Transformative Outreach: Rhoda Reddock's Life Work

Abstract This essay pays tribute to Rhoda Reddock's groundbreaking work as a scholar-activist. As an ethnomusicologist and scholar of popular music studies, the author shares how her immersive rereading of many of Reddock's publications on the (neo)colonial constructions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, to name only a few, made her increasingly aware of how her work exemplifies the kinds of interventions—intellectual, institutional, political, and sociocultural—that make a difference in the world. This essay acknowledges Reddock's inspiring methodological approaches and sense of ethics (what she views as fair practice) exemplified by, among others, her inclusion of competing discourses in her publications. This, the author contends, says something about Reddock's listening to as opposed to listening for, her efforts not to be looking for confirmation of what she has already determined but rather to learn what other people think. The essay also underscores how Reddock's sense of ethics is further manifest in her refusal to shy away from confronting unspoken topics that, until recently, were widely known but kept as public secrets (homosexuality, HIV, sexual abuse) in academia and the Caribbean at large and beyond. Throughout this essay, the author notes how Reddock's lifelong work on gender, race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity (and more) has not privileged one community, religion, tradition, private sector, or set of activities—a feat in and of itself. Collectively, the author reads Reddock's writings as fighting injustices, apathy, and desperation, as laying bare her own engagement but also as simultaneously encouraging others to engage—with and beyond her.