Signed in as:

You are browsing courtesy of:

Sign in to an additional subscriber account

Login

This account has no valid subscription for this site.

Forthcoming Articles Expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section

Music in Chile
Music in Paraguay
Notation
Find more forthcoming articles...

Feedback

Print
Export Citations
Cite
Email this content

Share Link

Copy this link, or click below to email it to a friend
Email this content
or copy the link directly:

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199757824/obo-9780199757824-0226.xml
The link was not copied. Your current browser may not support copying via this button.

Link copied successfully

9780199757824-0226

Introduction

The English-speaking Caribbean is extraordinarily rich in its musical diversity. This region within a region is home to a mere 7 million people, but the sonic footprint that the English-speaking Caribbean has left on the world far outstrips any reasonable expectation for what such a collection of small places should be able to produce. The Caribbean is shaped by the violence associated with Amerindian encounters with Europe; the long and brutal histories of slavery and plantation economies; the economic, political, and social consequences of coloniality; anticolonial and decolonial struggles of the 20th century; and by the fact that everyone in the region is, for one reason or another, from somewhere else. The English-speaking Caribbean is also home to profoundly creative communities. The sounds of calypso, dancehall, soca, wylers, rake-n-scrape, bouyon, junkanoo, ska, spouge, tuk, mento, quelbe, chutney, reggae, and cadence-lypso, to name but a few styles, have emerged in this region within a region, and many of these sounds circulate far beyond the Caribbean. What follows is a guide to the essential scholarship on the music of the English-speaking Caribbean. Any bibliography that begins by dividing the circum-Caribbean region into language blocks immediately risks reinforcing one of the long-standing scholarly issues within Caribbean studies—the tendency to treat the French-, Spanish-, Dutch-, and English-speaking Caribbean as though they exist in isolation from each other. Too often, Caribbean scholarship has missed opportunities to think across linguistic boundaries in addressing common threads and significant exchanges. There are, nevertheless, also certain practical advantages to compiling bibliographies that are focused in this way. For instance, such an organizational choice affords an opportunity to explore the specificities of colonialism and empire within the region. It also provides a unique perspective on the practicalities, associations, and political realities that continue to animate the Caribbean. This article leverages these advantages while also offering a sense, where possible, of the deep connections and interdependencies that extend across the region, regardless of language or colonial history. Anyone wishing to gain a broadly useful framework for thinking about music in the Caribbean, however, should also survey the literature of the French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean. Bibliographies, by their very shape and organization, often point to areas for further research, and the organizational strategy for this particular article highlights some significant imbalances in the scholarly record. A pattern that emerges clearly concerns the relative lack of attention that has been paid to the small island Caribbean. The further need to integrate the small island Caribbean into the larger conversations within the English-speaking (and wider) Caribbean is pressing. To that end, after three sections highlighting reference works, general overviews, and theoretical works, this article breaks down scholarship according to island, focusing attention on each in turn. In doing so, it groups islands within the political rubrics commonly used to organize them within the region, including: the Commonwealth Caribbean, the Mainland Caribbean, the British Overseas Territories of the Caribbean, and Other Territories (the US Virgin Islands). One area consciously omitted from this bibliography is the growing body of literature centered on diasporic Caribbean communities. Although this rapidly growing field of research is producing excellent scholarship, there is simply not space to incorporate it within the constraints of this bibliography. In fact, this topic is crucial to understanding the Caribbean as a region and warrants a dedicated bibliographic essay in its own right. A final note: the English-speaking Caribbean was built on the ashes of Amerindian societies (Carib, Arawak, Taíno, Kalinago, etc.) that had existed in the region before encounter with Europe. Unfortunately, disease, war, shrinking territory, and forced labor ensured that they have not generally survived as viable communities (with the notable exception of the Kalinago community in Dominica). Consequently, very little can be written about Amerindian musical practices outside of the realm of archeology. Notwithstanding the lack of music scholarship, however, it remains crucial not to treat European encounters with Amerindians as a prehistory to the region but rather as foundational to our understanding of the region’s past, present, and future.

Reference Works

The English-speaking Caribbean is well represented in standard reference works concerned with Caribbean musical life. Included here are some of the most useful encyclopedias along with a few select anthologies and bibliographic tools that engage with musical practices across a significant portion of this region within a region. Olsen and Sheehy 1998 is perhaps the best place to begin a general study of the region’s musical life. Shepherd, et al. 2005; Shepherd, et al. 2014; and Kuss 2007, however, also offer excellent entries on the region’s traditional and popular musics. Those interested specifically in religious practices and sacred music should turn to Taylor and Case 2013, which represents the most comprehensive reference work on this subject. Lomax Hawes 1997 offers an excellent entry into children’s games in the eastern Caribbean, and Gray 2011 and Gray 2015 offer exhaustive bibliographies of Trinidadian and Jamaican musics, respectively.

Gray, John. Jamaican Popular Music, From Mento to Dancehall Reggae: A Bibliographic Guide. Nyack, NY: African Diaspora, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This comprehensive bibliographic work covers the wide range and scope of Jamaican popular music. Covering materials from the mid-20th century to the early 21st, and expanding beyond Jamaica to include presence of Jamaican sounds in international contexts, this work is a valuable starting point for those interested in researching these genres and their global circulations.
Find this resource:
Gray, John. Carnival, Calypso and Steel Pan: A Bibliographic Guide to Popular Music of the English-Speaking Caribbean and Its Diaspora. Nyack, NY: African Diaspora, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is the most comprehensive bibliographic work on the intertwined topics of carnival, calypso, and steelpan. Annotated citations cover materials from the mid-19th century to the early 21st, expanding beyond Trinidad to include the bourgeoning practices of the diaspora. This is a valuable resource for those interested in researching these musical and masquerading practices.
Find this resource:
Kuss, Malena, ed. Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History. Vol. 2. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Eight chapters of this encyclopedia volume are focused on music in the English-speaking Caribbean, including: Jamaica, Barbados, The Bahamas, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad. The encyclopedia includes general essays about the region and incorporates scholars hailing from within the region more thoroughly than does any other such volume. The entries provide excellent introductions to the musical genres and social contexts within their respective national contexts.
Find this resource:
Lomax Hawes, Bess. Brown Girl in the Ring: An Anthology of Song Games from the Eastern Caribbean. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This anthology of song games from the eastern Caribbean is an excellent reference for anyone interested in the circulation of children’s songs throughout the region. An audio compilation, recorded by Alan Lomax and released as part of the Caribbean Voyage series by Rounder Records (see citation in General Overviews) serves as a companion to this anthology.
Find this resource:
Olsen, Dale A., and Daniel Sheehy, eds. The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 2, South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. New York: Garland, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Perhaps the most widely recognized encyclopedia of world music. The entries on the English-speaking Caribbean are detailed, encompass traditional, popular, and art musics, and offer an excellent starting point for research. General essays on several aspects of the region’s musical life are also included. While not comprehensive, the encyclopedia offers detailed articles aiming for broad coverage, including: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, and the US Virgin Islands.
Find this resource:
Shepherd, John, David Horn, and Dave Laing, eds. Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. 3, Locations: Caribbean and Latin America. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This encyclopedia volume includes survey essays concerning much of the English-speaking Caribbean. Although not exhaustive, it nevertheless provides an excellent starting point for further research. Musical genres that are introduced here in the context of colonial and decolonial narratives are further explored in Volume 9 of the encyclopedia.
Find this resource:
Shepherd, John, David Horn, Hettie Malcomson, Pamela Narbona Jerez, Mona-Lynn Courteau, and Heidi Feldman, eds. Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. 9, Genres: Caribbean and Latin America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This encyclopedia volume includes introductory essays to many of the genres emanating from the English-speaking Caribbean. Entries are written by experts in the field and include select bibliographic and discographic references. Although the encyclopedia is explicitly focused on popular musics, traditional musics are covered where relevant to the development of particular genres.
Find this resource:
Taylor, Patrick, and Frederick I. Case, eds. The Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions. Vols. 1 & 2. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This encyclopedia offers the best and most exhaustive introduction to the many religious and spiritual traditions of the Caribbean. Because entries focus on practice as well as theology/belief, the encyclopedia includes a substantial amount of material on the sacred/spiritual musical traditions of the English-speaking Caribbean. As such, it serves as an excellent starting point for those interested in the sacred musics of the region.
Find this resource:

General Overviews

As a rule, overviews of the region include the English-speaking Caribbean but do not focus exclusively on its musical and sociocultural life. Most of the citations below are, as such, to some extent or another, only partially concerned with the principal subject of this bibliography. It should also be mentioned that a few of the citations that follow are less concerned with music, per se, than with the political, economic, and social contexts that animate Caribbean life. That said, these overviews of the Caribbean afford readers the opportunity to think about how the English-speaking Caribbean fits within the larger region and to draw connections between the French, Spanish, Dutch, and English Caribbean.

Entire Caribbean

For region-wide overviews focused specifically on musical traditions, see Manuel 2006 and Rommen 2016. For overviews focused on dance, tourism, and African retentions, see Sloat 2010, Rommen and Neely 2014, and Warner-Lewis 2003, respectively. For broad historical overviews, see the edited collections Mintz and Price 1985 and Palmié and Scarano 2011. Those interested in an overview of the region’s religious practices (both within and without the Caribbean) should consult Pulis 1999.

