24

Calypso and the Performance of Representational Politics

Susan Harewood

Any licit approach to questions about representation, in other words, must make available a shifting multifocal and mobile set of grids.

(Shohat, 1995, p. 176)

A critical question for many is, Where are the new Carnival musics leading? Or, to put it another way, what kinds of future might be envisioned through them?

(Guilbault, 2007, p. 276)

Calypso has been at the center of the modern Anglo-Caribbean nation-state. The calypsonian (i.e., the performer/writer of calypsos) played a key role in resisting imperialism in the pre-independence period and, in the post-independence period, calypsonians have been hailed for their ability to keep a check on the power of political elites. In fact, academic research on the calypso has told and retold a narrative that posits a direct link between representation in calypso and political representation in the parliamentary democracies of the Anglo-Caribbean. In this chapter I seek to examine this narrative. The chapter focuses on the intersection of representation in calypso performance, representation in calypso research, and representation in parliament. I highlight the ways in which a particular discourse of citizenship shapes the ways in which calypso is thought about and how the democratic project in the region is imagined through calypso performance. Thus I focus on the productive nature of calypso research, suggesting that calypso research emerges within and reinscribes a limited view of citizenship. The chapter makes a case for reimagining calypso's political significance by suggesting ways to reinvigorate the creative practices of calypso research.

I will begin with a review of the calypso research literature by examining the intersecting notions of representation that have surfaced in the work. Thus the chapter will briefly examine representation as presence, particularly in the early literature on calypso. In this earlier literature, scholars sought to articulate presence in order to challenge racist colonial ideologies. However, the main way in which representation emerges in the calypso literature, and which I focus on in this chapter, is representation as “standing in for” as both calypsonian and politician are described as standing in for or representing “the people.” Thus the chapter focuses on the work that is done by the heavy emphasis on “the political calypso,” and how the political calypso is defined in the literature plays a part in how citizenship and political participation have been imagined. Finally, the chapter will trace the possibilities of imagining a different political project within the region by returning to some of the creative research strategies used in calypso research, by drawing upon research strategies that are missing from the literature, and by examining the challenge posed by new carnival music styles.

Calypso Research: Histories, Intellectuals, and “The People”

Calypso is a popular music genre that emerged in nineteenth-century Trinidad. Indeed, Trinidad is recognized as the center of the calypso world, though calypso is in many ways a transnational music because of the number of influences that came together in Trinidad to give rise to this rich art form. It is also transnational because other Caribbean territories have developed their own, though often related, creative calypso music traditions. And finally, it is transnational because it is an important part of the cultural life of Caribbean diasporic communities. Calypso is a music form most closely linked to the pre-Lenten carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. However, though calypso remains linked to carnival, the very engine room of the festival, the number of carnivals that have arisen through the Caribbean and the diaspora have meant that there is a significantly longer period in which calypsos can be created, performed, and heard around the world. Calypso is a music of praise and celebration, blame and castigation, joke and wit. It is a dance music, a music that should be listened to very carefully to catch the play on words and coded messages, and a music that should be sung along to. It is known for its incisive critique as well as its parodic laughter aimed at the social and political foibles of members of society from those with the highest status to the lowest status. It is, in fact, possible to identify myriad ways in which calypso operates within the Caribbean and, though the research on calypso seeks to highlight that breadth, there are a number of key themes that consistently emerge, two of the most important of which I explore below. First, I examine the research that focuses on the history of calypso, which is often linked to important discussions of musical, national, and racial authenticity. Second, I examine the research on the political calypso and the ways in which it links the music to parliamentary representation.

Constructing Histories

The foundational academic work on calypso was conducted by scholars from anthropology, ethnomusicology, folklore, and literature rather than media studies. Many of these writers had differing, though related, objectives. Deborah Thomas and Karla Slocum (2008) provide a valuable examination of the position of the Caribbean in anthropological research. They examine some of the “master symbols” that have guided anthropological examinations of social change in the region. When we examine the foundational calypso research, it is possible to recognize that two of the master symbols identified by Thomas and Slocum – cultural retention and cultural stripping or deficiency – have been important to the ways in which calypso has been examined. Thus, much of the early work seeks to write against the colonial archive and its effort to produce a Caribbean defined by deficiency.

