Island Time : Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baker, Jessica Swanston.

Series:

Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Popular music--Social aspects--Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Popular music.

Popular music--Social aspects--Caribbean Area.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (247 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

"In racist tropes and exoticizing vacation advertisements alike, the Caribbean is characterized by its slowness. A blank canvas for colonial development or a place where wealthy foreigners can forget their troubles, the alleged slowness of the Caribbean has also been used as a blunt instrument to perpetuate its underdevelopment. But popular music from the Caribbean is just getting faster. In this new project, ethnomusicologist Jessica Baker examines speed as a productive nexus of concepts that articulate the Caribbean present. Baker is particularly interested in a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis called wilders. Baker argues that the speed of wilders becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations to the promises of economic modernity, women's bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy, and material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. Wilders musicians and audiences form a historical and regional cohesion that offers an alternative model to the constrictive logics of development. Wilders in importantly continuous with other musical genres throughout the region, leading to what Baker calls archipelagic listening practices, a geography of thought and sounding modeled on the island-to-island relations the archipelago represents. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media resonances of wilders. Indeed, that the music flows through the region allows her to pose an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands-Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti-neglecting not only the unique contributions of smaller nations, but the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago thus emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance and make it a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Island Time

The Pedagogy of Pace

Wylers and the Tempo of Development

Archipelagic Listening from the Small Islands

Conclusion: Connecting the Dots.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226837291

0226837297

OCLC:

1455131797