Manuel, Peter, ed. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This textbook introduces the Caribbean’s musical life in survey fashion. It opens up the broad themes and continuing challenges animating the region while also offering a solid, introductory exploration of musical genres and musical histories. That said, the coverage of the English-speaking Caribbean is limited primarily to the large islands of Trinidad and Jamaica.
Find this resource:
Mintz, Sydney, and Sally Price, eds. Caribbean Contours. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This classic anthropological statement about the Caribbean region is a useful point of departure for understanding the intellectual history of the region. An excellent chapter, “The Caribbean as a Musical Region,” written by Kenneth Bilby, is one of the highlights.
Find this resource:
Palmié, Stephan, and Francisco Scarano, eds. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited volume relies on expert authors to explore the history of the Caribbean from the pre-Columbian era through colonial encounter, and from postcolonial moment to the complicated political and social contexts of the 21st century. The abiding issues and challenges of the region are highlighted and explored in productive essays. The book extends to almost six hundred pages, thereby affording readers perhaps the most comprehensive accounting of the region’s history in a single volume.
Find this resource:
Pulis, John, ed. Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity: A Reader in the Anglophone Caribbean. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This collection of ethnographic case studies is concerned with the religious practices of Caribbean communities both in the region and residing elsewhere in the diaspora. Organized into two parts, the first concerns the diaspora, and the second explores the Caribbean. This collection is an excellent point of departure for those wishing to understand the religious possibilities within the region.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy, and Daniel Neely, eds. Sun, Sea, and Sound: Music and Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An exploration of music and tourism in the circum-Caribbean, this edited collection makes the argument that music and tourism have not generally been thought together in the region. Chapters introduce various vectors of tourism such as mass, intra-regional, expatriate, sex, religious, and festival tourism. The volume aims to encourage more research on the encounters between local musicians and tourists of all sorts. Several chapters deal specifically with locations in the English-speaking Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. “Music in the Caribbean.” In Excursions in World Music. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter, part of a larger introductory textbook for non-specialists, offers a survey of the entire region. It is designed to wrestle with the shared history of the region, compiling a set of musical case studies in order to explore four themes: patterns of musical reception, questions of identity, class and cultural politics, and tourism and travel.
Find this resource:
Sloat, Susanna. Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813034676.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Offers an excellent set of case studies on Caribbean dance. Although focused broadly on the region, the book nevertheless includes multiple chapters on dance in the English-speaking Caribbean. The value of this text lies in calling attention to dance as an inextricable aspect of Caribbean life and to the many ways that music, dance, belief, and sociality are intertwined with each other in everyday practice.
Find this resource:
Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Offers one of the most comprehensive explorations of the influence of a specific African cultural zone on the development of expressive culture in the Caribbean. In the process of illustrating these influences, the book includes a significant amount of information on music.
Find this resource:

English-Speaking Caribbean

Scholarship focused specifically on the English-speaking Caribbean includes: Abrahams 1983 and Nicholls 2012, which offer explorations of the verbal arts and masquerade practices, respectively; Bilby and Neely 2009 focuses on the history of contradance; and Guilbault 1997 offers an exploration of the politics of genre labels within the popular music industry. For those interested in gaining a sonic overview of the English-speaking Caribbean, there is perhaps no better place to start than with the series of recordings made by Alan Lomax and released by Rounder Records 1997–2002.

Abrahams, Roger. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a classic collection of articles on expressive culture in the English-speaking Caribbean. Particularly interested in the verbal arts, Abrahams’s collection explores the contexts, conventions, and innovations associated with the man-of-words. Significantly, many of the traditions discussed by Abrahams incorporate important musical components as well.
Find this resource:
Bilby, Kenneth, and Daniel T. Neely. “The English-Speaking Caribbean: Re-Embodying the Colonial Ballroom.” In Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean. Edited by Peter Manuel, 231–270. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter provides an excellent overview of contradance practice throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. It constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in contradance, quadrille, lancers, and the history of social dancing in the region. The entire book, moreover, is an excellent resource for contextualizing the tradition across the Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. “The Politics of Labelling Popular Music in the English Caribbean.” Transcultural Music Review 3 (1997).
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Guilbault’s essay is an important exploration of how popular music is labeled, circulated, and marketed in the English-speaking Caribbean. A major contribution to understanding how artists, in particular, go about branding their innovations and capitalizing on their artistic vision.
Find this resource:
Lomax, Alan. Caribbean Voyage: The 1962 Field Recordings. CD. Nashville, TN: Rounder Records, 1997–2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A rich collection of field recordings from the mid-20th-century (mostly small island) Caribbean. Across eleven CDs, Lomax’s recordings document the rich diversity of traditional music across the region. Liner notes by regional experts make these recordings an indispensable resource for those interested in the music of the English-speaking Caribbean. CD’s include the audio for Beth Lomax Hawes’s Brown Girl In the Ring; Carriacou Calaloo; East Indian Music in the West Indies; Dominica: Creole Crossroads; Trinidad: Carnival Roots; Saraca: Funery Music of Carriacou; Tombstone Feast; Funery Music of Carriacou; Grenada: Creole and Yoruba Voices; and Nevis and St. Kitts: Tea Meetings, Christmas Sports, & the Moonlight. A sampler CD and an eleventh CD, entitled Martinique: Cane Fields and City Streets, round out the collection.
Find this resource:
Nicholls, Robert Wyndham. The Jumbies’ Playing Ground: Old World Influences on Afro-Creole Masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A valuable resource for thinking about masquerade traditions in the eastern Caribbean (or small island Caribbean). Focusing significant attention on St. Kitts and Nevis, the US Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Antigua and Barbuda, and Anguilla, this book traces the interactions and exchanges between Old World European practices and African-derived practices. After tracing this history, the book goes on to illustrate the ways in which such influences continue to shape and inform current practice.
Find this resource:

Theoretical Literature

Scholarship on the Caribbean in general, and involving the musics of the English-speaking Caribbean, in particular, draws on an interdisciplinary set of theoretical paradigms. Work in cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, critical theory, literary criticism, and history informs the ways that music scholars approach their subject. The citations below represent a selection of such scholarship with a particular focus on scholarship produced by Caribbean intellectuals. Included here are several iconic and classic works published by intellectuals hailing from the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean in order to illustrate the impact within the English-speaking Caribbean of these scholars and their ideas. Although there is no separate heading for journals in this article, new theoretical and interdisciplinary ideas are often published in: Calaloo, Caribbean Quarterly, New West Indian Guide, Small Axe, Caribbean in Transit, Calabash, Caribbean Studies, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Latin American Music Review.

Classic Texts

The following texts represent a small sampling of the theoretical work emanating from the region during the 20th century and should thus be understood only as helpful starting points for research in the region. Included here are classic anticolonial statements such as Césaire 2000, Fanon 2008, James 1989, and Williams 1944. Mintz and Price 1992, which originally circulated as a working paper in the 1970s is a classic anthropological statement about creolization. Hebdige 1987 and Gilroy 1993 represent classic statements about the region’s importance within a diasporic understanding of the Black Atlantic. Glissant 1999 is one of the most eloquent statements of postcolonial possibility, arguing for an embrace of what he calls a poetics of Creolization as a means of moving forward. Benitez-Rojo 1997 approaches the postcolonial Caribbean through the lens of chaos theory, while Walcott 1993 reads as a productive and literary counterpoint to the approaches taken by Glissant and Benitez-Rojo.

Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean in Postcolonial Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822382058 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This provocative classic takes as its point of departure the field of chaos theory. Arguing that apparent disorder is itself guided by ordering principles (fractal geometry), Benitez-Rojo illustrates that the discontinuities (geographic, linguistic, social, etc.) within the region can be understood not as disorder but rather as an ordering principle that produces an archipelago of repeating islands. This theoretical claim has become a touchstone for much of the subsequent literature on the postcolonial Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
It is not a stretch to suggest that this book represents the most iconic anticolonial argument articulated from the Caribbean. This short book is, essentially, a manifesto. It focuses on the long-standing abuses perpetrated by the colonizer, the unjust subjugation and suffering experienced by the colonized, and the inevitable effects on the colonizing society as a result of such dehumanizing behavior. Written in profoundly poetic language, this book is essential reading. Originally published in 1955.
Find this resource:
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is one of the classic statements of the anticolonial moment in the Caribbean. It diagnoses the psychological effects of unfreedom, coloniality, and cultural dominance on black bodies in the Caribbean. Relying heavily on psychoanalysis and aimed squarely at the history of sociopolitical inequality and racism, Fanon lays bare the devastating consequences of coloniality. This book remains a touchstone for those interested in the intellectual history of the region and in the history of empire in the region. Originally published in 1952.
Find this resource:
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This classic book, which articulates the Black Atlantic as a historical and cultural space that needs to be thought as a whole, ushered in a great deal of new research focusing on circulations, interconnections, internationalism, diaspora, and transatlantic culture. In the process, the Caribbean is thought in connection to Africa, Europe, and the Americas in productive fashion.
Find this resource:
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Offers a thoroughgoing and complex rethinking of Caribbean coloniality. Glissant offers a sustained, unflinching, and critical exploration of the implications and effects of cultural dependency in the Caribbean. He argues that responding to this legacy in the postcolonial moment entails embracing a poetics of Creolization or a cross-cultural poetics. Although Glissant’s examples are drawn primarily from Martinique, this book has become foundational for much work in the English-speaking Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Hebdige, Dick. Cut `n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. New York: Routledge, 1987.
DOI: 10.4324/9780203359280 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An important statement about the aesthetics and possibilities of Caribbean popular music. Particularly focused on Jamaican and Trinidadian styles, the book traces them both in the region and as they circulate through and spur innovations within Caribbean communities in England and the United States. Offers a starting point for considering the ways in which sound encodes history, meaning, and cultural identities.
Find this resource:
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of the classic studies of the Haitian Revolution. It reveals the paradoxical relation between revolutionary ideals of freedom in France and the ways they were ignored, distorted, or otherwise challenged when the same calls came from Haiti. A seminal study of the political and social dynamics attendant to the Haitian Revolution, the book also mounts a profoundly anticolonial argument. Originally published in 1938.
Find this resource:
Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The classic statement on Creolization as process. Remains a touchstone for the shift within anthropology from an earlier emphasis on African retentions to a more nuanced appraisal of the processes attendant to the Middle Passage and subsequent adjustments to life in the so-called New World. Much of the discourse about Creolization in the contemporary moment starts from intellectual ground first cleared in this book.
Find this resource:
Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Theory as poetry. This short essay, delivered as his Nobel Prize lecture, is a profound affirmation of the cultural vitality of the Caribbean. At once acknowledging the losses of unrecoverable pasts and illustrating the power of such loss to inspire creative solutions and new histories, this book stands as a classic affirmation of a Caribbean aesthetic.
Find this resource:
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is a classic statement of the way that the Caribbean was interpolated into modern capitalist economies and the extent to which free labor and unfree bodies provided the engine for empire. Written by the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, this book remains important within Caribbean intellectual history and for its theoretical orientation.
Find this resource:

Recent Contributions

The suggestions offered below, again, represent only a small fraction of the excellent work on the region. They have been chosen to highlight several themes that have been important for music scholarship in the English-speaking Caribbean and to spur further exploration. Those interested in the possibilities of Creole will find good starting points in Crichlow 2009 and Stewart 2007. Fulani 2012 and Hosein and Outar 2016 offers excellent explorations of feminist and gender studies perspectives. The edited volumes by Meeks and Lindahl 2001 and Edmondson 1999, along with Sheller 2003, provide broad and interdisciplinary reflections on representation, identity, mobility, and history in the region. Those interested in understanding the political and intellectual dimensions of the region, should consider starting with Scott 2014, Puri 2004, and Kempadoo 2016.