Some of the earliest writing seeks to establish the origins for the actual word “calypso.” For example, Daniel Crowley (1959) outlines eight origination narratives, some serious, some amusing, that suggest how the word calypso might have been derived. These origination narratives include the theory that calypso might have been derived from kaiso, an African word meaning bravo; carrousseaux, a word derived from the old French term for a drinking party; caliso, a Spanish word meaning peon; carrizo, a Latin American word meaning reed and also used for bravo; and carieto, a Carib word for a joyous healing or courting song. Different elements of this list are replicated across the calypso literature. Errol Hill (1967, 1972) investigates Crowley's eight narratives and finds most of them “highly improbable.” Hill ultimately is persuaded by his research that Crowley's first narrative is the correct one, that is, that calypso derives from the African, specifically Hausa, word kaico or kaito, which became kaiso. (This word is still used today to signal a song well sung, to refer to the calypso music genre, and especially to refer to particularly excellent calypsos.)

As I have suggested, these origination narratives, or related ones, are replicated across the literature, and often in their recounting the emphasis is placed on how these narratives highlight the multicultural nature of Trinidad. For example, Crowley draws attention to the racial diversity in Trinidad and then states that “nearly every national and racial group [in Trinidad] has its own theory of origin for calypso, both the word and the institution” (Crowley, 1959, p. 59). The diversity of Trinidad's ethnic and racial makeup is the starting point for many of the texts and seems to be used for two important purposes. On the one hand, the emphasis on the multicultural nature of Trinidad seems to provide some evidence as to why Trinidad, and not one of the other Caribbean territories, is the home and originator of calypso. Thus, some of the writers challenge not only those who try to suggest that calypso emerged from one of the other islands, but also those who wish to suggest that calypso was a Tin Pan Alley invention. The calypso craze in the United States in the 1950s seemed to have prompted some murkiness over calypso's origins. Thus the early research challenges this murkiness, and differentiates between the novelty songs made for profit in the United States and the true calypsos of Trinidad. This is, perhaps, interesting because the question of authenticity in the face of commercial pressures has arisen in the contemporary period.

Another reason for the emphasis on multiculturalism that emerges from the literature is that the emphasis sought to challenge the scholarship, which argued that the ethnic diversity of the Caribbean colonies meant they could never attain the type of unity that would make them successful societies and successful nation-states. Thus, in some ways the emphasis on difference within unity is an argument for the possibilities of self-government. This can be seen, for example, in Elder's work. His article “Color, Music, and Conflict” (1964) is illustrative of a nationalist narrative that argues that, despite diversity, national unity is possible:

This quotation locates Elder's work within the national independence project (Trinidad and Tobago gained independence in 1962). He presents his cast of characters – from colonial governors to Amazonians – to indicate the race, class, and gender difference that he sees as now being united under the sign of the nation.

Nevertheless, despite the emphasis on the multicultural influences on calypso, the main thrust in the literature is in identifying the calypso as an African-derived cultural practice. There was some initial debate on this issue that is, perhaps, illustrative of the struggles over the conceptual boundaries of national identity in the Anglophone Caribbean. In his history of calypso, Raphael “Roaring Lion” De Leon (1980–1988) emphatically states that the calypso originated in France and that those who suggest that it originated in Africa are not only wrong, but are also perpetuating a damaging falsehood. De Leon states that documentary evidence demonstrates that the calypso was invented in 1295 in France by Guillaume de Machaut. He suggests that the French ballade has the same musical structure as the calypso and that the ballade was exported from France to a number of countries. In the processes of exportation, the name of the ballade changed and in Trinidad and Tobago this ballade was renamed the calypso. De Leon (1980–1988) suggests that the ballade/calypso came to Trinidad and Tobago via French planters who came to the island from Martinique. De Leon is not the only one to suggest that the calypso is not African. Peter Manuel (2006) stated that the calypsos of the 1930s “were essentially English in character,” though he provides no clear reason for this conclusion. Perhaps the contentious nature of this idea of a European source for calypso is suggested by the story that in 1859, the American William Moore stated that the calypso was simply a Trinidadian version of the British and US ballad; a crowd gathered outside of his hotel and the calypsonian Surisma the Carib ridiculed Moore's conclusions in song (Brown, 1990; Crowley, 1959).

