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Benjamin Barson

Biography

Benjamin Barson

Benjamin Barson is a historian, baritone saxophonist and political activist. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. His work emphasizes “music history from below” and has been published in English, Spanish and Portuguese-language journals and several edited collections. He is a former Fulbright scholar to Mexico and has been an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin and UConn-Storrs.

Also a composer, he is the recipient of the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize from the ASCAP Foundation and has performed at a wide range of venues ranging from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT). He has released two CDs as a bandleader and has composed music for several staged works.

Barson, disturbed by the incredible oppression and ecological destructivity wrought by racial capitalism, employs a compositional practice that draws from the deep well of revolutionary musicians within the jazz tradition.

Benjamin Barson

Books by Benjamin Barson

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons
by Benjamin Barson - Culture, History, Music, Nonfiction

BRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas --- Haiti --- as a nexus for cultural and political change in 19th-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation.

The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom
written by Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson and Alexis Dudden; illustrated by Kim Inthavong - Graphic Novel, History, Nonfiction

THE CARGO REBELLION tells a true story of mutiny on the high seas in which 400 indentured Chinese men overthrew their captor, the Connecticut businessman and slave trader Leslie Bryson, taking a stand against an exploitative global enterprise. The laborers learned that Bryson’s claimed destination of San Francisco was a lie to trick them into deadly servitude in the dreaded guano islands of Peru. Reaching a dramatic tipping point, the mutineers rose up and killed Bryson and several of the ship's officers and then attempted to sail back to China. This book is a history from below that does justice to the memory of hundreds of thousands of indentured workers and demonstrates how Asian migration to the Americas was rooted in slavery, colonialism and the life-and-death struggle against servitude.