Crichlow, Michaeline. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822392453 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A sophisticated exploration of the concept of “Creole,” this book attempts to reframe the term for use in the postcolonial contexts of the region and to suggest new ways of thinking about Creolization as an unfinished, ongoing project not explicitly tied to its plantation histories.
Find this resource:
Edmondson, Belinda, ed. Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection includes essays on literature and music focused on thinking carefully about how various Caribbean communities represent themselves both to the nation and beyond it. Case studies reach across genre, race, class, and gender in order to illustrate the wide range of possibilities and the regional rivalries, tensions, and challenges that accompany representational strategies. This book finds in cultural productions particularly useful material for such analyses.
Find this resource:
Fulani, Ifeona, ed. Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection explores Caribbean popular musics through the twin lenses of gender and diaspora. Focusing on women performers, including Rihanna, Calypso Rose, and Grace Jones, among several others, the chapters offer important readings on the mobilities, challenges, and controversies that accompany these musicians’ contributions to Caribbean popular musics in both local and transnational contexts. The chapters also illustrate the ways that the transnational flows of sound diverge from and also impact upon local sounds.
Find this resource:
Hosein, Gabrielle Jamela, and Lisa Outar, eds. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A groundbreaking book, bringing together three generations of scholars to explore the impact of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, activism, and intervention in the Caribbean. Chapters explore gender negotiations (across class, religion, race, etc.) and uncouple their historical arguments from the centrality of India. Instead, the book’s contributors adopt a stance founded on shared histories of indentureship, reaching across and beyond the region for their case studies.
Find this resource:
Kempadoo, Roshini. Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence, and the Location of the Caribbean Figure. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An excellent engagement with the past, present, and future uses of the archive in the Caribbean. Kempadoo takes readers through the archive, illustrating how it has been manipulated, how it shapes understandings of the present, and how it influences possible futures. The chapters offer insightful readings, in particular, of images and their archival lives and the book offers an important starting point for anyone considering the ambivalences, silences, and complexities attendant to Caribbean archives.
Find this resource:
Meeks, Brian, and Folke Lindahl, eds. New Caribbean Thought: A Reader. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection brings together a veritable who’s who of Caribbean intellectuals to address themselves to the urgent political, social, and cultural questions of the 21st century. The book is divided into four parts—“Context,” “Conjunctures,” “Critique,” and “Construction”—and contributors explore how the particular histories of the Caribbean have contributed to questions of nation, identity, race, class, and gender and how these can be mobilized in pursuit of contemporary projects and future goals.
Find this resource:
Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Post-colonial: Social Equality, Post-nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781403973719 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book explores what it might mean to invoke the Caribbean postcolonial by thinking about the region’s literature and music. Critiquing the claims of hybridity discourse, concerned about minority populations in the region (such as the dougla in Trinidad) and committed to thinking beyond black/white racial binaries, Puri offers a rich set of case studies and theoretical insights that remain important to current understandings of the region.
Find this resource:
Scott, David. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the collapse of the Grenada Revolution as a marker—as a shift in Caribbean thought. Scott argues that this moment challenged the feasibility of projects aimed at emancipatory futures, bringing to an end the era of revolutionary socialist possibility that had driven Caribbean intellectual projects during much of the 20th century. In the process, this book offers a powerful archeology of memory, political action, and justice.
Find this resource:
Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A study of the Caribbean as a region fixed in place for the mobilities of others—whether for tourism, capital extraction, resource exportation, or pleasure. Taking a long historical view, the book works through the consumption of landscapes (beaches, coral reefs, etc.), resources (sugar, coffee, bananas, etc.), and bodies (service workers, sex workers, etc.) across colonial and postcolonial contexts. It represents an insightful and significant contribution to the material and social histories of the Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Stewart, Charles, ed. Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection explores the concept of Creole, engaging it across the Americas, the Indian Ocean, and Asia. Such a broad scope raises important and difficult questions about the limits and use-value of Creole as theory. It also challenges those working in the Caribbean to rethink the concept in local contexts. A significant contribution to the theorization of Creole.
Find this resource:

Commonwealth Caribbean

This designation helps define a postcolonial Caribbean space that includes former colonies now independent but still affiliated with Great Britain. It comprises Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. As such, the Commonwealth Caribbean includes the vast majority of the English-speaking Caribbean. In order to highlight the wealth of research as well as some of the imbalances that emerge in thinking about the relationship between large and small islands in the Commonwealth Caribbean, the following references are organized by nation-state. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago have received the lion’s share of research in the Commonwealth Caribbean, while many other locations are barely represented in the literature.

Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda, is located in the Leeward Islands region of the eastern Caribbean. Independent since 1981, it hosts a population of roughly 82,000. What little research has been published on the musical traditions of Antigua and Barbuda is focused on carnival, soca, and calypso. In the process of making a case for the significance of secular rituals in the face of tourism, Manning 1977 offers a comparative study of Antiguan carnival and Cup Match in Bermuda. Treitler 1990 takes a close look at the competing ideologies being performed in the 1987 Antigua carnival (shortly after independence in 1981). Simmonds 2013 offers a comparative study of soca and calypso lyrics in Antigua and elsewhere in the region. Those interested in individual performers should turn to O’Marde 2014, which presents a biography of Antiguan calypsonian Sir MacLean Emanuel (also known as King Short Shirt).

Manning, Frank. “Cup Match and Carnival: Secular Rites of Revitalization in Decolonizing Tourist-Oriented Societies.” In Secular Ritual. Edited by Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, 265–281. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1977.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter posits that secular rituals can provide a medium through which to respond to the pressures of outside influence—in this case, the pressures of mass tourism. Focusing on Cup Match in Bermuda and carnival in Antigua, Manning frames these festivals as secular rituals with the power to revitalize local meanings and identities in the face of the impacts of tourism on social and cultural life.
Find this resource:
O’Marde, Dorbrene. King Short Shirt: Nobody Go Run Me—the Life and Times of Sir MacLean Emanuel. Hertford, UK: Hansib, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This biography of the most famous Antiguan calypsonian was published to mark the artist’s seventieth birthday and to honor his fifty years as a performer. O’Marde, who is himself an Antiguan cultural commentator, playwright, judge of calypso competitions, and writer on calypso, brings an insider’s perspective to King Short Shirt’s career. The narrative O’Marde offers connects the calypso scene in Antigua to the wider Caribbean circuits that calypso travels on.
Find this resource:
Simmonds, Ann-Marie Lauralin. “‘. . .How We Loved, Labored, and Sinned’: Analyzing the d/Discourse of Antiguan Music.” PhD diss., Purdue University, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation analyzes Antiguan soca and calypso lyrics in order to understand artists’ language choices and compare the themes and ideas of local carnival music with those present in other regional practices. Simmonds illustrates that unlike soca tunes elsewhere, which are usually focused on party lyrics, Antiguan soca tunes make regular use of social and political commentary. This dissertation brings Antiguan carnival musics into conversation with the rest of the region in productive fashion.
Find this resource:
Treitler, Inga. “A Case Study in Political Resistance: Antigua Carnival ‘87.’” In Caribbean Popular Culture. Edited by John Lent, 37–48. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter analyzes the competing ideologies that play out during carnival festivities in Antigua. Treitler argues that carnival is a site within which competing visions of the nation are explored, juxtaposed, and contested in public performance. Treitler then illustrates that traditional and nostalgic desires are pitted against more capitalist and competitive approaches and that the spaces within which carnival takes place index and reinforce these approaches to the festival (and the nation).
Find this resource:

The Bahamas

The Bahamas witnessed the first encounter between the Americas and Europe when Columbus made landfall on the island of Guanahani (San Salvador) in 1492. Later colonized by the British, the islands gained independence in 1973 and today host a population of roughly 330,000. Most of the research on the Bahamas focuses on the festival tradition of junkanoo. Bethel 1991, Bilby 2010, and Craton 1995 offer broad historical studies of (and quite divergent perspectives on) junkanoo. Sands 1989 presents interviews with two key figures in 20th-century junkanoo. Wood 1995, while also tracing the history of junkanoo, is most valuable for its ethnographic exploration of the entire junkanoo complex, from costume arts to were mobilized by musicians throughout the 20th century to respond to the growing mass tourism market.

Bethel, Clement. Junkanoo: Festival of the Bahamas. Edited and expanded by Nicolette Bethel. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book, written by the Bahamian playwright and cultural activist, Clement Bethel, offers a historical account of junkanoo in the Bahamas. It expressly denies a sacred history for junkanoo, placing his interpretation at odds with Bilby’s. The local history and archival material brought to bear on the narrative is important to anyone researching the festival in the Bahamas.
Find this resource:
Bilby, Kenneth. “Surviving Secularization: Masking the Spirit in Jankunu (John Canoe) Festivals of the Caribbean and Southern United States.” New West Indian Guide 84.3–4 (2010): 179–223.
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002440 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Bilby is the foremost expert on junkanoo throughout the Americas and has published on local traditions in Belize, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. In this article, he explores the distinct possibility that junkanoo has sacred roots—roots that are masked and/or denied in contemporary Bahamian contexts. Junkanoo is not, argues Bilby, a purely secular enterprise but contains, instead, a set of sacred ideas lost to active practice in the contemporary moment.
Find this resource:
Charters, Samuel. The Day is so Long and the Wages So Small: Music on a Summer Island. New York: M. Boyars, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Essentially a travelogue, this book recounts the research that Charters conducted in the Bahamas. Important for its descriptions of communal life on Andros Island and for the insights it provides into the musical scene in the Bahamas during the mid-20th century.
Find this resource:
Craton, Michael. “Decoding Pitchy-Patchy: The Roots, Branches, and Essence of Junkanoo.” Slavery and Abolition 16.1 (1995): 14–44.
DOI: 10.1080/01440399508575147 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Presents a historical journey through the possible routes that junkanoo may have traveled to the Americas and eventually to the Bahamas. Meticulously researched, it serves as an excellent companion to Kenneth Bilby’s work on the same topic.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520265684.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Against the economic realities of mass tourism and the political journey toward independence, Bahamian musicians provided tourists and Bahamians with musical soundtracks. This book explores the long histories of rake-n-scrape and junkanoo—their grounding in social dance and festivity, their incorporation into popular music, and their implication in the tourist industry and narratives of the nation. Part ethnography, part historiography, part social history, this book provides an analysis of life and music making in a tourist-driven economy.
Find this resource:
Sands, Rosita. “Conversation with Maureen ‘Bahama Mama’ Duvalier and Ronald Simms: Junkanoo, Past, Present, and Future.” Black Perspective in Music 17.1 (1989): 93–108.
DOI: 10.2307/1214745 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Presents conversations with two of the seminal figures in Bahamian junkanoo. Sands explores the long history of the festival and records her interactions with Duvalier and Simms.
Find this resource:
Wood, Vivian Nina Michelle. “Rushin’ Hard and Runnin’ Hot: Experiencing the Junkanoo Parade in Nassau, the Bahamas.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation has unfortunately never been revised for publication as a monograph. That said, it remains one of the only close readings of junkanoo performance (as opposed to history). Wood brings her readers into the shacks (where junkanoo set pieces and costumes are made), and onto the streets (where junkanoo groups compete and are judged). Part ethnography, part history, part performance studies, this dissertation is essential reading for anyone working on junkanoo in the Bahamas.
Find this resource:

Barbados

Barbados lies northeast of Trinidad and Tobago and east of the Windward Islands of the Caribbean. As such, it is technically located in the North Atlantic, not the Caribbean. That said, it is so deeply connected to the Caribbean by trade, politics, history, and proximity that it is always included in discussions of the region and grouped with the Windward Islands. Barbados is home to some 280,000 people and gained its independence in 1966. Those interested in traditional music will find in Marshall, et al. 1981; Meredith 2003; and Meredith 2015, a collection of folk songs and a studies of tuk music, respectively. Those more interested in popular music will find the general overviews by Best 2001 and Best 2012 and the series of case studies included in Bascomb 2013 (Alison Hinds, Rupee, and Rihanna) useful as starting points. Critical biographies by Beckles and Russell 2015 and Watson 2015 focus on the careers and significance of Rihanna and Jackie Opel, respectively. Harewood and Hunte 2010 argue that dance is a particularly effective lens through which to analyze national identities within Barbados.

