“Interrogating all the mythologies of the nation-state, authorship, individual and collective agency, Governing Sound is the first effort at bringing key concepts of Foucauldian thought to bear on an ethnomusicological topic. This book will be received as a milestone in ethnomusicology.”--Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin

Veit Erlmann

“Governing Sound is a brilliant and original work, a vivid, accessible, and engaging book about calypso music and the cultural politics of Trinidad-Tobago. Guilbault’s deft blend of interviews, observations, and analyses reveals how popular music serves as a sensitive register of historical change, as a crucible of new social identities and identifications, and as a vital repository of collective memory.”

George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark

“In David Rudder’s memorable lyrics, calypso can “make a politician cringe or turn a woman’s body to jelly.” Jocelyne Guilbault’s Governing Sound captures that full range of expressive potential—from social critique to party conviviality—in Trinbagonian calypso and its successors. But more importantly, Guilbault has delivered the first work to thoroughly assess the cultural politics of carnival, demonstrating brilliantly how calypso emerged as a contested emblem of the state and of postcolonial governance and how it struggles within the current neoliberal sonic environment.”

Gage Averill, University of Toronto

"Governing Sound stands as an incredibly rich work that successfully engages complex questions of music history, politics, gender, and culture."

Andrew G. Wood | The World of Music

"There is much to recommend in this important book. Guilbault carefully illustrates that calypso and its offshoots perform work in Trinidad and that their work – their sound – is disciplined, marshalled, and made meaningful through a network of governing technologies extending from the state to the individual artist, from arranger and entrepreneur to fans both in Trinidad and abroad. Her commitment consistently to identify the limits to the power of any individual regime and her ability to point out the ways that power is negotiated and/or consolidated in dialogue with other regimes of power combine to offer a crucially important contribution to the literature on calypso and Carnival. . . . Guilbault’s book will undoubtedly find a prominent place on the bookshelves of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and scholars working on Caribbean cultural formations."

Timothy Rommen | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"This absorbing, thoroughly researched and well-written volume is the most in-depth study of Trinidad’s carnival music forms to date. . . . . A thought-provoking and original study not only of calypso but also of other more recent Trinidadian carnival music forms . . . and their place at the centre of competing sets of demands from governing bodies, audiences and the market place. It is a valuable contribution to popular music studies that weill be of interest to any scholar concerned with the links between political behaviour, popular culture and the articulation of ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality."

Hazel Marsh | Popular Music