Comprising 13 chapters, each one discussing a specific musical genre from a particular island or community, this volume is a very useful companion to Caribbean music in its many diverse forms, from salsa, son and merengue to rara, konpa, zouk, and reggae. The chapters engage with particular themes – for example, race, transculturation, exile, diaspora, history, etc. – so that each essay may be read individually, as a case study, and as part of the volume's broader attempt to think of Caribbean music globally, as a connected, diverse but unified whole that transmits the experiences of the people of the region and its diaspora. The connections are therefore often complex, hidden or indeed rhizomatic, with tangled, shared roots that meet and intertwine. Fittingly, the book is organised according to an archipelagic principle whereby the chapters ‘are presented not in a straight line, but as part of a loop, where essential ideas recur and repeat, to different measures and to different outcomes. The chapters arise as a collage of voices and accounts, suggesting process, not product; meant to reflect the fluidity that marks the Caribbean as a whole’ (p. 10).
Thus, Robin Moore's chapter on Cuban son music acts as a kind of anchor, introducing ideas of transculturation to explain the evolution of the music and the nation's changing relationship to notions of race and identity. As Moore demonstrates, the growth of the music coincided with that of recording and mass dissemination, technological developments that brought the music of the black working class to increasingly middle-class ears. Moore argues that son was the first commercially successful musical form to incorporate ‘Afro-diasporic aesthetic elements […] presenting them in a manner less threatening to Eurocentric middle-class listeners than music based on percussion and vocals alone’ (pp. 24–5). As such, the history of son reflects and exemplifies that of other musical forms across the Caribbean, especially in the 20th century, when the music was to some degree taken off the streets and out of the yards and into the realm of the gramophone and record buyers, where it could be listened to in private, without the presence of the music makers themselves. Son, like for example calypso and carnival music in Trinidad, could be appropriated to some degree by the middle classes, even as those classes themselves were subjected to and changed by the force of the music, its rhythms that spoke of class struggle and indeed of the African roots of the island people. Music in this way is one of the most powerful means of bridging social differences and creating the new national consciousnesses that emerged throughout the 20th century. This new national feeling occurred in the ears, out of the sounds that became part of the way that people related to each other and to the nation. Music was in fact just part of the sonic culture of the captive people and their descendants, which extends to sounds of language, work, revolt, war and indeed the silences that were often means of resisting the complete control of the whites. Just as in the United States, the plantations were sites of an ongoing battles between the visually oriented culture and power of the whites and the sonic interruptions and defiance of the African and Creole people.Footnote 1 Following slavery and later, as independent Caribbean nations emerged, the relation between sound and subjectivity remained crucial, even as technological changes brought new sounds and new musical forms.
In this regard, the key role of radio in these processes is perhaps overlooked in the volume. Indeed, radio is vital to the development of Caribbean music – it is well known that musicians and fans would listen to American radio stations in the 1950s and that the influence of R'n’B, soul, and even country music is felt in many island music forms. Also, radio is crucial to the evolution of diasporic musical forms, such as salsa music, which is described in this volume by Frances Aparicio as a genre imbued with ‘social, racial, ethnic, and gender meanings’ that was a vehicle for the ‘oppositional yet contradictory politics in Puerto Rican New York in the 1960s and 1970s’, and which has a long history of ‘transnational circulation from New York into Latin America’ (p. 37). Again, as is the case with son, the evolution of salsa has served to challenge ‘the racist gestures of erasure’ that accompanied the early history of the genre (p. 37).
A strength of the volume is that it gives due attention to forms that are relatively understudied (at least in Anglophone academia), such as the bachata music of the Dominican Republic, a genre that originates in rural areas but which travels with the diaspora into urban contexts, and as such undergoes changes in its relation to space and identity. Similarly, there is a chapter on Kokomakuku, a stick-fighting game rooted in the history of slavery in Curaçao, and one on Tambú parties in the Netherlands. Both these chapters are provided by the editor, who indeed is author or co-author of six of the 15 chapters (including the Introduction and Conclusion).
On the other hand, some of the dominant genres of Caribbean music are perhaps underserved by the volume – the commercial powerhouses of reggae, reggaeton, calypso and soca, not to mention sub-genres such as dancehall and chutney, receive relatively little attention. No single volume can however hope to incorporate fully the diverse, evolving musical forms of the Caribbean and its diaspora, and the dominant forms have received extensive scholarly attention already. The fundamental worth of this collection is that it presents fine scholarship on genres such as those mentioned, in addition to rara, merengue, gwoka and Big Drum, so that students and readers gain a sense of the ways in which music continues to play a dynamic role in Caribbean societies, in the region and abroad. In each case, readers and listeners can hear echoes of the past, something of the rich, defiant culture of sound that has always served to contest racism and colonialism, and that stands as a sonorous marker of survival and connectedness.
