Island Time - (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) by Jessica Swanston Baker (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In racist tropes and exoticizing vacation advertisements alike, the Caribbean is characterized by its slowness. A blank canvas for colonial development or a place where wealthy foreigners can forget their troubles, the alleged slowness of the Caribbean has also been used as a blunt instrument to perpetuate its underdevelopment. But popular music from the Caribbean is just getting faster. In this new project, ethnomusicologist Jessica Baker examines speed as a productive nexus of concepts that articulate the Caribbean present. Baker is particularly interested in a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis called wilders. Baker argues that the speed of wilders 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. Wilders musicians and audiences form a historical and regional cohesion that offers an alternative model to the constrictive logics of development. Wilders in importantly continuous with other musical genres throughout the region, leading to what Baker calls archipelagic listening practices, a geography of thought and sounding modeled on the island-to-island relations the archipelago represents. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media resonances of wilders. Indeed, that the music flows through the region allows her to pose an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands-Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti-neglecting not only the unique contributions 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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"There is nothing small about the music that flows from the tiny Leeward islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. Nor can the implications of Jessica Swanston Baker's Island Time be easily overstated. With graceful pen and shrewd ear, Baker gathers music scholars around a fresh preposition--from--showing just how much where matters in music."--Braxton D. Shelley, Yale University

"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

"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

About the Author

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