By contrast, other scholars such as Errol Hill (1972), Raymond “Attila” Quevedo (1983), Trevor Marshall (1986), Gordon Rohlehr (1990), Keith Warner (1982), and Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool (1998) draw a direct genealogy of the calypso from African music forms. Like De Leon, Hill, Quevedo, Rohlehr, and Warner stress the importance of the arrival of immigrants from Martinique and Haiti; however, these writers suggest that it was the African slaves that arrived with the planters who brought the calypso to Trinidad and Tobago as well as Africans freed from slave ships.¹ For example, Rohlehr (1990) starts his richly comprehensive text by suggesting that “one possible approach to writing a history of the calypso in Trinidad would be to identify its West African roots and then to trace what happened to that oral tradition in colonial Trinidad” (Rohlehr, 1990, p. 1). He links this approach to the work of anthropologists such as Melville Herskovits. This is an important link as it contextualizes the research within the discourse of African cultural retentions and thus illuminates some of the issues to which calypso researchers are speaking.

The research on calypso was emerging in a period in which the presence of intellectuals of the formerly colonized territories was transforming the production of knowledge within certain parts of the academy and beyond it (see, e.g., Gershenhorn, 2009; Schwarz, 2003). This transnational movement of bodies, ideas, and activism meant that spaces were opening where scholars could challenge the standard racist tropes about inferiority of colonized subjects.

For example, Melville Herskovits was influenced by these changes. According to Kate Ramsey, Herskovits' interaction with African American scholars/artists convinced him of the continuity of African cultural forms. He believed that the exploration of these continuities would “instill greater self esteem and pride among peoples of African descent by culturally validating their connection to an ancestral past” (Ramsey, 2000, p. 199). Not only is it possible to see a link between Herskovits and Rohlehr, but it is also possible to see links between Herskovits and Jacob Elder, whose work has been fundamentally important to calypso music research. Elder collaborated with Alan Lomax, who studied under Herskovits; in his PhD dissertation, Elder uses a scale developed by Herskovits to indicate the level of “Africanness” in Trinidadian music and religions. Using the scale, Trinidad got a “B” for quite African whilst Brazil got an “A” for very African. Using Alan Lomax's method of cantometrics Elder set out to measure change and how much “Africanness” still remained in Trinidadian music forms. He based his work on the calypso, but was interested in being able to draw conclusions about the breadth of Trinidadian music practices. Elder (1964, 1966, 1969) was especially interested in African survivals. In his dissertation he identified his research interests in the following manner:

Note that in this statement Elder immediately takes as a given that which colonial scholarship refused to recognize – the value and complexity of Black cultural practices. He thus challenges the colonial deficiency caricature. His work was a direct engagement with an issue that was controversial at the time – whether Caribbean people of African descent and African Americans had retained, despite the ravages of slavery and imperialism, any cultural connection to Africa. He based his work on the calypso, but was interested in being able to draw conclusions about the breadth of Trinidadian music practices. He would go on to write about the broadest range of Trinidadian cultural practices, and became part of Trinidad and Tobago's post-independence government as Minister of Culture and Education for Tobago as well as consultant to the Ministry of Youth Sport Culture and Creative Arts for the government of Trinidad and Tobago.

These histories are important in a variety of ways. First, we recognize that the histories provide an answer, or answers, to the question of where this cultural practice came from. In doing so, the absence of or racist representation of people of African descent in colonial scholarship is met with presence – not only in the histories that write Black people into history, but also the scholars themselves whose presence in the academy poses new questions. Certainly, these were questions that some would steadfastly ignore but the questions are posed nevertheless.

