Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226837284)

A close look at how wylers, a popular musical style from the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, expresses a unique mode of relation in the postcolonial Caribbean.

In Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that this speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity; women's bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy; and the material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media-based resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands--Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti--thus neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but also the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance. The archipelago and its speeds ultimately emerge as a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.


Author: Jessica Swanston Baker
ISBN-10: 0226837289
ISBN-13: 9780226837284
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 10/16/2024
Pages: 232
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.04lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d