Overview

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 its speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations to the promises of economic modernity, women's bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy, and material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago thus emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance and make it a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.

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9780226837284

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Reviews

"""Theoretically sophisticated and written with a deeply engaging autoethnographic tone, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the (post)colonial dynamics and assumptions that animate defining discourses about small islands’ musical aesthetics in the twenty-first century Caribbean. In a bold and welcome move, Baker critically rethinks what in the West and in former colonies has been typically conceived as polar opposites—big and small islands, slow and fast tempo, women’s restrained and exuberant behaviors. In contrast, this book foregrounds the horizontal web of island relations, its forever ongoing transformation of conventions, and its sounding of familiarity and difference that produce the unmistakable feeling of Caribbeanness. An insightful and significant achievement!"" -- Jocelyne Guilbault, University of California, Berkeley"

"""Theoretically sophisticated and written with a deeply engaging autoethnographic tone, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the (post)colonial dynamics and assumptions that animate defining discourses about small islands’ musical aesthetics in the twenty-first century Caribbean. In a bold and welcome move, Baker critically rethinks what in the West and in former colonies has been typically conceived as polar opposites—big and small islands, slow and fast tempo, women’s restrained and exuberant behaviors. In contrast, this book foregrounds the horizontal web of island relations, its forever ongoing transformation of conventions, and its sounding of familiarity and difference that produce the unmistakable feeling of Caribbeanness. An insightful and significant achievement!"" -- Jocelyne Guilbault, University of California, Berkeley ""Drawing on Caribbean philosophy and fine-grained ethnography, Island Time engages with the simultaneity of disjunct regimes of time—the hyperactive beat of wylers music and tourism's promise of languor, developmentalist accounts of backwardness and the hypermodernity of ""fast"" girls—and a reticulate cultural geography by which the Caribbean archipelago's multitudes are experienced in the small-island nation of St. Kitts-Nevis."" -- Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Boston University"

Author Information

Jessica Swanston Baker is assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago.  

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