St. Lawrence University Associate Professor and Coordinator of Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino Studies Martha Chew Sánchez and Associate Professor of Music David Henderson recently harnessed the power of their collective expertise to co-edit and publish a book titled Scattered Music.
Chew Sánchez, whose research and teachings focus on Latino studies, cultural studies, musicology, border studies, ethnic studies, and cultural ecology, collaborated with Henderson, who has conducted research on music in the Kathmandu Valley, the Nepali film industry, and taught courses on music, film making, and Asian studies.
Along with other scholarly authors, Chew Sánchez and Henderson explore music and locations such as, cumbia in Mexico, música sertaneja in Japan, hip-hop in Canada, Irish music in the U.S. and the UK, reggae and dancehall in Germany, to examine how some migrant populations emulate their home countries through their music while others use music as a tool to redefine their sense of home.
According to the publisher, University Press of Mississippi, the book is considered “a world tour of the expected yet unexpected transformations of music and musicians on the move.”
“As the opening paragraph of the introduction to the volume observes, ‘What remains when people have been scattered apart is a strong urge to gather together, to collect,’” the publisher notes. “At few times in our lives has that ever been more apparent than right now.”
Chew Sánchez has guided St. Lawrence students on educational trips to the US-Mexico border, Yucatan Peninsula, and teaches courses on Ethnic Studies and Social Justice, Latino Popular Culture, Theories of Cultural Studies, and Latino Cultural Expressions: Music, Literature, Film, and more. Chew Sánchez graduated summa cum laude from Escuela Nacional de Maestros, earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Texas at El Paso, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Corridos in Migrant Memory published by the University of New Mexico in 2006 and is currently editing the manuscript Performing Mexican Identity.
Henderson is chair of St. Lawrence’s Department of Music and teaches courses on Musics of the World, Documentary Filmmaking, Musics of South Asia, Musics of Eastern Europe, World Cinema, Music Video, and Avant-garde and Underground Music. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor of the book Mementos, Artifacts, and Hallucinations from the Ethnographer’s Tent and a member of many professional associations including Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Association for Asian Studies, and more.