Second, the histories are part of the processes of building a national imaginary. Intellectual work on nationalism has identified the importance of making traditions and originary myths to the production of national identities (see, e.g., Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983). Though the origins of European nations might be set in the ancient past, colonial settler states like those of the Caribbean often bypass the originary myths of the indigenous peoples and negotiate a more recent narrative linked to the time of European “discovery.” However, constitutional independence for these states requires a rethinking of the colonial narrative of origins, and calypso research has been important to the renarrativization of national origins. What William Green says about Caribbean history in general is true of calypso histories too. Green states that the creolization of Caribbean history has resulted in an emphasis on laboring-class resistance and the generation of “new national heroes whose historic exploits are thought to affirm creole traditions and express the legitimate aspirations of island peoples” (Green, 1993, p. 28). This scholarship, therefore, was part of what Hall (1994) called “imaginative rediscovery” or what Shohat (1995) called “compensatory origanism.” Both Hall and Shohat recognize these acts of constructing roots as vitally important. Though Hall ultimately highlights the problems with discovering original, essential identities in an unproblematized past, he still stresses that such historical excavation “continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of representation amongst hitherto marginalized peoples” (Hall, 1994, p. 393).

The third way that these histories are important is the way in which they can draw our attention to the imaginative work of scholarship. Note that Hall makes reference to “imaginative rediscovery” and the “creative force” of these histories. These renarrativizations are creative or imaginative intellectual acts. In order for the calypso scholars to write the work that they did, they had to read against the colonial archive and write against the colonial archive. For example, in “The Calypsonian as Artist: Freedom and Responsibility,” Rohlehr (2001b) reads the history of calypso through the ordinances passed against calypso. The histories also had to seek out alternative informants and sources of knowledge. In this the calypso became both the object and subject of the studies as the calypso has been used as a valuable historical document in itself. Thus, Keith Warner lauds the calypso as a historical document: “One can follow the varying faces of Trinidad's social and political history through a careful analysis of many of the calypsos composed over the years” (Warner, 1982 – p. 59). Similarly, Cynthia Mahabir (1996) describes the calypso as “the subordinate class's transcript of important events in Trinidadian society” (p. 60). The writers argue, then, that in calypsos we can read the political history of a people. This perspective serves as an intellectual framework for work such as Louis Regis' The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago 1962–1987 (1999). He uses his survey of Trinidadian calypsos from 1962 to 1987 (together with some foundational discussion of the 1956–1963 period) to examine the political history of Trinidad and Tobago.

Like Hall, I must ultimately be skeptical of fixed historical narratives as a source for unproblematic essential identities. Nevertheless, the creative impulse in research seems to me to be something that we need to retain at this time. The ability to read against the grain of the colonial archive and seek out alternative sources to those legitimated by colonialism are research strategies which, I will suggest later in this chapter, must be reinvigorated in this postcolonial period.

The Political Calypso: Intellectuals and “The People”

There is a broad range of calypso topics and forms. Nevertheless, the political calypso tends to receive the most attention in the literature and in media commentary. Gordon Rohlehr defines the political calypso in the following terms:

He states that it emerged at the same time as the rise of adult suffrage and the trade union movement. Thus, the political calypso is presented as an important part of the processes that led to and characterized the new democratic Caribbean state. Rohlehr further points out that the response from the colonial administration to this political ferment, including the politico-aesthetic art form of the calypso, was predictably draconian and included “sedition bills, armed occupation, and the censorship of books, pamphlets and calypso records and performances” (Rohlehr, 1985, p. 2). Thus the political calypso is closely tied to modern democracy in the Caribbean. In fact, Frank Manning probably makes the most unequivocal connection between the democratic enfranchisement and the calypso:

Generally, the writing on calypso has delineated a three-way relationship between the politicians, the calypsonians, and the audience. In this relationship the audience is equated with the electorate and the calypso is said to faithfully reflect the reality facing Caribbean citizens. This leads to a position in which the calypsonian is said to stand in for the citizens, representing their interests to the political directorate. This, then, is the symbolic work performed by much calypso research – it is the representation of calypso that serves to legitimize a particular style of representational government. However, I would argue that this legitimization of the parliamentary system and the authority of the calypsonian and politician, though progressive in some ways, comes at the expense of the voice of the electorate.