Bascomb, Lia Tamar. “‘In Plenty and In Time of Need’: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation explores the post-independence history of Bajan popular music. The argument revolves around the notion that Bajan national identity is forged in collaboration with regional and transnational resources. In order to illustrate this, Bascomb turns to three musical case studies, including Alison Hinds, Rupee, and Rihanna. In each of these cases, interactions between local Bajan ideas and resources from beyond the nation-state combine to create a national sound that works both at home and abroad to signal Bajan identity.
Find this resource:
Beckles, Hilary, and Heather Russell, eds. Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This edited collection explores the impact of Rihanna on global culture and on the local Bajan scene. What makes this book particularly important is the focus on the discourse and reaction within the Caribbean to Rihanna’s creative life. As such, issues of class, sexuality, gender, culture, race, and economy are all taken up with a focus that affords a regional conversation about Rihanna’s career.
Find this resource:
Best, Curwen. Roots to Popular Culture: Barbadian Aesthetics: Kamau Brathwaite to Hardcore Styles. New York: Macmillan Education, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book traces popular culture in Barbados, including literature, theater, and music. By offering case studies of literary figures such as Kamau Brathwaite and playwright Jeanette Layne-Clark along with musicians Gabby, Marvo Manning, Johnny Koieman and Lil’ Rick, Best assembles an argument about what might constitute a unique Bajan aesthetic—an aesthetic approach that, he argues, should be foregrounded in the pursuit of national agendas.
Find this resource:
Best, Curwen. The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados: Pathways to Digital Culture. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book offers a history of Bajan popular music, with an emphasis on the move from acoustic and analog modes of performance toward electronic and digital modes of production and consumption. Divided into four parts (“Acoustic,” “Electronic/Analog,” “Electronic/Digital,” and “Post-2000 Digital/Virtual”), the book makes an argument about how the music industry and entertainment have shifted in response to technological change since the middle of the 20th century.
Find this resource:
Harewood, Susan, and John Hunte. “Dance in Barbados: Reclaiming, Preserving, and Creating National Identities.” In Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures. Edited by Susanna Sloat, 265–284. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813034676.003.0018 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter explores the history of dance in Barbados, thus offering a read on music through the lens of moving bodies. One of the aims of the chapter is to explore discourses of “decency” as a legacy of colonial ways of thinking about bodies (particularly women’s bodies).
Find this resource:
Marshall, Trevor, Peggy McGeary, and Grace Thompson. Folk Songs of Barbados. Bridgetown, Barbados: MacMarson Associates, 1981.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This short volume compiles and presents some of the folk songs of Barbados with musical notation and short commentaries. An introductory essay offers some context for thinking about the categories and histories of the songs included (narrative social songs, children’s songs, tuk band songs, work songs, social songs, songs about men, songs about women, and more recent songs about the folk). An excellent resource.
Find this resource:
Meredith, Sharon. “Barbadian Tuk Music: Colonial Development and Post-Independence Recontextualization.” British Journal for Ethnomusicology 12.2 (2003): 81–106.
DOI: 10.1080/09681220308567364 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article condenses much of the argument of Meredith’s book-length study into a concise statement. It is useful as an accessible introduction to the topic.
Find this resource:
Meredith, Sharon. Tuk Music in Barbados. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A study that explores, in ethnographic and archival detail, the reconfiguration of tuk music as a marker of the nation in the post-independence era. Meredith traces a narrative of revival as tuk, originally a drum and fife music performed by the working class in the context of plantations and rum shops, becomes an example of national heritage music.
Find this resource:
Watson, Elizabeth Faye. “Uncovering and Recovering Caribbean Popular Music: Jackie Opel as a Case Study.” PhD diss., University of the West Indies, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation offers a critical biography of Jackie Opel, illustrating the extent to which Opel shaped popular music in both Barbados and Jamaica. It engages in significant archival and discographic work. In so doing, Watson makes a strong case for why such detailed and painstaking work is necessary to projects of cultural development both in Barbados and elsewhere in the region.
Find this resource:

Dominica

Dominica, the southern-most of the Leeward Islands, lies between Guadeloupe and Martinique. It is an English-speaking island with a long and important history of French Creole connections. The political history of Dominica, too, is a story of competing colonial interests, as it regularly changed hands between France and England. Dominica gained independence in 1983 and today hosts a population of roughly 72,000. It also is home to the largest Island Carib (Kalinago) population in the region, numbering some three thousand. Dominica has received little attention from international scholars, but local intellectuals and artists have produced significant studies of its music and dance traditions. Honychurch 1988 presents an overview of the island’s traditions and expressive arts. Phillip and Smith 1998 and Wason 2010 offer excellent studies of Dominican dance traditions. Henderson 1998 and Henderson 2005, along with Rabess 1993 trace the history and significance of cadence-lypso. Henderson’s contributions are written from the perspective of the pioneering band, Exile One, of which he was both lead singer and founder. Rommen 2015 offers a reflection on the extent to which Creole sensibilities inform both cadence-lypso and bouyon music in Dominica.

Henderson, Gordon. Zoukland. Cliffside Park, NJ: Global Datacast Exchange, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This self-published book explores the history of cadence-lypso from the perspective of Dominica. The author, Gordon Henderson, is the founding member of Exile One. Throughout the book, he argues for cadence-lypso as a creole genre and points out how it connects to regional sounds and ideas.
Find this resource:
Henderson, Gordon. A History of Cadence-lypso: From Cadence to Decadence. Self-published, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
More autobiographical in nature than Zoukland, this book offers a particularly personal exploration of the history of cadence-lypso. It is an important contribution to the literature on popular music in Dominica.
Find this resource:
Honychurch, Lennox. Our Island Culture. Bridgetown, Barbados: Letchworth, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book, written by one of the most well-respected historians in Dominica, presents in survey fashion (and for educational purposes) the range of cultural production on offer in Dominica. Although it offers no more than a non-specialist and general introduction to Dominica’s music, art, and dance, it continues to fill a niche as one of the only publications on this topic. As such, it remains an important contribution.
Find this resource:
Phillip, Daryl, and Gary Smith. Heritage Dances of Dominica. Division of Culture, Government of Dominica, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This compilation features detailed analyses of quadrille, lancers, and bélé dancing in Dominica. Attentive to both music and dance (choreography), this short book makes a significant contribution and counts as an invaluable resource.
Find this resource:
Rabess, Gregory. “Cadence: The Dominican Experience.” In Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. Edited by Jocelyne Guilbault, et al., 90–107. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter offers an overview of the development of cadence-lypso from a Dominican perspective. Its regional connections to Haitian and French Antillean musical ideas are filtered here through the career of Exile One, the band that pioneered the genre during the early 1970s. This chapter forms part of a series of chapters within the book dedicated to an archaeology of zouk.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. “Créolité, (Im)Mobility, and Music in Dominica.” Journal of Musicology 32.4 (2015): 558–591.
DOI: 10.1525/jm.2015.32.4.558 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article rethinks the use of Creole in Dominican popular music, illustrating through cadence-lypso and bouyon that the Creole claims of musicians are deeply complex articulations of place and space that extend far beyond the limits of the nation-state. These ideas are then further interrogated with recourse to the logics underlying the World Creole Music Festival held each year in Roseau.
Find this resource:
Wason, Janet. “Bele and Quadrille: African and European Dimensions in the Traditional Dances of Dominica, West Indies.” In Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures. Edited by Susanna Sloat, 227–246. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813034676.003.0016 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A chapter focused on the two principal traditional dances of Dominica—bélé and quadrille. Bélé dancing is associated with African heritage, whereas quadrille is deeply connected to European and colonial discourses. Both dances, today, fall into the category of heritage and are performed most iconically during events highlighting the nation. Both dances are also integrated into competitions which enhance their visibility and symbolic importance within the nation. The chapter provides an excellent overview of these dynamics.
Find this resource:

Grenada

Grenada is an independent nation comprised of Grenada and several other islands, including Carriacou. It lies North and West of Trinidad and Tobago and is considered part of the Windward Islands. Initially colonized by France in 1649, the islands became British possessions in 1763, and Grenada remained a British colony until independence in 1974. Grenada is home to approximately 110,000 people. Most of the research on Grenada is focused on the Big Drum ritual and stringband performance in Carriacou. Those interested in the Big Drum ritual should start with McDaniel 1998 and McDaniel 2002. Those interested in work addressing stringband music will likely wish to begin with Miller 2005 and Miller 2007. Miller 2003 focuses on quadrille dancing in Carriacou. McLean 1986 focuses on calypso and revolution in Grenada, using song as a lens through which to analyze the political and social consequences of the failed revolution.

