Sun Sea And Sound

Within the circum-Caribbean, the ubiquity of tourism and the variety of musical life are hard to miss. Scholars have long explored both of these themes in the Caribbean, but have done so from disciplinary perspectives that tended until recently (and for a variety of reasons) to foreclose readings that considered tourism and music together. This volume addresses itself to analyzing the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region.

Music and tourism, both integral to the culture and livelihood of the circum-Caribbean region, have until recently been approached from disparate disciplinary perspectives. Scholars who specialize in tourism studies typically focus on issues such as economic policy, sustainability, and political implications; music scholars are more likely to concentrate on questions of identity, authenticity, neo-colonialism, and appropriation. Although the insights generated by these paths of scholarship have long been essential to study of the region, Sun, Sea, and Sound turns its attention to the dynamics and interrelationships between tourism and music throughout the region. Editors Timothy Rommen and Daniel T. Neely bring together a group of leading scholars from the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, mobility studies, and history to develop and explore a framework - termed music touristics - that considers music in relation to the wide range of tourist experiences that have developed in the region. Over the course of eleven chapters, the authors delve into an array of issues including the ways in which countries such as Jamaica and Cuba have used music to distinguish themselves within the international tourism industry, the tourism surrounding music festivals in Guadeloupe and New Orleans, the intersections between music and sex tourism in Brazil, and spirituality tourism in Cuba. An indispensable resource for the study of music and tourism in global perspective, Sun, Sea, and Sound is essential reading for scholars and students across disciplines interested in the Caribbean region.

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family. Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

The contributors to Sounds of Vacation examine the commodification of music and sound at popular vacation destinations throughout the Caribbean in order to tease out the relationships between political economy, hospitality, and the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Drawing on case studies from Barbados, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Lucia, the contributors point to the myriad ways live performances, programmed music, and the sonic environment heighten tourists' pleasurable vacation experience. They explore, among other topics, issues of authenticity in Bahamian music; efforts to give tourists in Barbados peace and quiet at a former site of colonial violence; and how resort soundscapes extend beyond music to encompass the speech accents of local residents. Through interviews with resort managers, musicians, and hospitality workers, the contributors also outline the social, political, and economic pressures and interests that affect musical labor and the social encounters of musical production. In so doing, they prompt a rethinking of how to account for music and sound's resonances in postcolonial spaces. Contributors. Jerome Camal, Steven Feld, Francio Guadeloupe, Jocelyne Guilbault, Jordi Halfman, Susan Harewood, Percy C. Hintzen, Timothy Rommen

No truer words can be said—life isn’t always as it seems—especially when it throws a dangerous concoction of its mind-blowing elements straight at you. Coming from an underprivileged background in the East End of London, Berkeley sets himself the challenge to escape poverty and do well for himself. Armed with a good brain and determination, he succeeds and wants for nothing, but there’s a bitter price to pay. Now the challenge is with himself, and he escapes to the quiet of Tenerife for love, only to lose it promptly. What now? With no career or prospects in the unfamiliar country, what is Berkeley to do? He decides to set up business opening an art gallery, yet knows nothing about art. What follows is a series of comical disasters, veiled threats, and visitors of a spiritual nature convincing him he’s to be served up to the Devil himself. The whole experience pushes Berkeley to limits he’s never encountered before, and he learns the hard way that what goes around really does come around to haunt you. Only love and true friendships can bring him back to the real world.

A Science Friday Best Science Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Science and Technology Book of the Year A Tampa Bay Times Best Book of the Year A stunning history of seashells and the animals that make them that "will have you marveling at nature…Barnett’s account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, about global history and about environmental crises and preservation" (John Williams, New York Times Book Review). Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature’s creations since the dawn of humanity. They were money before coins, jewelry before gems, art before canvas. In The Sound of the Sea, acclaimed environmental author Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. Spiraling out from the great cities of shell that once rose in North America to the warming waters of the Maldives and the slave castles of Ghana, Barnett has created an unforgettable history of our world through an examination of the unassuming seashell. She begins with their childhood wonder, unwinds surprising histories like the origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, and charts what shells and the soft animals that build them are telling scientists about our warming, acidifying seas. From the eerie calls of early shell trumpets to the evolutionary miracle of spines and spires and the modern science of carbon capture inspired by shell, Barnett circles to her central point of listening to nature’s wisdom—and acting on what seashells have to say about taking care of each other and our world.