| Contents |
Introduction: Music, writing, and ocean circuits / Timothy J. Reiss -- Cinquillo consciousness: the formation of a Pan-Caribbean musical aesthetic / Sara E. Johnson -- Reading caribbean music: reflections on the music of Leo Brouwer / Paul B. Miller -- Africanity and continuum in sacred and popular Trinidadian musical forms / Amon Saba Saakana -- The ties that bind? Rhythm, writing, and the question of heredity in the Caribbean / Rudyard Alcocer -- "Soy mestiza y no lo soy": Gonzalo Roig's musical re(vision) of Cecilia Valdés / Lucy D. Harney -- The spaces and faces of music and dance in early modern Havana / Luz Mena -- Drum and minuet: music, masquerade, and the mulatto of style / Gordon Rohlehr -- Calypso aesthetic in George Lamming's In the castle of my skin / Margaret Diana Gill -- Forging a distinctive sensibility: Babylon by bus / Kwame Dawes -- "More fire": chanting down Babylon from Bob Marley to Capleton / Carolyn Cooper -- Street romances: salsa's voyeurism / Juan Otero Garabìs -- In Cortijo's wake: Crónica and popular music / Juan Flores -- Cuba, the night, and the music: Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Havana Son et lumière / Christopher Winks -- Dancehall lyricism / Natasha Barnes -- Créolité's queer mangrove / Jarrod Hayes -- How to read a novel from Curaçao? The perception of history in Diana Lebac's The longest month / Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger -- Parent tongue: Caribbean women poets and female musicians sounding landscapes / Opal Palmer Adisa -- Caribbean dirges: rising rhythms, precarious prospects / Silvio Torres-Saillant -- Piggyback exchange: Kassav' and black musicians in Paris / Brenda F. Berrian. |
| Abstract |
This book brings together performers, writers, critics, and musicologists from the Dutch-, English-, French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, as well as Britain and the United States. The collection explores the history of the circulation of music and writing in transAtlantic, intraCaribbean, and finally global perspectives. Authors' concerns include exchanges between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and native America, the places of music and dance in Caribbean culture in general, in the establishment of a literary aesthetic, in individual authors and performers, and in specific island cultures. Forms of resistance, adjustments of race, gender, and class, specific modes of cultural creation are also key issues, as are spirit of place and senses of history. Nor do contributors scant the central dilemma of political and social violence as often crucial elements in daily experience and cultural creation. The idea of a cultural unity despite political disunity is a common theme (even when local forms or individual writers are at issue), as is a sense that such unity can resist metropolitan economic and intellectual hegemonies even as its cultural productions run the risk of being caught in the snares of global multinationalism. Overall here is a sense of cultural vitality ever in search of and always creating new, but simultaneously traditional, representations of Caribbean being and experience. Authors include major established and new writers: Opal Palmer Adisa, Rudyard Alcocer, Natasha Barnes, Brenda Berrian, Carolyn Cooper, Kwame Dawes, Juan Flores, Margaret Gill, Lucy Harney, Jarrod Hayes, Sara Johnson, Luz Mena, Paul Miller, Juan Otero Garabís, Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, Timothy Reiss, Gordon Rohlehr, Amon Saba Saakana, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Christopher Winks. |
