Island Sounds In The Global City

Maps the musical Caribbeanization of New York City, now home to the diverse concentrations of Caribbean people in the world. This volume surveys a mosaic of popular Caribbean styles, showing how these musics serve the dual function of defining a group's uniqueness and creating bridges across ethnic boundaries.

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

On summer nights on downtown Los Angeles's Bunker Hill, Grand Performances presents free public concerts for the people of the city. A hip hop orchestra, a mariachi musician, an Afropop singer, and a Chinese modern dance company are just a few examples of the eclectic range of artists employed to reflect the diversity of LA itself. At these concerts, shared experiences of listening and dancing to the music become sites for the recognition of some of the general aspirations for the performances, for Los Angeles, and for contemporary public life. In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at downtown performances. Along with archival materials on urban planning and policy, Peterson draws extensively on her own participation with Grand Performances, ranging from working in an information booth answering questions about the artists and the venue, to observing concerts and concert-goers as an audience member, to performing onstage herself as a cellist with the daKAH Hip Hop orchestra. The book offers an exploration of intersecting concerns of urban residents and scholars today that include social relations and diversity, public space and civic life, privatization and suburbanization and economic and cultural globalization. At a moment when cities around the world are undertaking similar efforts to revitalize their centers, Sound, Space, and the City conveys the underlying tensions of such projects and their relevance for understanding urban futures.

The Caribbean ranks among the earliest and most completely globalized regions in the world. From the first moment Europeans set foot on the islands to the present, products, people, and ideas have made their way back and forth between the region and other parts of the globe with unequal but inexorable force. An inventory of some of these unprecedented multidirectional exchanges, this volume provides a measure of, as well as a model for, new scholarship on globalization in the region. Ten essays by leading scholars in the field of Caribbean studies identify and illuminate important social and cultural aspects of the region as it seeks to maintain its own identity against the unrelenting pressures of globalization. These essays examine cultural phenomena in their creolized forms--from sports and religion to music and drink--as well as the Caribbean manifestations of more universal trends--from racial inequality and feminist activism to indebtedness and economic uncertainty. Throughout, the volume points to the contending forces of homogeneity and differentiation that define globalization and highlights the growing agency of the Caribbean peoples in the modern world. Contributors: Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2004) Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University Juan Flores, City University of New York Graduate Center Jorge L. Giovannetti, University of Puerto Rico Aline Helg, University of Geneva Franklin W. Knight, The Johns Hopkins University Anthony P. Maingot, Florida International University Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Macalester College Helen McBain, Economic Commission for Latin America & the Caribbean, Trinidad Frances Negron-Muntaner, Columbia University Valentina Peguero, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Raquel Romberg, Temple University

"This book pulls together an exceptional range of literature in addressing the complexity of contemporary patterns and processes of urbanization. It offers a rich array of concepts and theories and is studded with fascinating examples that illustrate the changing nature of cities and urban life" - Paul Knox, Virginia Tech University "The SAGE Companion to the City is a tour-de-force of contemporary urban studies. At once a stocktake, showcase and springboard for scholarly approaches to cities and city life, the editors have assembled a cohesive and convincing set of lucid, insightful and critical essays of great quality. Eschewing grand theory and deadening encyclopediasm, the contributors refresh both longstanding concerns and explore new themes in ways both brilliantly accessible to newcomers and satisfying to the cognoscenti." - Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales Organized in four sections The SAGE Companion to the City provides a systematic A-Z to understanding the city that explains the interrelations between society, culture and economy. Histories: explores power, religion, science and technology, modernity, and the landscape of the city. Economies and Inequalities: explores work and leisure, globalisation, innovation, and the role of the state. Communities: explores migration and settlement, segregation and division, civility, housing and homelessness. Order and Disorder: explores politics and policy, planning and conflict, law and order, surveillance and terror. An accessible guide to all areas of urban studies, the text offers both a contemporary cutting edge reflection and measured historical and geographical reflection on urban studies. It will be essential reading for students of any discipline interested in the city as an object of study.

Caribbean Diaspora in the USA presents a new cultural theory based on an exploration of Caribbean religious communities in New York City. The Caribbean culture of New York demonstrates a cultural dynamism which embraces Spanish speaking, English speaking and French speaking migrants. All cultures are full of breaks and contradictions as Latin American and Caribbean theorists have demonstrated in their ongoing debate. This book combines unique research by the author in Caribbean New York with the theoretical discourse of Latin American and Caribbean scholars. Focusing on Caribbean religious communities, including Cuban/Puerto Rican Santería (Regla de Ocha), Haitian Vodou, Shango (Orisha Baptist) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Brazilian Pentecostal church, Schmidt's observations lead to the construction of a cultural concept that illustrates a culture in an ongoing state of change, with more than one form of expression depending on situation, time and context. Showing the creativity of religions and the way immigrants adapt to their new surroundings, this book fills a gap between Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

This volume makes available the full range of the American/Canadian musical experience, covering-for the first time in print-all major regions, ethnic groups, and traditional and popular contexts. From musical comedy to world beat, from the songs of the Arctic to rap and house music, from Hispanic Texas to the Chinese communities of Vancouver, the coverage captures the rich diversity and continuities of the vibrant music we hear around us. Special attention is paid to recent immigrant groups, to Native American traditions, and to such socio-musical topics as class, race, gender, religion, government policy, media, and technology.

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.