The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical Literature Prize

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons

Benjamin Barson, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2024.

Dr. Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. He is Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University. His research thinks through jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply tied to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their echoes in Radical Reconstruction. He recently completed a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico. Disturbed by the incredible oppression wrought by white supremacy and the destruction of global ecology, Barson employs a musical practice that draws from the deep well of revolutionary musicians within the jazz tradition, often composing through a collaborative process with activists and social movement leaders in the Global South. His work Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite (2018) was hailed as “Fully orchestrated and magnificently realized” (The Vermont Standard) as well as “a call to action” (I Care if You Listen). His teaching encourages students to consider musical aesthetics and their associated production practices through a holistic, interdisciplinary approach rooted in methodologies developed by scholars in Africana studies, musicology, cultural studies, and Atlantic History from below.

According to one of the referees,

Brassroots Democracy stands as a paradigm-shifting work offering an innovative and provocative challenge to the status quo. Like the musical forms that are its subject, the book is a creolizing harmony of methods (drawing from history, musicology, philosophy, and geography, among others), which stands, again like jazz music, not as a final word, but as an open invitation to further innovations, elaborations, and improvisations. Barson’s text, in other words, exemplifies many of the social, spiritual, and intellectual virtues that animate the musicians he discusses…. For those interested in the music, history, and politics of Black Atlantic, Brassroots Democracy is therefore an indispensable text and deserves receiving the Guillén Outstanding book award.

Sayan Dey, whose Performing Memories and Weaving Archives was a winner of the 2025 Guillén Outstanding Award, adds:

Brassroots Democracy by Benjamin Barson is a powerful testimony to the jazz musical culture, the different sociopolitical and “socio-sonic” factors that have shaped the musical culture, and what it means for a collective practice of democracy, which is in deep crisis in today’s times. We are all living in extremely severe times of genocides and ecocides facilitated by psychopathic and sociopathic leaderships and governmentalities who are consistently surveilling, censoring, and erasing thought-processes and knowledge-producing mechanisms that contribute to humanity, creativity, diversity, and critical thinking. In such scenarios, it is increasingly challenging to find avenues for solidarity, love, and care. Benjamin’s book generates such an avenue through jazz music and maroon ecologies, inviting communities to think, act, resist, and recover the fading values of dignity and humanity.

In agreement, President Jacqueline Martinez states:

Benjamin Barson’s Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, shows us the intimate and powerful connection between jazz and political struggle. Barson’s critical examination of the social and political contexts though which jazz thrives explores both the locality of New Orleans and the shared struggles for civil rights nationally and internationally. This masterful work deepens our understanding of how music, and jazz in particular, sustains relations through which struggles for humanity within and across black communities are engaged.

Nicolás Guillén Philosophical Literature Prize Previous Recipients