| Summary: | "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 wylers. Baker argues that the speed of wylers 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. Wylers musicians and audiences form a historical and regional cohesion that offers an alternative model to the constrictive logics of development. Wylers 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 wylers. 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"--
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