Governing Sound
The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics
Governing Sound
The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics
Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad’s national identity. When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the great Trinidadian musician Roaring Lion where he was from, Lion famously replied “the land of calypso.” But in a nation as diverse as Trinidad, why is it that calypso has emerged as the emblematic music?
In Governing Sound, Jocelyne Guilbault examines the conditions that have enabled calypso to be valorized, contested, and targeted as a field of cultural politics in Trinidad. The prominence of calypso, Guilbault argues, is uniquely enmeshed in projects of governing and in competing imaginations of nation, race, and diaspora. During the colonial regime, the period of national independence, and recent decades of neoliberal transformation, calypso and its musical offshoots have enabled new cultural formations while simultaneously excluding specific social expressions, political articulations, and artistic traditions. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work, Guilbault maps the musical journeys of Trinidad’s most prominent musicians and arrangers and explains the distinct ways their musical sensibilities became audibly entangled with modes of governing, audience demands, and market incentives.
Generously illustrated and complete with an accompanying CD, Governing Sound constitutes the most comprehensive study to date of Trinidad’s carnival musics.
352 pages | 25 halftones, 8 musical examples, 1 compact disc | 6 x 9 | © 2007
Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Music: Ethnomusicology
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Calypso
1. Calypso’s Historical Entanglements
2. Governing the Conduct of Carnival and Calypso
3. Power, Practice, and Competitions
4. Calypsonians Onstage /
5. Independence, Innovation, and Authenticity
Part 2: Calypso’s Musical Offshoots
6. Post-independence, Proliferation, and Permissible Traditions
7. Soca, Nation, and Discrepant Diasporas
8. Cultural Entrepreneurship under Neoliberalism
Coda
References
Selected Discography
CD TRACK LIST
1. Sam Manning: “Lieutenant Julian” (1929), oratorical calypso (also called “Sans Humanité”)
2. Unknown singers: “We Goin’ to Cut the Wood” (1956), lavway at funeral wakes (bongo)
3. Machel Montano and Xtatik: “Daddy Axe” (1998), ragga soca
4. Brother Resistance: “Cyar Take Dat” (1996 version), rapso
5. Machel Montano and Xtatik: “You” (2005), soca
6. Machel Montano and Xtatik: “On the Road” (Brancker Version), Peter C. Lewis featuring Machel Montano (2003), soca
7. Rikki Jai: “ Sting She” (2001), chutney soca
8. Rikki Jai: “Hamareh Galeeyah” (2001), chutney version
9. Rikki Jai: “Hamareh Galeeyah” (2001), chutney soca version
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