McDaniel, Lorna. The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book, based on extended ethnographic work, illustrates the deep connection to African cosmology maintained through the Big Drum ritual of Carriacou (which is politically part of Grenada). Through careful historical and archival work, the book connects the early experiences of enslaved Africans in Carriacou with the generational work of passing on traditions. It stands as an important exploration of memory-work and diasporic identity within the Caribbean.
Find this resource:
McDaniel, Lorna. “Musical Thoughts on Unresolved Questions and Recent Findings in Big Drum Research.” Black Music Research Journal 22.1 (2002): 127–139.
DOI: 10.2307/1519967 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A short exploration of several outstanding issues within McDaniel’s research in Carriacou. Categorized into dance, drum codes, text, and ancestral pantheon, the issues reveal a tradition already well researched and yet still open to new insights and productive remappings.
Find this resource:
McLean, Polly. “Calypso and Revolution in Grenada.” Popular Music and Society 10.4 (1986): 87–99.
DOI: 10.1080/03007768608591262 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Published in the wake of the 1979 internal coup and the 1983 U.S. military invasion of Grenada, this article finds in calypso a means of reading the political and social implications of this fraught moment in the nation’s history. McLean illustrates that calypso was seen as a major vehicle through which to instill new ideas and a new vision for the nation after the coup.
Find this resource:
Miller, Rebecca. “‘Me Ain’ Lie on Nobody!’ Locality, Regionalism, and Identity at the Parang String Band Competition in Carriacou, Grenada.” World of Music 45.1 (2003): 55–77.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article is a condensed and usefully introductory statement of Miller’s larger project, later published in book-length form as Carriacou String Band Serenade.
Find this resource:
Miller, Rebecca. “Performing Ambivalence: The Case of Quadrille Music.” Ethnomusicology 49.3 (2005): 403–440.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Quadrille as a European dance in a Caribbean space, raises a certain amount of ambivalence among its practitioners. On the one hand, quadrille is associated with slavery and colonization, and this has led to a dwindling number of younger practitioners. On the other hand, it is ubiquitous at cultural and political events and judged beautiful to watch by many who would have it remain a part of Carriacou’s cultural heritage. This article traces these ambivalences and explores the complex place of quadrille in Carriacou in the contemporary moment.
Find this resource:
Miller, Rebecca. Carriacou String Band Serenade: Performing Identity in the Eastern Caribbean. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph investigates the long history of the string band tradition in Carriacou. Carefully researched, it focuses ethnographically on the Parang Festival. Miller offers a rich historical engagement with parang and introduces readers to some of its principal innovators and practitioners. Provides a way of reading the music and the festival as markers of what it means and sounds like to be from Carriacou.
Find this resource:

Jamaica

Colonized by Spain in 1509, Jamaica came under English control in 1655 and remained a British colony until its independence in 1962. Today, Jamaica is home to almost three million people. Jamaica, along with Trinidad, has received the most scholarly attention in the English-speaking Caribbean. In order to offer a representative sampling of the range of publications devoted to music in Jamaica, this section is divided into several smaller units: folk music/jonkonnu/mento, sacred musics, and reggae/dub/dancehall.

Folk Music/Jonkonnu/Mento

This section contains work concerned with documenting Jamaican folk life, including jonkonnu and the history of mento, which inhabits an important place within both rural and urban contexts. Those interested in general overviews of Jamaican folk music might wish to turn to Beckwith 1969, Lewin 2000, and White 1982. Jonkonnu provides the principal focus for Bettelheim 1976, whereas Mento is the central topic addressed in Neely 2007. Barringer, et al. 2007 is a beautiful exploration of Jamaican cultural productions through the lens of Mendes Belisario’s paintings. Bilby 1992, for its part, offers a thorough sonic introduction to Maroon music in Jamaica.

Barringer, Tim, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Dedicated to the art produced by the artist Belisario, who spent a significant amount of time in Jamaica and painted a great deal while there, this book explores Jamaican aesthetics, art, music, dance, and culture as seen through the eyes of the painter. Chapters are not all relevant to music, but the integration of scholarship on the arts represented in this volume is significant and brilliantly executed.
Find this resource:
Beckwith, Martha. Black Roadways, a Study of Jamaican Folk Life. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This seminal study of rural folkways in Jamaica contains important information about music as well.
Find this resource:
Bettelheim, Judith. “The Jonkonnu Festival and its Relation to Caribbean and African Masquerades.” Jamaica Journal 10 (1976): 20–27.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is one of the classic statements about jonkonnu in Jamaica. It serves as a foundational text for virtually all studies of jonkonnu in the circum-Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Bilby, Kenneth. Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of Jamaica. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Records, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Recorded and compiled by the foremost expert on maroon societies in the circum-Caribbean, and including extensive liner notes, this set of performances offers an excellent overview of the history of maroon music in Jamaica.
Find this resource:
Lewin, Olive. Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The most extensive exploration of folk music in Jamaica, this monograph systematically explores the range of practices actively maintained by Jamaican communities. Working through history (the book begins with considerations of the musics of slavery and of post-emancipation communities), the book addresses itself to non-cult musics such as mento and then goes on to discuss cult-musics, focusing most thoroughly on Kumina. A significant contribution to the literature.
Find this resource:
Neely, Daniel. “Mento, Jamaica’s Original Music: Development, Tourism and the Nationalist Frame.” PhD diss., New York University, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation represents the most developed exploration of mento history and practice to date. It makes a significant contribution to understandings of early popular musics in Jamaica and to how such sounds remain powerfully important in contemporary Jamaican contexts, including as a soundtrack for tourism and as a sonic marker for national heritage.
Find this resource:
White, Garth. “Traditional Music Practice in Jamaica and its Influence on the Birth of Modern Jamaican Music.” African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica Newsletter 7 (1982): 41–68.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Written by a prominent Jamaican historian, this article offers an archival and historiographic exploration of the extent to which traditional musical practice in Jamaica influenced and occasioned the rise of popular music in Jamaica.
Find this resource:

Sacred Musics

This section offers a sampling of the range of religious practices and sacred musical traditions in Jamaica. Those interested in a general overview of this topic would be well served to start with Coester and Bender 2015. Another excellent introduction to the religious landscape of Jamaica is found in Austin-Broos 1997. A growing literature exploring Christianity and popular music includes Beckford 2006, Butler 2008, Butler 2010, and Rommen 2006. For a general reader on Rastafarianism, see Murrell, et al. 1998. Bilby and Leib 1986 focuses on Kumina and explores the roots of Rastafarian traditional music. Bilby 1999 is concerned with Myal and its connections to jonkonnu practice.

Austin-Broos, Diane. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226924816.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Although this book is not expressly concerned with music, it provides a strong introduction to the range and stakes of religious practice in Jamaica. And it stands as an essential text for anyone wishing to understand the context within which sacred music is performed in Jamaica.
Find this resource:
Beckford, Robert. Jesus Dub: Theology, Music, and Social Change. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focusing on the role of the sacred within Jamaica, this book illustrates how the church and the dancehall are linked. Beckford offers an analysis that argues for the deep importance of Christianity within the Black Atlantic—a faith tradition that, in spite of the deeply problematic histories of slavery, forced conversion, and coloniality, continues to shape the lives of many throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Find this resource:
Bilby, Kenneth. “Gumbay, Myal, and the Great House: New Evidence on the Religious Background of Jonkonnu in Jamaica.” ACIJ Research Review 4 (1999): 47–70.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Makes a major (and challenging) claim about the religious roots of jonkonnu in Jamaica (and elsewhere in the circum-Caribbean). It is extended in other publications but stands here as an argument in favor of understanding jonkonnu as a sacred and not merely secular celebration.
Find this resource:
Bilby, Kenneth, and Elliot Leib. “Kumina, The Howellite Church and the Emergence of Rastafarian Traditional Music in Jamaica.” Jamaica Journal 19.3 (1986): 22–28.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This short article is an important statement about how elements of Kumina drumming were appropriated into the Howelite Church and, by extension, became foundational for Rastafarian musical expression from the 1930s forward. A major contribution to Rastafarian musical history.
Find this resource:
Butler, Melvin. “Dancing around Dancehall: Pentecostalism, Popular Culture, and Musical Practice in Transnational Jamaica and Haiti.” In Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean. Edited by Holger Henke, Karl-Heinz Magister, and Alissa Trotz, 63–99. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A comparative study engaging with how dance and dancehall intersect with, inform, and challenge Pentecostal communities of faith in Jamaica and Haiti. An insightful analysis of shifting meanings and local use-value as dancehall is evaluated in these two contexts.
Find this resource:
Butler, Melvin. “Performing Pentecostalism: Music, Identity, and the Interplay of Jamaican and African American Styles.” In Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrances. Edited by Ifeoma Nwankwo and Mamadou Diouf, 41–54. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter opens a window onto the ways that African American gospel music and Jamaican gospel reggae, circulate among communities of faith in both the United States and in Jamaica. Illustrates how music from elsewhere can be made useful and meaningful in the local scene and why these sounds are so important to worship. An excellent contribution to the literature on the ethnomusicology of Christianity within the Caribbean.
Find this resource:
Coester, Markus, and Wolfgang Bender. A Reader in African-Jamaican Music, Dance, Religion. New York: Ian Randle, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This highly useful reader brings together under one cover a significant amount of previously published research on traditional music, dance, and religion in Jamaica. It has the virtue of making readily available materials that have, in many instances, been rather difficult to access and serves as an excellent starting point for anyone interested in researching sacred musics in Jamaica.
Find this resource:
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel, William Spencer, and Adrian McFarlane, eds. Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This reader is an indispensable introduction to Rastafarian belief, practice, and cultural production. Encompassing music, ritual, linguistics, political concerns, and social ramifications, this collection grounds Rastafarianism as a major and influential religious movement in 20th-century Jamaican life and illustrates how it has found receptive communities throughout the world.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. “Protestant Vibrations: Reggae Rastafari, and Conscious Evangelicals.” Popular Music 25.2 (2006): 235–263.
DOI: 10.1017/S026114300600081X Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the appropriation of reggae music and Rastafarian language and symbolism for use within Protestant expressions of popular music. Case studies include Christafari (a US-based Christian reggae group), Stichie (a former Jamaican dancehall artist now converted to Christianity), and Sherwin Gardner (a Trinidadian gospel-dancehall singer).
Find this resource:

Reggae/Dub/Dancehall

The following citations represent only a fraction of the scholarship on reggae, dub, and dancehall. That said, they provide a solid foundation from which to build into the wider literature. King, et al. 2002 is a thorough exploration of the connections between reggae and Rastafarianism during an era characterized by governmental rhetoric of social control. Katz 2003 presents an oral history of reggae. Veal 2007 explores the history of dub, focusing on the engineers and technologies that have come to define the genre’s sound. Cooper 2004 and Stanley-Niaah 2010 offer critical engagements with dancehall culture both at home and abroad. Those researchers interested in approaching Jamaican popular music from the perspective of gender and sexuality studies should turn to Augustyn 2014, Cooper 1993, and Hope 2010. Manuel and Marshall 2006 is an exploration of compositional practice within dancehall, focusing on how producers and the riddims they create have come to dominate the industry. Turner and Schoenfeld 2004 is an online, crowdsourced database of recordings that serves as an indispensable resource for any scholar interested in Jamaican popular music.

