Pages: 1-17., Examines the songs of the insular Caribbean as a contribution to the oral literature of the Caribbean region, with particular reference to the songs and singers of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and to a lesser extent, Barbados. Among the artists discussed are Trinidad's African Queen of Song, Ella Andall, Dominica's Nascio Fontaine, and Carolyn Cooper's perspectives on the Jamaican dancehall and Kittitian legend King Ellie Matt, 'De Hardest Hard', who reigned supreme during the 1970s and 1980s. He influenced the late Daddy Friday, whose songs still receive significant airplay today. Trinidad's chutney soca songs speak to the presence of its East Indian singers while Jamaican sisters Tami Chynn and Tessanne Chin of Chinese, Cherokee, European, and African descent have become known, respectively, as pop and rock reggae singers.
Caribbean identity is informed by the condition of being islands and also by its sociopolitical conditions of colonialism, (e)migration, and pluralism. The uncertainty of not being grounded to the specificity of place is in conflict with generalized notions of nation and cultural identity. As people migrate, they create shifting identities following the process of addition and flux that has characterized the region. Cultural identity and migration are central issues in songs, which play a key role of lending continuity to culture and reconstructing symbols.
By reflecting on the intersections of race, nationality, and the body within the specificities of Black Seminole border culture and history, the essay problematizes Anne Anlin Cheng’s notion of racial melancholia, suggesting that self rejection might be a more strategic move than Cheng acknowledges it to be. In the end, the author coins the term dialectical soundings and proposes that the singing of spirituals among the Black Seminoles in fact operates as such, rendering blackness visible in the context of the Mexican border essentialist racial discourse.
