About the talk
In her book Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that this speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity; women's bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy; and the material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial Independence.
Baker traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural and media-based resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica and Haiti—thus neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations, but also the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance. The archipelago and its speeds ultimately emerge as a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.
Jessica Swanston Baker is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in contemporary popular music of and in the Circum-Caribbean. Her research and critical interests include tempo and aesthetics, coloniality, decolonization, and race/gender and respectability. As a Caribbeanist, her work focuses on issues within Caribbean theory pertaining to small islands-nations such as representation and invisibility, vulnerability, and sovereignty. Her current ethnographic book project, The Aesthetics of Speed: Music and the Modern in St. Kitts and Nevis examines the relationship between tempo perception and gendered and raced legacies of colonization. Through historical and ethnographic analysis of polysemantic colloquialisms and music reception, she argues that colonial understandings of black femininity, and Enlightenment notions of musicianship frame local perceptions of wylers, a style of Kittitian-Nevisian popular music, as “too fast.” Her most recent article, “Black Like Me: Caribbean Tourism and the St. Kitts Music Festival,” takes up music tourism as a second area of research interest. This work centers on black diasporic travel between the United States and the Caribbean, and the performance and consumption of American soul music within the context of Caribbean music festivals.
Jessica holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.M. in vocal performance from Bucknell University. Jessica is assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. Prior to her appointment there, she was the a postdoctoral fellow in critical Caribbean studies at Rutgers University.
This event is made possible by the support of the Caribbean Studies Initiative of the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies and the Butler School's Center for American Music.