The Department of Music is proud to share the release of Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis, the first published book by Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Jessica Swanston Baker.
In Island Time, 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. She 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.
Island Time can be purchased through The University of Chicago Press.
We invite you to join us in celebrating the release of Island Time on November 22nd at 3:00pm in Fulton Recital Hall. This event will feature Caribbean bites, music, a book raffle, and more. RSVP here.
Reviews of Island Time
"Theoretically sophisticated and written with a deeply engaging autoethnographic tone, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the (post)colonial dynamics and assumptions that animate defining discourses about small islands' musical aesthetics in the twenty-first century Caribbean. In a bold and welcome move, Baker critically rethinks what in the West and in former colonies has been typically conceived as polar opposites—big and small islands, slow and fast tempo, women's restrained and exuberant behaviors. In contrast, this book foregrounds the horizontal web of island relations, its forever ongoing transformation of conventions, and its sounding of familiarity and difference that produce the unmistakable feeling of Caribbeanness. An insightful and significant achievement!" —Jocelyne Guilbault, University of California, Berkeley
"Drawing on Caribbean philosophy and fine-grained ethnography, Island Time engages with the simultaneity of disjunct regimes of time—the hyperactive beat of wylers music and tourism's promise of languor, developmentalist accounts of backwardness and the hypermodernity of "fast" girls—and a reticulate cultural geography by which the Caribbean archipelago's multitudes are experienced in the small-island nation of St. Kitts-Nevis." —Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Boston University
"There is nothing small about the music that flows from the tiny Leeward islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. Nor can the implications of Jessica Swanston Baker's Island Time be easily overstated. With graceful pen and shrewd ear, Baker gather music scholars around a fresh preposition—from—showing just how much where matters in music." —Braxton D. Shelley, Yale University
About Jessica Swanston Baker
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 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 PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BM in Vocal Performance from Bucknell University. Prior to her faculty appointment at Chicago, Jessica was the 2015-16 postdoctoral fellow in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.