Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance

Open Arts Journal

Recent critical attention to art of the Caribbean has sought to render obsolete an older and pervasive interest in trying to define what is 'Caribbean' about the region's art. Such attention has implied the limits of seeing the region as a bounded territorial entity, preferring to celebrate its transnational and diasporic character. Allegedly, the more familiar interconnections between art, identity and nationality have dissolved. Not without contradiction, however, such an emphasis on the need to transcend all boundaries of nation and language has seemed to trade on generalisations of the region's similarities among its many countries and territories, as well as with the wider diasporic community of Caribbean people elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Through a discussion of three contemporary Barbadian artists, this article argues that such notions of a borderless cultural zone are less open-ended than current criticism admits, and on occasion quite harmful. Drawing on the work of Leon Wainwright and Timothy Brennan (while differentiating between their contributions), Hadchity shows the complexities and contradictions of recent developments that have seen Caribbean artists of an ostensibly cosmopolitan disposition, enjoying access to metropolitan art spaces in the North Atlantic. The author examines the conditionality of this success and explains how certain artistic gestures may be received in different locations. In conclusion, Hadchity argues for a renewed interest in nation-based contextual art histories, as a premise for appreciating the significance of Caribbean art works before and after they make their way into the wider world.

David Publishing Company, 2021

In this study, I analyze Glissant's idea of the Caribbean society as an inclusive community that treats its members with equality and mutual respect. The literary analysis includes novels Brown Girl in the Ring (BGR) by Nalo Hopkinson, Les Affres d'un défi (The Throes of a Challenge) (AF) by Frankétienne, and L'Envers du décor (Behind the Scene) (ED) by Ernest Pépin. All three novels demonstrate how the enslaving western governments of the Black populations of the Caribbean, have dispossessed the Black people of their culture and identity and instilled a feeling of shame into them, and minimized them as zombies. Glissant, like the mentioned authors, raises the question of whether our modern governments still operate on the same principles. Ernest Pépin shows how modern tourists and settlers still envision the Caribbean islands as Christopher Columbus did for the Western world's profit only. Glissant proposes another form of world relations in the Caribbean, neither ontological nor one of political affiliation with France, but a rhizomatic relation with all the former communities of which the Caribbean peoples are composed.

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 2015

View Crossmark data represents by adorning her in elaborate outfits and costly jewelry. This story reflects migration during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). For Juncker, this doll is also representative of the migration of Afro-Caribbean women employed as domestic workers in twentieth-century New York (p. 109). My only criticism of Juncker's book is her omission of clients Carmen initiated. Despite this small omission, the book offers a fresh perspective on how Afro-Atlantic identities are forged and memorialized. Hence, this work is extremely critical to the emerging discipline of Afro-diasporic Art History.

Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2017

This essay examines how Caribbean artists have employed withdrawal in critical, insurgent ways. I confront several Caribbean projects developed in different chronologies and locations that have attempted to use withdrawal in order to challenge uneven institutional dynamics. The examples I discuss here – Cuban art dedicates itself to baseball (Havana, José A. Echevarría Stadium (Vedado), 1989), Silvano Lora’s Marginal Biennial (Santo Domingo, multiple locations, 1992), Joëlle Ferly’s L’Art de faire la grève (Martinique, Fondation Clément, 2009) and L’Artocarpe (Guadeloupe, ongoing) – problematize the role of artistic agency, the reach of the exhibition form and the influence of foreign expectations. Traditionally, Caribbean art has been subjected to a process of commodification and exoticization. Through the examination of those four practices, I will assert that an alternative genealogy of active, productive interventions concerned with staging emancipative spatial dynamics beyond representational constraints and objecthood can be found.

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2004

The Small Axe Project consists of this: to participate both in the renewal of practices of intellectual criticism in the Caribbean and in the expansion/revision of the horizons of such criticism. We acknowledge of course a tradition of social, political, and cultural criticism in and about the regional/diasporic Caribbean. We want to honor that tradition but also to argue with it, because in our view it is in and through such argument that a tradition renews itself, that it carries on its quarrel with the generations of itself: retaining/revising the boundaries of its identity, sustaining/altering the shape of its self-image, defending/resisting its conceptions of history and community. It seems to us that many of the conceptions that guided the formation of our Caribbean modernitiesconceptions of class, gender, nation, culture, race, for example, as well as conceptions of sovereignty, development, democracy, and so on-are in need of substantial rethinking. What we aim to do in our journal is to provide a forum for such rethinking. We aim to enable an informed and sustained debate about the present we inhabit, its political and cultural contours, its historical conditions and global context, and the critical languages in which change can be thought and alternatives reimagined.

