Beyond translation into chaos: exploring language movement in the French Caribbean

As Edwin Gentzler’s latest book (2001) reveals, translation studies (as opposed to translating) is an area that is becoming increasingly relevant to both cultural and literary studies. Developing this point further, Sherry Simon states that, “Increasingly, translation and writing have become a particularly strong form of writing at a time when national cultures have themselves become diverse, inhabited by plurality”(Simon 1999: 72). Or indeed how “Symbolically, translation comes to be the very representation of the play of equivalence and difference in cultural interchange: translation permits communication without eliminating the grounds of specificity” (Simon 1992: 159). Therefore, particularly in postcolonial contexts, where the balance of power hinges on questions of language possession and linguistic insecurities, translation allows this power to be repositioned: it can establish a form of plurality by refusing to allow one language to dominate another. In recent works exploring the complex relationship between postcolonial environments and translation,1 these issues are examined in a worldwide context – writings from Quebec, North Africa, India constitute but a few examples. Yet, Simon also draws our attention to processes of translation that allow each language to maintain its own specific identity. In the French Caribbean, this becomes highly problematic because of the tensions between French – the official language – and Creole – the native spoken language.2 This article will explore the difficulties involved in establishing and maintaining this language specificity and will look at how, and if, French and Creole can ‘translate ’French Caribbean culture.

Rethinking the Historical Development of Caribbean Performance Culture from an Afro-Iberian Perspective

This article advocates for a new perspective on Caribbean performance traditions by adopting an Afro-Iberian perspective. It argues that we are able to acquire a better understanding of the historical development of some of the most enigmatic Caribbean performances, including Jankunu, by taking into consideration that many of those who built the foundations of Afro-Caribbean culture had already adopted cultural and religious elements rooted in Iberian traditions before their arrival in the Americas. A comparative analysis demonstrates a series of parallels between early witness accounts of Jankunu and Iberian calenda traditions. In order to explain this, the article points to Iberian dominance in the early-modern Atlantic and, in particular, Portuguese influences in Africa. It highlights the importance of confraternities and argues that it was in the context of African variants of these mutual-aid and burial societies that elements rooted in Iberian traditions entered Afro-Caribbean culture.

Culture, Subjectivity, and Music in Puerto Rico

Understanding human phenomena requires an in-depth analysis of the interconnectedness that arises from a particular culture and its history. Subjectivity as well as a collective subjectivity emerges from human productions such as language and art in a specific time and place. In this article, we explore the role of African-based popular music genres such as bomba and plena as ways of negotiating narratives about Puerto Rican society. Popular music encompasses diverse meanings. Puerto Rican folk music’s subjectivity provides narratives that distance Puerto Ricans from an individualistic cosmovision, allowing us to understand the social and political dimensions of this complex Caribbean culture. The events of the summer of 2019, which culminated in the ousting of governor Ricardo Rosselló from his position, illustrate how music can foster social change.

From Trinidad and Tobago to the World: Determining the role of Calypso in a new Era

Calypso is a popular Caribbean musical genre that originated in the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The genre was developed primarily by enslaved West Africans brought to the region via the transatlantic slave trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although West-African Kaiso music was a major influence, the genre has also been shaped by other African genres, and by Indian, British, French, and Spanish musical cultures. Emerging in the early twentieth century, Calypso became a tool of resistance by Afro-Caribbean working-class Trinbagonians. Calypso flourished in Trinidad due to a combination of factors—namely, the migration of Afro-Caribbean people from across the region in search of upward social mobility. These people sought to expose the injustices perpetrated by a foreign European and a domestic elite against labourers in industries such as petroleum extraction. The genre is heavily anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-elitist, and it advocated for regional integration. Although this did not occur immediately, Calypsonians sought to establish unity across the region regardless of race, nationality, and class through their songwriting and performing. Today, Calypso remains a unifying force and an important part of Caribbean culture. Considering Calypso's history and purpose, as well as its ever-changing creators and audiences, this essay will demonstrate that the goal of regional integration is not possible without cultural sovereignty.

Transatlantic Coloniality in 1940s Cuba

“Transatlantic Coloniality” focuses on the work of Wifredo Lam and Virgilio Piñera to explore the construction of a national Cuban cannon in the 40s. From the perspective of Transatlantic Studies, the development of Cuban arts illustrates the dynamic tensions between those seeking to build Cuban national arts emerging from a whitewashed colonial past and those cosmopolitans, such as Lam and Piñera, emphasizing popular and Afro-Caribbean culture. Colonial discourses were, in both cases, at the center of the struggle to establish and consolidate the Cuban arts. Absorbed and integrated in one case as a historical foundation, it was critically questioned by Lam and Piñera.

Familial Longings

In recent reinterpretations of the Caribbean dictatorial past, Caribbean American writers living in the United States challenge the Latin American dictator novel genre as a discursive tradition that reduces Caribbean culture to specific representations of power, oppression, and identity anchored in the political upheavals of the Cold War. This essay examines how the contemporary Caribbean writers Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, and Edwidge Danticat use familial dynamics to bring forth the multifaceted and complex realities of transnational communities, dispel ideas of cultural legitimacy based on exclusionary practices, disrupt everyday practices of cultural consumption, and empower Caribbean subjects to claim agency over their own stories and experiences.

The Brooklyn Steelband Movement

Chapter 5 chronicles the rise of steelbands on Eastern Parkway and the establishment of WIADCA’s Brooklyn Panorama steelband competition during the 1970s and 1980s. These bands were extensions of Trinidad’s steelband movement that afforded Brooklyn’s migrants, now far from home, the opportunity to re-experience their native culture. The uptick in post-1965 Caribbean migration to Brooklyn led to the influx of skilled steelband players, arrangers, and tuners with years of experience with the Trinidad bands. The transnational flow of steel pan players and musical practices was relatively unidirectional in the early years of Brooklyn Carnival, as Trinidadian musicians, arrangers, and tuners regularly visited Brooklyn and helped shape the emerging steelband scene. New York’s complex multiethnic political landscape served as a backdrop for WIADCA’s struggle to deploy various Carnival expressions, particularly steelband and calypso music, in hopes of uniting Brooklyn’s diverse island populations under a single pan-Caribbean banner, while also encouraging greater social integration of Caribbean culture into mainstream urban society.