ABSTRACT
The Nigerian bàtá is a two-headed talking drum (spelled and pronounced batá in Cuba) and provides an apt metaphor and microcosm for the transatlantic conversations and symbiotic relationships between Nigerian and Cuban religious elites involved in the various sects of orisha religion. This article revises Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993), challenging his term ‘black music’ and the notion that black Atlantic populations are fundamentally unified by shared memories of slavery. Furthermore, this discussion challenges the privileging of text in transatlantic musical studies and argues for the centralising of purely musical data across academic disciplines.