Caribbean Intransit, 3(6) pp. 36–47. https://issuu.com/caribbeanintransit/docs/final_new_ci_issue_6_journal_jan_2022, 2022

This article offers a case study of an officially sponsored arts programme that culminated in two exhibitions staged in 2010 which sought to offer a cultural ‘exchange’ between the cities of Paramaribo (Suriname) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Discussion focuses on individual artists and works of art, in order to examine the significance of taste for understanding dynamics of power in the various forms of transnational geographical movement that the programme entailed. In recent decades, attention to processes of global change has occupied a central place in academic writing about contemporary art. While this scholarship has taken a largely progressive form, beyond the academy in the sphere of public art exhibitions, adoption of such conceptual vocabulary has often brought rather more mixed outcomes which this article explores critically.

Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol 3, edited by Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press: 2020), 2020

The intermixing of literary, oral and performance cultures has long been the bedrock of Caribbean writing. Through an analysis of contemporary writing by Anthony Joseph, Nalo Hopkinson, Monique Roffey, Marcia Douglas, Robert Antoni, Nicolás Guillén and Tanya Shirley, this essay demonstrates how contemporary Caribbean writing embraces popular culture to challenge Euro- and American-centric ideologies and destabilize the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal cultures. Popular culture in these texts challenges the writer to experiment with form, language and rhythm rooted in call-and-response, folklore traditions, and Caribbean musical forms such as reggae, calypso, dancehall, mento, zouk, bélé and Afro-Cuban drumming. Drawing from conceptualizations of Caribbean culture in the work of critics Gerard Aching, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Kevin Adonis Browne, Carolyn Cooper and Kwame Dawes, this essay demonstrates how the oral is always whispering below the surface of the written text as Caribbean authors permeate their writings with soundscapes of Caribbean languages and music. Importantly too, drawing from the rich cultural traditions of the region also becomes a means through which the poetic and literary become explicitly political. These writers fulfil Kamau Brathwaite’s celebrated call in ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’ for the Caribbean artist to draw from and acclaim their indigenous, local cultural forms and commu- nity; yet they also adapt and adopt popular culture with a critical eye, particularly in relation to the misogyny and sexism often performed within dancehall and carnival cultures.

Popular Music and Society, 2006

In this essay, I explore the possibility of a refashioning of the broader category of ''the popular,'' and further, of ''popular music,'' which, because of its obvious link to mass consumer culture, presents a challenge for any claims as to its transformative potential and capacity for resistance. This effort must follow the lead of various cultural theorists, who espouse something of an aesthetics of the popular, beyond, above, but also what we witness in contemporary pop and commercial artifacts, not only in terms of what's ''hot'' and what's not, but also in terms of the genres and artists themselves. This inevitably involves a peculiar paradox whereby we valorize, but also undermine, the popular. We embrace it, but also push its limits. To this end, I draw upon both Chris Cutler's taxonomy and criticism of the more traditional approaches to assessing the popular with respect to music and Jacques Attali's notion of ''composition'' to show how a reconstituted ''popular'' music is not only applicable to a broad understanding of music's situatedness, but can also have a significantly transformative social and political impact as well.

consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean, Tate , 2021

A paper given as part of "consent not to be a single being: Worlding Through the Caribbean" at the Tate—hosted in partnership with Worlding Public Cultures and the University of the Arts London Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN)—to compliment the Tate Britain’s exhibition "Life Between Islands: British - Caribbean Art 1950s – now." According to poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, the inaugural Carifesta—a 1972 gathering in Georgetown, Guyana, of hundreds of artists celebrating their multiple cultural heritages without precedent and without “foreign magistrates of taste or art”—was one of the most crucial events to have occurred in the region since Emancipation. A council of artists and writers envisioned the shape of the event and aimed to promote art standards based in myriad aesthetic traditions from, their report reads, the “multi-lingual Caribbean plantation culture.” This paper argues that Carifesta was envisaged as a process to redraw—for a mass, regional and diasporic audience—racialized cultural and architectural canons transplanted to and informed by the region during the reign of the colonial plantation. Through engaging contemporaneous theories by Sylvia Wynter and Brathwaite regarding the cultural lives of the enslaved and those of the New World Group and Tapia Group, the paper reads the council’s report as a call to “resurrect” unrecorded images and cultural production systemically omitted from stories of (Euro-)Caribbean aesthetics by those upholding what Wynter terms “plantation ideology.” By attending to the intertwined power of art and architecture, it makes a case that, at its start, Carifesta was a key technology to unmake a colonized Caribbean and build the region, together, anew.