In some ways it is possible to recognize the calypso research as depicting calypso as the ideal liberal democratic space of deliberation and opinion formation. Two interrelated tropes that are consistently used within the research focus on the political calypso as a type of public sphere. These are the description of the calypso as the “poor man's newspaper” and the calypsonian as the “voice of the people.” Both phrases seek to define the calypso as an accurate archive of public events and the calypsonian as both recorder of those events and faithful representative of his audience. The phrase “the poor man's newspaper,” or variants of it, can be found in a number of works on calypso. Quevedo (1983) suggests that calypso was identified as the “living newspaper” by the US magazine Time in 1949. Since that time the phrase has been used to emphasize the calypsonian as a monitor of social political events, as taking on the watchdog function of the press. Thus Gordon Rohlehr, who evinces a broad and multifaceted range of roles for the calypsonian in the rich body of his work, identifies the calypsonian as, among other things, an investigative reporter of local events in his “Man Talking to Man” article (Rohlehr, 1985) and a guardian of freedom of expression in both that article and in “‘We Getting the Kaiso We Deserve’” (1998). Similarly, the idea of the calypsonian as the “voice of the people” is also replicated across the literature and seems to perform similar work; that is, it portrays the calypso and the calypsonian as mirrors that simply reflect the will of the audience/electorate. The “voice” trope appears in a variety of ways. John Patton (1994), for example, writes of the calypsonian as a seer. Frank Manning (1990), quoting calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow, describes the calypsonian as “the mouthpiece of the underprivileged.” C. L. R. James, again with specific reference to Sparrow, describes him as vox populi and suggests that Sparrow “faithfully reports public sentiment” (James, 1973, p. 376). Therefore, these writers suggest that the experiences of the underprivileged and the artistic expression of the calypsonians are the same. In fact, Warner, drawing from C. L. R. James and Selwyn Ryan, reinforces the idea of the “fidelity of the calypsonian as indicator of contemporary public opinion” (Warner, 1982, p. 70).

To hear the calypsonian, then it would seem, is to hear “the people” through the offices and creative talent of their own intellectual. Accordingly Christine Ho (2008) refers to the calypsonian as an organic intellectual, and certainly the Gramscian concept that these calypsonian-intellectuals emerge from the working classes and assist in the consciousness raising of the workers runs through descriptions of the calypsonians in the literature. For example, in Regis' (2007) monograph about Black Stalin, a quote from the calypsonian seems to emphasize his own sense that his intellectual labor emerges from his connection his community.

This is a role that Gordon Rohlehr (2001b) also sees Stalin performing. Yet Rohlehr, who as I have suggested before tends to see the complexity of the different roles that the calypsonian occupies, also draws attention to the vanguard intellectual persona of calypso. Thus he contrasts Stalin's knowledge, which he sees as emerging from the class struggle, with that of The Mighty Chalkdust, former teacher, author, university professor, and a leading scholar of calypso and carnival. In any case, though much of the literature seems drawn to the idea of the calypsonian as an organic intellectual, in many ways it is the vanguard intellectual who actually takes form in the methodologies used in the literature.

A comparison of two chapters can make this point quite clearly. In Keith Warner's chapter “Social and Political Commentary in Calypso” from his book Kaiso! The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature (1982) and in Louis Regis' chapter “The Calypso and Politics 1956–1962” from his book The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago 1962–1987 (1999), one can witness the suturing of calypso and electoral politics quite clearly. One can also see that, although the idea of vox populi is definitely present, the actual voices and interests of “the people” disappear quite quickly. I have selected these two chapters because the information that they present is replicated at different points within the literature and, therefore, forms an important part of the way that the political calypso is perceived.

