Laurent Dubois — The Banjo: An Unfinished History (2016) — Chapter Notes

Laurent Dubois — The Banjo: An Unfinished History (2016) — Chapter Notes Laurent Dubois traces the banjo from its roots in West and Central African lutes through its Caribbean genesis, its central role in North American slavery and blackface minstrelsy, and its twentieth-century transformations in folk revival and bluegrass. The book insists the instrument is not merely an artifact of American culture but the product of a four-hundred-year Atlantic passage — an "unfinished history" that connects Vodou cosmology, the Atlantic slave trade, plantation soundscapes, and the civil-rights movement in a single continuous thread. The key Haitian node of this story is the banza — an early Caribbean form of the banjo documented in Saint-Domingue from the late eighteenth century, now held in the Paris Museum of Music, whose cross-shaped sound hole Dubois links to the Kongo cosmogram and, via a Haitian oungan, to the spirit Gédé.