Examines the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multiethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.
Examines the transplantation of the vocal romance from France to the Federalist U.S, focusing on romances by Eugène Guilbert (1758–1839) and Jean-Baptiste Renaud de Chateaudun (fl. 1795). The songs are described as both vehicles of nostalgia for the ancien régime and the French colony of Sainte-Domingue, and aspects of the new post-revolutionary reality. Both composers came from the Caribbean region and settled on the East Coast of the U.S.