Caribbean Popular Culture

Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance examines the Caribbean popular - an idea that has been an important and contested terrain for exploring the dynamic and oftentimes subversive cultural expressions of the region. The Caribbean popular arts, whether embodied in the hybrid musical genres or vernacular performance and festival traditions, have historically provided a space for social and political critique, the performance of visibility and also articulations of a temporal emancipatory ethos with its attendant acquisition of power and status. Beyond the spaces of their local/regional enactments and the social realities out of which they emerged and continue to circulate, Caribbean popular culture has over time contributed to contemporary understandings of global and diasporic cultures and, at the same time, the dynamics of inter-cultural encounters. The terrain of the popular has been a generative site for the study of Caribbean societies, and has produced enduring theoretical postulations that have been pivotal to the shaping of the intellectual production on the Caribbean. It is also the most powerful force that socializes contemporary Caribbean citizens into an understanding of their identities, the limits of their citizenship, and the meaning of their worlds.

This insightful book introduces the most important trends, people, events, and products of popular culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. In recent times, Latin American influences have permeated American culture through music, movies, television, and literature. This sweeping volume serves as a ready-reference guide to pop culture in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, focusing on Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Costa Rica, among other areas. The work encourages hands-on engagement with the popular culture in these places, making such suggestions as Brazilian films to rent or where to find Venezuelan music on the Internet. To start, the book covers various perspectives and issues of these regions, including the influence of the United States, how the idea of machismo reflects on the portrayal of women in these societies, and the representation of Latino-Caribo cultures in film and other mediums. Entries cover key trends, people, events, and products from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. Each section gives detailed information and profound insights into some of the more academic—and often controversial—debates on the subject, while the inclusion of the Internet, social media, and video games make the book timely and relevant.

A legacy of slavery, abolition, colonialism, and class struggle has profoundly impacted the people and culture of the Caribbean. In Tropic Tendencies, Kevin Adonis Browne examines the development of an Anglophone Caribbean rhetorical tradition in response to the struggle to make meaning, maintain identity, negotiate across differences, and thrive in light of historical constraints and the need to participate in contemporary global culture. Browne bases his study on the concept of the “Caribbean carnivalesque” as the formative ethos driving cultural and rhetorical production in the region and beyond it. He finds that carnivalesque discourse operates as a “continuum of discursive substantiation” that increases the probability of achieving desired outcomes for both the rhetor and the audience. Browne also views the symbolic and material interplay of the masque and its widespread use to amplify efforts of resistance, assertion, and liberation. Browne analyzes rhetorical modes and strategies in a variety of forms, including music, dance, folklore, performance, sermons, fiction, poetry, photography, and digital media. He introduces chantwells, calypsonians, old talkers, jamettes, stickfighters, badjohns, and others as exemplary purveyors of Caribbean rhetoric and deconstructs their rhetorical displays. From novels by Earl Lovelace, he also extracts thematic references to kalinda, limbo, and dragon dances that demonstrate the author’s claim of an active vernacular sensibility. He then investigates the re-creation and reinvention of the carnivalesque in cyber culture, demonstrating the ways participants both flaunt and defy normative ideas of “Caribbeanness” in online and macro environments.

It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture--which is considered derivative of Europe--and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. This book recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. It shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. The book also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century.

Sixteen essays chronicle the emergence and metamorphosis across centuries of a variety of Caribbean expressions, and document the restructuring of social relations through expressive forms.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island's music culture. Curwen Best's The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados provides this long overdue survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. Best concentrates, in particular, on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. His study considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. Readers will find especially compelling Best's analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil' Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression. This book will be of significant interest to scholars, students and all those curious about Caribbean popular culture, the popular music of Barbados, and the impact of emerging technologies on cultural development in a small island state.

The anglophone Caribbean has long been celebrated and known for its vibrant and innovative music. Reggae, dancehall, calypso, soca, gospel and ringbang have flourished within the Caribbean and have exploded on the worldwide stage. Somewhat surprisingly, many facets of this contribution have not been analysed or discussed by academic writing. This work deliberately moves away from the customary exclusive focus on Trinidad and Jamaica and broadens the discourse to represent the wider region. It addresses such topics as the status of Caribbean gospel; the birth of new musical styles in the Eastern Caribbean; cultural misrepresentation in Caribbean music videos; the representation of Aids in Caribbean music; and the impact of the actual music technology utilized by Caribbean musicians since the 1980s.