Augustyn, Heather. Songbirds: Pioneering Women in Jamaican Music. Chesterton, IN: Half Pint, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A welcome addition to the literature, this monograph provides case studies of the many women who have made their careers in Jamaican music. In a landscape generally dominated by men, this intervention is timely and incisive.
Find this resource:
Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This is one of the classic statements on the meanings and possibilities of the dancehall as a social and political space and of dancehall as a musical genre. This book has become foundational for virtually all work on dancehall since its publication.
Find this resource:
Cooper, Carolyn. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781403982605 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An engaging and important exploration of dancehall culture. Focusing on slackness as subversion, language-use, the role of the deejay, dance, and questions of gender, this monograph opens to analysis the range of practices that comprise the production and consumption of dancehall culture. The book also reaches beyond Jamaica to illustrate the reach and impact of dancehall culture. An indispensable study.
Find this resource:
Hope, Donna. Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Much of the critical work on dancehall has rightly focused on gender and sexuality. In particular, it has been a site for working out feminist approaches to popular culture. The unique contribution made by Hope’s monograph is the attention she pays to the masculinities that also permeate these spaces.
Find this resource:
Katz, David. Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Presents a series of interviews with many of the artists who have, in retrospect, been credited with innovating and disseminating reggae. An important collection of firsthand accounts of the bourgeoning scene.
Find this resource:
King, Stephen, with Barry Bays, and Renée Foster. Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Exploring an era that was deeply divisive within Jamaican political and social life, encompassing the push for independence, the suppression of Rastafarian ideas and lifestyles, and the rise of a popular music both locally maligned and destined to find broad international appeal, this book illustrates how both reggae and Rastafari practice were shaped by strategies for social control exercised by the government and the establishment in Jamaica.
Find this resource:
Manuel, Peter, and Wayne Marshall. “The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, and Ownership in Jamaican Dancehall.” Popular Music 25.3 (2006): 447–470.
DOI: 10.1017/S0261143006000997 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article is an exploration of the role of the producer in Jamaican dancehall music. It explores how tracks (“riddims”) are produced, how they are used as templates for a variety of performances (“versions”), and how they are owned for the purposes of assigning royalties. One part exploration of an industry, one part ethnographic analysis of practice, this article is an important contribution to the literature on dancehall.
Find this resource:
Stanley-Niaah, Sonjah. Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Using dancehall as an analytical lens, this monograph explores performance culture throughout the Black Atlantic. Drawing methodologically from cultural studies, performance studies, and cultural geography, this monograph makes powerful connections between South African kwaito, the blues, and reggaeton, crafting an insightful argument about common institutions and shared experiences throughout Africana and the African diaspora.
Find this resource:
Turner, Michael, and Robert Schoenfeld. Roots Knotty Roots: The Discography of Jamaican Music—Singles, 78, & 45 RPM, 1950–1985. St. Louis, MO: Nighthawk Records, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This database, originally published in printed form, is currently maintained and updated in digital form. It is a crowdsourced database and is meticulously updated and carefully juried by the global community of collectors of Jamaican popular music. As such, it represents an absolutely indispensable resource for those interested in Jamaican music.
Find this resource:
Veal, Michael. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph presents a detailed exploration of dub music in Jamaica. Focusing especially on the engineers and producers that created the sonic possibilities for dub, Veal illustrates the creative license, the national and transnational flows, and the social scenes that animated the rise of dub within Jamaica (and then internationally). Meticulously researched, this book offers an indispensable analysis of dub.
Find this resource:

St. Kitts and Nevis

St. Kitts and Nevis is the smallest sovereign state in the Americas, and this both in terms of population and land area. Home to around 55,000, it is also one of the earliest to be settled. Located in the Leeward Islands, and actively settled starting in 1623, St. Kitts and Nevis played a crucial role in support of English and French expansion into the wider Caribbean. In 1713, the territory was ceded to Britain and remained a colony until it gained independence in 1983. Baker 2014 explores how the rhetoric surrounding wylers music and dance provides a lens through which to understand colonial histories, social control, and decolonial possibilities.

Baker, Jessica Swanston. “Too Fast: Colonially and Time in Wylers Music of St. Kitts and Nevis.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation is the first study to explore the rhetoric surrounding wylers music in St. Kitts and Nevis from a decolonial perspective. Arguing that much of the discourse criticizing the practice is framed in colonial terms of respectability, Baker argues that women’s dancing bodies, the tempo itself, and the sounds of wylers are all decolonial precisely because they actively and consistently challenge the notion that they are behaving or playing “too fast.”
Find this resource:

St. Lucia

St. Lucia is located in the Windward Islands, south of Martinique. Home to approximately 185,000 people (including a small Carib community of some one thousand people), St. Lucia gained independence in 1979. Like Dominica, St. Lucia has a long and important history of French Creole influence. Guilbault 1985, Guilbault 1987a, and Guilbault 1987b explore aspects of traditional music and expressive culture, focusing on funeral wakes, quadrille, and the impact of social institutions on performances of identity, respectively. Wever 2011 examines postcolonial Creolizations in St. Lucian jazz and country music. Kremser and Wernhart 1986, while not explicitly concerned with music, offers valuable perspective on efforts toward cultural development during the 1980s.

Guilbault, Jocelyne. “A St. Lucian Kwadril Evening.” Latin American Music Review 6.1 (1985): 31–57.
DOI: 10.2307/779964 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article traces the history of quadrille in St. Lucia. It analyzes the elements and possibilities in play during a kwadril evening. It makes several insightful aesthetic and formal distinctions between St. Lucian and European quadrille practices and considers the factors that secured quadrille as a major social dance complex in St. Lucia while also exploring some of the contributing factors to its decline in popularity during the late 20th century.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. “Fitness and Flexibility: Funeral Wakes in St. Lucia, West Indies.” Ethnomusicology 31.2 (1987a): 273–299.
DOI: 10.2307/851893 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Provides a thorough ethnography of the music and sociality that enliven wakes in St. Lucia, focusing on the meaning and variety of musical choices in such contexts, and attending to the ways in which people interact within the constraints in play during such moments.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. “The La Rose and La Marguerite Organizations in St. Lucia: Oral and Literate Strategies in Performance.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 19 (1987b): 97–115.
DOI: 10.2307/767879 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article uses the La Rose and La Marguerite social organizations as a lens through which to highlight competing and contrasting performances of identity within St. Lucia. Ethnographically exploring contrasting views toward oral and written traditions, differing class and economic associations, and associated moral and social values, Guilbault offers an insightful reading of how institutions can structure performances that create powerful arguments for thinking about the past and envisioning the future.
Find this resource:
Kremser, Manfred, and Karl Wernhart, eds. Research in Ethnography and Ethnohistory of St. Lucia. Vienna: Ferdinand Berger und Söhne, 1986.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Published report of a cooperative project between the Institut für Völkerkunde at the University of Vienna, and the Folk Research Centre and National Research and Development Foundation of St. Lucia. Although this project, involving documentation, new research in ethnohistory, and preservation, is not explicitly concerned with music, it offers valuable insights into the history of cultural research and development in St. Lucia in the 1980s.
Find this resource:
Wever, Jerry. “Dancing the Habanera Beats (in Country Music): Empire Rollover and Postcolonial Creolizations in St. Lucia.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This dissertation explores the contradictions embedded in the deep popularity of country music in postcolonial St. Lucia. Comparing the popularity of country music to that of jazz (St. Lucia hosts a major jazz festival each year), Wever illustrates that jazz and country music engender quite divergent local meanings and values even as they are both incorporated into agendas and events designed to attract tourists.
Find this resource:

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Located in the Windward Islands just south of St. Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines hosts a population of around 105,000. Initially settled by the French, St. Vincent was eventually permanently controlled by England and gained independence in 1979. The black Caribs of St. Vincent fought against British control but were eventually deported from the island, initially to the island of Roatán, off the coast of what was then British Honduras. Their descendants, known today as the Garinagu, have lived in parts of Central America, including Honduras and Belize, since the turn of the 19th century. Zane 1999 offers an exploration of the Spiritual Baptist faith in St. Vincent and across the region. Those interested in Caribbean sacred musics will find it useful even though it is not explicitly concerned with musical practices.

Zane, Wallace. Journeys to the Spiritual Lands: The Natural History of a West Indian Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph is a major contribution to understanding the Spiritual Baptist faith, not only in St. Vincent but also throughout the region (and in Trinidad and Tobago, in particular). Although not specifically focused on the musical lives of these faith communities, the book is nevertheless a significant contribution that those interested in sacred music will do well to know.
Find this resource:

Trinidad and Tobago

Independent since 1962, the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago is home to a population of roughly 1.3 million people, characterized by two large ethnic groups (Afro-Creole and East Indian), each comprising a little less than 40 percent of the total population. Trinidad, along with Jamaica, has received the most scholarly attention in the English-speaking Caribbean. In order to offer a representative sampling of the range of publications devoted to music in Jamaica, this section is divided into several smaller units: East Indian Traditions; Calypso and Soca; Steelband; and Carnival Traditions/Carnival Culture.

East Indian Traditions

The following citations explore the range of musical possibilities that exist within the East Indian community in Trinidad. They also extend to thinking about the diaspora and India and to the more local cultural politics involved in negotiation the national sphere through sound. Korom 2002 and Manuel 2015 focus attention on the sounds and cultural politics of tassa drumming. Myers 1998 and Manuel 2000a and Manuel 2000b offer explorations of the deep connections between India and East Indian communities in the West Indies. Ramnarine 2000 and Niranjana 2006 extend these inquiries to popular music and film, including chutney, chutney-soca, and Bollywood. Niranjana, in particular, illustrates the extent to which the diaspora (Trinidad) is coming to influence practice and perception in India.

Korom, Frank. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph focuses on the Hosay festival in Trinidad. This Shia Muslim festival commemorates the death of the Prophet’s grandson (Husayn ibn Ali) with tassa drums and public processions. Korom traces a social context that seems to counter the often fraught cultural politics in Trinidad. This is the case because the Hosay festival finds East Indians, whether Muslim or Hindu, and Afro-Creoles gathering together to celebrate and revel in the tassa drumming.
Find this resource:
Manuel, Peter. East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000a.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focused on Trinidad, Suriname, and Guyana, this book offers rich ethnographic narratives of musical communities for whom India still matters deeply. Manuel illustrates that East Indian communities have developed their own, idiosyncratic approaches to Indian genres within a context where identification with India provides a means of addressing the often fraught cultural politics of being East Indian in the West Indies.
Find this resource:
Manuel, Peter. “The Construction of a Diasporic Tradition: Indo-Caribbean ‘Local Classical Music.’” Ethnomusicology 44.1 (2000b): 97–119.
DOI: 10.2307/852656 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article presents a succinct and compressed presentation of the arguments offered in Manuel’s book length study of this topic (Manuel 2000a). It is especially useful for inclusion in survey courses.
Find this resource:
Manuel, Peter. Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention into Indo-Caribbean Music. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph explores the tassa drumming of Trinidad, focusing on how the repertory and context afford practitioners and audiences alike with opportunities for remembrance and innovation. Drawing on his extensive expertise on Indo-Trinidadian musical practices (see his book on Tan-singing, Manuel 2000a), Manuel productively extends his analysis of musical circulations and idiosyncrasies into new repertories and musical contexts in Trinidad.
Find this resource:
Myers, Helen. Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the India Diaspora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
One of the first books to take seriously the need to think about the imaginaries, musical circulations, and diasporic dynamics attendant to East Indian musical life in Trinidad. Based on rich ethnographic work centered on the Trinidadian village of Felicity, this book addresses questions later taken up by Ramnarine, Manuel, and Niranjana, among others.
Find this resource:
Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.1215/9780822388425 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Conceived as a comparative project focused on circulations within the Global South, Niranjana’s project illustrates the extent to which Trinidadian perceptions of Indian women’s sexuality have impacted upon Indian practice. Drawing on travel narratives, Bollywood film, and popular musics such as chutney-soca, this book presents a case for the circulation of ideas through diasporic sites and their reintroduction at “home.” Importantly, this very process also shifts practice in the diaspora.
Find this resource:
Ramnarine, Tina. Creating Their Own Space: The Development of an Indian-Caribbean Musical Tradition. 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph introduces and then explores the ways that chutney has been mobilized by the Indo-Trinidadian community in Trinidad. Chutney, originally a traditional wedding music, is understood as a sonic marker of identity within the Indo-Trinidadian community and, as such, offers room for both certain solidarities and potential ambivalences as it is reshaped into popular music and presented to the nation at large.
Find this resource:

Calypso and Soca

The following cited works represent only a small sampling of the scholarship devoted to calypso and soca in Trinidad and Tobago. That said, they provide a strong foundation for further inquiry into these genres. Those hoping to research the early history of calypso would do well to start with Hill 1993. Regis 1999, Mahabir 2001, and Guilbault 2010 offer more focused explorations of the political calypso, calypso feminism, and the politics of pleasure in soca, respectively. Guilbault 2014 presents a hybrid (auto)biography, history, and industry review in collaboration with a renowned band leader. Dudley 1996 offers a music-analytical exploration of calypso and soca. Rommen 2007a explores the role of calypso and soca as inspirations for gospel musicians in Trinidad. Rommen 2007b suggests that rock musicians in Trinidad are clearing political and cultural space for new and cosmopolitan approaches to what constitutes local music. Cowley 2007 is an indispensable collection of recordings from 1938–1940.

Cowley, John, ed. West Indian Rhythm: Trinidad Calypsos, 1938–1940. Hoste-Oldendorf, Germany: Bear Family, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This collection of recordings, contextualized by the insights and analysis offered in liner notes, is required listening/reading for anyone studying the history of calypso. A major contribution.
Find this resource:
Dudley, Shannon. “Judging by the Beat: Calypso vs. Soca.” Ethnomusicology 40.2 (1996): 269–298.
DOI: 10.2307/852062 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article, divided into two sections, first addresses the question of rhythm in calypso, articulating the idea of an “interactive rhythmic feel” as most appropriate for analyzing the genre. The second section then turns to the question of whether soca represents a break with or an extension of the calypso tradition.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. “Music, Politics, and Pleasure: Live Soca in Trinidad.” Small Axe 31 (2010): 16–29.
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-2009-041 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
An article about the complex ways in which the politics of pleasure and the creation of public intimacies during live soca performances in Trinidad variously shape, reshape, or reinforce long-standing understandings about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Refusing to dismiss soca as mere party music, Guilbault illustrates how the dynamics of live performance engender public intimacies among artists on stage, among the audience members, and between artists and their audiences.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This innovative monograph represents a collaborative effort between Guilbault and Cape, offering (auto)biography; reflections on the history of genre (calypso and soca); insights into the carnival complex and the music industry; and timely interventions into questions of technological change in performance.
Find this resource:
Hill, Donald. Calypso Calaloo: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This study of the early history of carnival music in Trinidad represents an important contribution to the literature. This monograph is expressly interested in the early calypso and traces this history with care and insight.
Find this resource:
Mahabir, Cynthia. “The Rise of Calypso Feminism: Gender and Musical Politics in the Calypso.” Popular Music 20.3 (2001): 409–430.
DOI: 10.1017/S0261143001001581 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the role of women in calypso, focusing particular attention on how women’s calypso contributes to women’s status and social standing and its contributions to rethinking attitudes toward gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Find this resource:
Regis, Louis. The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago, 1962–1987. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A classic monograph offering analysis of and insight into the ways that calypsonians entered into the political arena through their compositions. Lyrical analysis is matched here by historical narrative in order to present the complexities and challenges of calypso’s political voice in Trinidad’s post-independence moment.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007a.
DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520250673.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph explores the range of musical styles mobilized by the Full Gospel Community in Trinidad in the process of negotiating competing visions about what constitutes efficacious and ethical congregational song. Exploring North American gospel music, gospelypso, gospel dancehall, and jamoo, the book develops two analytical approaches—the ethics of style and the negotiation of proximity—to better understand the dynamics of the discourse surrounding these styles.
Find this resource:
Rommen, Timothy. “‘Localize It’: Rock, Cosmopolitanism, and the Nation in Trinidad.” Ethnomusicology 51.3 (2007b): 371–401.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Part history, part ethnography, this article explores the growth of a local rock scene in Trinidad. Fueled by the desire to escape from the cultural politics that mark musical style as either Afro-Creole (calypso, soca) or East Indian (chutney, chutney-soda), musicians created a space within which an unmarked music (rock) could be mobilized to offer a new vision of what it could sound like to be Trinidadian.
Find this resource:

Steelband

The literature on the steelband is extensive, and the citations included in this section offer a strong introduction to the subject. Dudley 2013 and Stuempfle 1995 present comprehensive studies of the ensemble, its social and political contexts, and its soundtracks. Dudley 2002a and Dudley 2002b offer more specific explorations of the “own tune” and the practice of arranging European Art music for steelband performance, respectively. Thomas 1992 compiles a thorough and annotated discography of some 40 years of steelband recordings.

Dudley, Shannon. “The Steelband ‘Own Tune’: Nationalism, Festivity, and Musical Strategies in Trinidad’s Panorama Competition.” Black Music Research Journal 22.1 (2002a): 13–36.
DOI: 10.2307/1519963 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article focuses on the politics of the “own tune” within the institutional spaces of Panorama, the national competition for steelbands in Trinidad. Rooted ethnographic evidence and approaching this topic as a matter of both historical practice and more recent innovation, the article points to the challenges of innovating successfully within the context of Panorama. The “own tune” is a model within which such musical strategies can be traced and analyzed.
Find this resource:
Dudley, Shannon. “Dropping the Bomb: Steelband Performance and Meaning in 1960s Trinidad.” Ethnomusicology 46.1 (2002b): 135–164.
DOI: 10.2307/852811 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This article explores a moment within steelband practice when arrangements of selections drawn from European art music—bombs—were commonly performed by steelbands during carnival. Beginning in the 1950s and lasting into the 1960s, this moment generated significant discourse around seemingly incommensurate symbols—the steelband as a Trinidadian invention drawing on its own musical repertory (calypso), and the European art music repertory as colonial imposition on local creativity and aesthetics. The article explores the competing discourses and meanings that accumulated around this practice, thereby highlighting the complex sociopolitical context within which these sounds and conversations were taking place.
Find this resource:
Dudley, Shannon. Music from Behind the Bridge: Steelband Aesthetics and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph explores the steelband as a set of musical and aesthetic practices within Trinidad. Ethnographic insight into the instrument is generated through a series of chapters focused on: particular techniques (dropping the bomb), compositional styles (the own tune), the rise of arrangers for pan, the institutional spaces of the panorama festival, the deeply competitive nature of performance; and the communal dimensions rooting ensembles in social space. A seminal contribution to the literature.
Find this resource:
Stuempfle, Stephen. The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad and Tobago. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph offers a thorough history of steelband’s development as an ensemble, social movement, and set of political possibilities. Illustrating the complex paths through which the steelband moved from maligned ensemble to eventual recognition as the national instrument, the monograph simultaneously presents a compelling vision of how shifting colonial and postcolonial contexts contributed to shaping the ensemble’s emergence into national prominence.
Find this resource:
Thomas, Jeffrey, ed. Forty Years of Steel: An Annotated Discography of Steel Band and Pan Recordings, 1951–1991. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A comprehensive discography, comprising almost eight hundred entries and encompassing over forty years of steelband and pan recordings. An indispensable resource for those interested in the history of steelband.
Find this resource:

Carnival Traditions/Carnival Culture

Scholarship concerning carnival, carnival musics, and carnival culture represents a significant portion of the overall research on music in Trinidad and Tobago. The selections below are representative of the best work on the subject. Those interested in historical overviews of carnival music will be well served to turn first to Cowley 1996, Dudley 2003, and Liverpool 2001. Green and Scher 2007 and Guilbault 2007 explore the transnational dimensions and the cultural politics of carnival music, respectively. Warner-Lewis 2015 focuses attention on the African dimensions of Trinidadian expressive culture and, by extension, of carnival. Birth 2008 focuses attention on rural parang and chutney, two genres that fall outside of the mainstream of carnival but are important festival musics, as well.

Birth, Kevin. Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This monograph offers a rich, ethnographic exploration of how music is mobilized in the service of navigating social and political life in Trinidad. Focusing on the soundtracks accompanying rural village life (on reception and interpretation), Birth turns to parang and chutney, in addition to calypso and soca, in order to illustrate how music becomes a powerful means of engendering solidarities and changing opinions about social life even in the face of political upheaval (the coup in 1990) or uncertainty (the elections of 1995).
Find this resource:
Cowley, John. Carnival, Canboulay, and Calypso: Traditions in the Making. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This seminal book is one of the best explorations of carnival traditions in Trinidad. Encompassing late-19th-century practices and focusing primarily on the 19th century and the rise of calypso, the historical arc of the book terminates in the early twentieth-century with an analysis of early recordings of calypso. This meticulously researched book is a major contribution to the literature.
Find this resource:
Dudley, Shannon. Carnival Music of Trinidad: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The subject of this introductory textbook is carnival, and Dudley manages to use it as a lens through which to think about a wide range of musical practices in Trinidad and Tobago. Written for a non-specialist audience, this book deftly introduces and then explains the carnival complex and its associated sonic and performative dimensions.
Find this resource:
Green, Garth and Philip Scher, eds. Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This collection of essays offers a wide range of perspectives on carnival in Trinidad. Explores the history of carnival, the challenges of studying carnival, the complexities involved in transnational return migrants and their touristic experiences of carnival, the expansion of carnival into other international spaces, and musical complexities and innovations, especially with regard to steelbands and calypso.
Find this resource:
Guilbault, Jocelyne. Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focuses attention on gender and governmentality in Trinidad’s carnival musics. Offering career narratives of calypsonians and soca artists, the book illustrates the powerful institutional and social forces shaping practice in Trinidad. Using governmentality in order to analyze the many registers at which ideology, politics, social convention, industry norms, media landscapes, and economics shape (govern) the musics of carnival, Guilbault provides a powerful reading of the cultural politics attendant to carnival in Trinidad.
Find this resource:
Liverpool, Hollis. Rituals of Power and Rebellion: The Carnival Tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. Chicago: Research Associates School Times, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Written by a calypsonian (Chalkdust) who himself has had a decorated career in the tents, this monograph offers a history of carnival and its associated cultural practices (including music) seasoned by the insights of a practitioner. An important contribution to the literature on carnival.
Find this resource:
Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Guinea’s Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015 [1991].
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A classic text on the African presence in the Americas, focusing specifically on Trinidad. Explores the wide range of cultural practices and aesthetic ideas that survived the Middle Passage and informed Trinidadian life. Poetic techniques, linguistic connections, cosmologies and religious rituals, masquerade traditions, are among the topics introduced as evidence of the continuing impact of African models on the Trinidadian context.
Find this resource:

Mainland Caribbean

For the purposes of this bibliography, the Mainland Caribbean includes Belize and Guyana. That said, a significant English-speaking community also makes their home on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Surinam also is often thought in relationship to the English-speaking Caribbean, not because of language, but rather because the large Surinamese East Indian community ties it in important ways to both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. Here, however, the bibliographic references are restricted to the two most significant English-speaking nations of the Mainland Caribbean.

