Imagine how different our world would be if the Transatlantic Slave Trade never happened. It’s a powerful question that makes us reflect on the deep scars of history and how they continue to shape our present.
SONG OF SLAVERY explores the Virgin Islands as a hub of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that extends far beyond its shores, shaping cultural, artistic, and musical landscapes of Africa and the Americas. Through the lens of music and art, this legacy is told in powerful ways, serving as a conduit for historical memory, resilience, and transformation.
These underwater sculptures are located in the Caribbean Sea along the coast of Grenada. It honors African who were thrown overboard from slave ships during the Midde Passage of the Transatlantic slave trade. Never forget. Credit: The African Monad #thegees
Production Plans
SONG OF SLAVERY will produce a documentary film, music program, digital storytelling program, and water drama in collaboration with the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), and Ghana Museums and Monuments.
Documentary Film
The film explores how music and art preserve the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in the Virgin Islands. Through the voices of musicians, storytellers, and artists, the film reveals how enslaved people used song as resistance and survival—and how their descendants continue to honor that history through contemporary culture.
Annaberg Sugar Plantation, St. John, US Virgin Islands. Credit: Gail Prensky
Music Program
The music program preserves and connects the diaspora’s connection to Africa. The Virgin Islands’ history as a slave trade hub profoundly shaped Africa and the Americas, with music acting as powerful testaments to the endurance of the African spirit. These creative expressions link past and present, ensuring that the struggles and triumphs of the enslaved are never forgotten but rather transformed into legacies of cultural pride and resistance. The music program repertoire will include a variety of traditions: the ring shout, reggae, calypso, and jazz, which still carry echoes of African melodies and drumming patterns; the quelbe music tradition, often called the “scratch band” sound , reflects African polyrhythms blended with European instruments, showing how the forced migration of Africans led to new hybrid sounds; and African rhythms from the Caribbean contributed to the evolution of blues, gospel, and hip-hop in the U.S.
Digital Storytelling Program
Digital Stories is a hybrid storytelling program connecting young scholars in Baltimore, MD (USA), Virgin Islands (USA/Caribbean), and Ghana (Africa). Participants will produce digital stories inspired by facilitated presentations and discussions about the impact of the slave trade hub in the Virgin Islands.
Leinster Bay, St. John, US Virgin Islands. Credit: Gail Prensky
Water Drama
The Water Remembers will be a drama that honors the Underground Railroad at Leinster Bay,
St. John, US Virgin Islands. Set at the shorelines, the sea, and the ruins—as a backdrop to tell the story of enslaved people who sought freedom through water routes to the British Virgin Islands in the
19th century.