press, 2000 (winner of the Caribbean Studies
Association 2001 Gordon K. Lewis Best Book Award)
Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. Temple University Press,
1995 (with Michael Largey and Ken Bilby) (winner of the Caribbean Studies Association
1996 Gordon K. Lewis Best Book Award, and “Outstanding Academic Book” award of
Choice 1996) (2nd edition, 2006).
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993 (also co-published by Oxford University Press – India, 2001)
Essays on Cuban Music: North American and Cuban Perspectives. University Press of
America (Lanham, MD), 1991.
Thumri in Historical and Stylistic Perspectives. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989.
Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988 (winner of an Ascap-Deems Taylor Award).
Documentary videos
Tan-Singing of Trinidad and Guyanas: Indo-Caribbean "Local-Classical Music." (50'
ethnographic documentary) 2/2000.
Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean. (53' ethnographic documentary) 2011.