Belize

Independent since 1981, Belize is the only nation in Central America within which English is the official language. The nation is home to around 350,000 people. Among these are the Garinagu, who are the focus of this bibliographic section. Living on the Caribbean coast of the country, and comprising about 4 percent of Belize’s population, the Garinagu community has ancestral ties to the Black Caribs of St. Vincent. Greene 2002 and Palacio 2005 explore the transnational dimensions of the Garinagu community, using music and dance to illustrate the pressure this places on cultural and linguistic continuity and ritual practice. Greene 1998 focuses specifically on the Dügü ritual, offering ethnographic and historical analysis. Stone 2006 discusses the ambivalences Garinagu musicians encounter in negotiating sound and meaning within/against the world music industry. Poluha 2015 presents a comparative study of the ways that Evangelical and Catholic churches engage with Garifuna culture. Greene 2006 documents the Jankunú tradition among the Garinagu.

Greene, Oliver. “The Dügü Ritual of the Garinagu of Belize: Reinforcing Values of Society through Music and Spirit Possession.” Black Music Research Journal 18.1–2 (1998): 167–181.
DOI: 10.2307/779397 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focuses on the Dügü ritual of the Garinagu in Belize. This ritual, which requires the presence of all members of a community in order to generate the appropriate spiritual energy, presents both unique opportunities for solidarity and social healing and significant challenges, given that the Garinagu community is widely dispersed between Belize and locations throughout the United States and because of the costs involved in mounting such a celebration.
Find this resource:
Greene, Oliver. “Ethnicity, Modernity, and Retention in Garifuna Punta.” Black Music Research Journal 22.2 (2002): 189–216.
DOI: 10.2307/1519956 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focuses on the mobilization of music, language, and religion in service of community identity in the face of the increasing modernization and dispersal of Garinagu communities. Greene argues that music and the arts facilitate a means of valuing cultural productions, language, and belief in the face of the realities facing Garinagu in the contemporary moment (family members living in diaspora, influx of media and English language programming/education, pressure to assimilate into national culture in Belize, etc.).
Find this resource:
Greene, Oliver. Play, Jankunú Play: The Garifuna Wanaragua Ritual of Belize. DVD. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This documentary film explores the Jankunú festival of Belize, illustrating the customs, musical practices, and masquerading that animate the event.
Find this resource:
Palacio, Joseph, ed. The Garifuna, A Nation Across Borders: Essays in Social Anthropology. Benque Viejo del Carmen, Belize: Cupola Productions, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This collection of essays offers a seminal contribution to thinking about the Garinagu nation as a transnationally distributed nation. Although not all chapters concern music, several contributions do cover topics such as Jankunú and Garifuna language, dance, and music (including punta and punta rock). An important resource.
Find this resource:
Poluha, Lauren Janel. “Let’s Worship Our Lord as Garinagu”: Sacred Music and the Negotiation of Garifuna Ethnicity.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Through close ethnographies of the two churches active in Hopkins Village, this dissertation explores the use of sacred music in service of ethnicity within the Garinagu community in Belize. One is a Catholic parish, while the other is an Evangelical congregation, and the tensions between the two communities afford Poluha with an opportunity to illustrate the ways that music is mobilized in service of competing religious contexts but also in pursuit of similar identitarian goals.
Find this resource:
Stone, Michael. “Garifuna Song, Groove Locale, and ‘World-Music’ Mediation.” In Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations. Edited by Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, 59–79. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the ambivalences and challenges created by the world music industry through an engagement with Garinagu musical practices. It mounts a critique of optimistic approaches to transnational mediations of local musics by using a grounded, historically contextualized narrative of Garinagu song as the lens through which to complicate and nuance such approaches.
Find this resource:

Guyana

The only nation in South America in which English is the official language, Guyana gained independence from Britain in 1966. It hosts a population of some 735,000. A significant East Indian population (comprising about 43 percent) connects it to communities in Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. The Afro-Guyanese community (some 30 percent of the population) is also deeply connected to the English-speaking Caribbean. Cambridge 2015 offers a historical survey of Guyanese musical life. Schultz 2014 explores the connections between Guyanese communities in Minneapolis, Guyana, and India, as imagined through Bollywood films.

Cambridge, Vibert. Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Controlling Creativity. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015.
DOI: 10.14325/mississippi/9781628460117.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Traces how class, gender, race, and ideology influenced access to media and to musical instruction and how those dynamics shifted over time. Elaborating on the connections between Guyanese musicians and artists from the Caribbean, and illustrating the patterns of circulation that saw many Guyanese musicians leave the country in pursuit of better opportunities, this book makes a strong and seminal contribution to the literature on music in Guyana.
Find this resource:
Schultz, Anna. “Bollywood Bhajans: Style as ‘Air’ in an Indian-Guyanese Twice-migrant Community.” Ethnomusicology Forum 23.3 (2014): 383–404.
DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2014.909736 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the musical and linguistic interactions of an Indo-Guyanese community in Minneapolis with Bollywood Films. Ethnographically engaging with the concerns, imaginaries, and desires of this community, Schultz illustrates the complicated relations, anxieties, and solidarities that extend between this community, the Indo-Guyanese community in Guyana, and the imagined community in India.
Find this resource:

British West Indies (British Overseas Territories)

The British West Indies comprises five territories: Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unfortunately, little research has been conducted on the musical life of these territories, even though the links to the Commonwealth Caribbean run deep. A few studies have been published on music in Montserrat, but even those are decades old. A sixth territory, not really located in the Caribbean but deeply connected to the long history of the Caribbean (especially that of the Bahamas), is Bermuda. Although some important research has been conducted on music in Bermuda, it falls outside the scope of this current bibliography. The British West Indies is included as a category here in order to highlight the pressing need for active scholarly engagement in these territories.

Montserrat

This British Overseas Territory hosts a population of roughly 5,000. It is located in the Leeward Islands, northwest of Guadeloupe. Dobbin 1986 connects the Jombee Dance to African cosmology and situates it within a historical trajectory marked by a decline in its popularity.

Dobbin, Jay. The Jombee Dance of Montserrat: A Study of Trance Ritual in the West Indies. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Applying the theoretical insights about ritual of Victor Turner, this book explores the sacred dimensions of the Jombee Dance in Montserrat. Dobbin seeks to illustrate what he sees as the African religious foundation of the ritual, even as it is performed in an ostensibly Christian context. The history and meaning of the ritual and the reasons for its decline in popularity are explored in ethnographic fashion.
Find this resource:

Other Territories

This category makes room for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which do not fit within any of the other political or geographic groupings. Comprising the islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John, the islands are considered an organized, unincorporated US territory. Although politically unique within the region, the island’s connections to the rest of the English-speaking Caribbean remain deep.

US Virgin Islands

The islands of St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John are located in the Leeward Islands and host a combined population of roughly 105,000. The islands were, since 1754, called the Danish West Indies, but the United States purchased the islands from Denmark in 1916, taking possession in 1917. Pinckney 1992 traces the emergence and development of jazz in the Virgin Islands between the 1920s and the 1980s. Albuquerque 1990 explores the political and cultural resistance to Americanization, highlighted during Carnival celebrations, that obtained in the 1980s. Oliver 2002 offers a careful analysis of changing perceptions of quadrille dance in St. Croix. Clague 2008 presents a biography of Alton Augustus Adams, a native of St. Thomas who became the first black bandmaster of the US Navy. Leland 2006 documents on film the career of James Brewster, an icon of traditional quelbe music.

Albuquerque, Klaus de. “‘Is We Carnival?’: Cultural Traditions Under Stress in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” In Caribbean Popular Culture. Edited by John Lent, 49–63. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This chapter explores the ways in which, during the late 1980s, carnival in the U.S. Virgin Islands has been a site for resistance to the Americanization of the nation. The heated rhetoric and occasional violence against white, US participants in carnival are marshaled as evidence of a growing concern over cultural loss and a felt need to reassert local traditions and heritage as meaningful.
Find this resource:
Clague, Mark, ed. The Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, Sr.: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This book is a scholarly engagement with the memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, who served as the first black bandmaster of the US Navy. Compelling (auto)biography, this book explores the career of this musician, writer, and hotel owner from St. Thomas, and his conviction that music could be used to mitigate racism.
Find this resource:
Leland, Andrea. Jamesie, King of Scratch. DVD. Blooming Grove, NY: New Day Digital, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
This documentary film is a celebration of quelbe music and of Jamesie (James Brewster), one of the most celebrated performers of this genre. An excellent introduction to the sounds and context of quelbe.
Find this resource:
Oliver, Cynthia. “Winin’ Yo’ Wais’: The Changing Tastes of Dance on the U.S. Virgin Island of St Croix.” In Caribbean Dance: From Abakuá to Zouk. Edited by Susanna Sloat, 199–220. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Focusing specifically on quadrille, this chapter traces the ambivalences and possibilities that historically accrue in the simultaneous presence of African- and European-derived contributions to that dance complex. The chapter explores tensions around race and class as part of a rethinking of the dance’s historical presence in St. Croix.
Find this resource:
Pinckney, Warren. “Jazz in the US. Virgin Islands.” American Music 10.4 (1992): 441–467.
DOI: 10.2307/3052034 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Traces the emergence of jazz in the U.S. Virgin Islands from the 1920s through the 1980s. Rich in archival work and incorporating ethnography into the argument, the article illustrates that jazz became a significant force across the three islands and included live venues (Blue Moon), institutions (such as the St. Croix Jazz Society), and a nuanced relationship to other genres such as soca and calypso.
Find this resource:

Music

Jump to Other Articles:

Article

Down

Recently viewed (0)