The structure and method of both chapters is very similar. Both scholars trace moments in Trinidad's political history from the rise of the People's National Movement (PNM), led by Dr. Eric Williams, in 1956 through to independence in 1962 and a little beyond it. Both chapters highlight the contributions that The Mighty Sparrow made to Williams' political fortunes. Sparrow and Williams are presented as the heroes of this period in Trinidad and Tobago' spolitical life. Williams is presented as the hero pushing through policies that create the modern, independent, self-confident nation-state. Sparrow is presented both as Williams' heroic cheerleader – indeed, a major plank of PNM public relations – and as a mirror for public sentiment. The chapters are not formulaic; nevertheless it is possible to see some similarity in the way the analysis is presented: a key political moment in the history of the nation-state is presented, the calypsonians' lyrical interpretation of that political moment is then presented, and finally, conclusions about the audience's agreement with that interpretation are made from the same lyrics. This is problematic as one cannot read audience reactions from content; the meaning-making processes of the active audience are complex and largely unpredictable.

The substitution of the scholar's interpretation for that of the audience that we find at this point in Warner's and Regis' work is seen at other points within the calypso literature. For example, it is particularly clear at those moments in the literature when audience assessment of the value of a calypso is presented but discounted, often in favor of the writer's evaluation. This happens, perhaps most often, in the assessment of the new carnival music such as soca.² For example, Rohlehr (1998) contends that the audience is too ready to accept mediocrity and identifies some calypsos which, in his estimation, should have been popular but were not. Similarly, Regis suggests toward the end of his book that one of the major challenges facing the calypsonian is his increasingly “hedonistic” and “giddy” audience, who are “addicted to the anodyne of pop music” (Regis, 1999, p. 209). The audience's evaluation is, therefore, viewed with some skepticism. However, on the other hand, the politicians' assessments carry a little more weight. Both Warner and Regis, for example, use approval and appraisal from leading Caribbean and international anticolonial leaders C. L. R. James, Albert Gomes, and Eric Williams to affirm the political significance of the calypso.

Thus, by ventriloquizing the audience reactions by reading reactions from lyrics, and by substituting the politician's and the scholar's views for those of the audience/electorate, it would seem to me that the research is naturalizing a form of representational politics in which the electorate are, if not irrelevant, at least marginal. “The people” is a monolithic category, and the pertinent question to ask, then, is what work this concept of “the people” does. It gives the appearance of lending legitimacy to the political project articulated in the literature on the political calypso. Taken without reflection, the presence of “the people” in the public forum that connects the calypso stage to the parliament, and the articulation of their interests in calypso form, is the ideal of liberal democracy. However, as I have suggested above, the category of “the people” actually serves to erase citizens/the electorate/the audience from the spaces and practices of political discourse as imagined in the calypso literature. This is much of the terrain suggested by Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Can “the people” speak? No, and for many of the reasons Spivak discusses. “The people” can only exist as a category constructed in the literature and thus cannot speak, nor effectively be heard in this silenced position. “The people” suggests a clearly defined political community with congruent interests. However, this depiction hides not only the heterogeneity of identities and interests that comprise Trinidadian or Caribbean society, but also the ways in which this category relies on those colonial definitions of race and gender to which I made reference earlier. Thus, though “the people” seems almost progressive in its inclusivity (we are all people, aren't we?), its construction in the literature demonstrates the persistence of colonial racial and gender ordering.³ This ordering produces the borders of the category “the people” and reveals that there are very few residents of the Caribbean whose right to humanity/citizenship cannot be viewed with some suspicion.

Suspect and Invisible People

One way in which we might pay close attention to how the category of “the people” can inadvertently limit the ways in which active citizenship is imagined is by analyzing how the arrival of the US GIs in Trinidad in 1939 is represented in the literature. The United States established a base in Trinidad during World War II – a significant event in the narrative of both Trinidad's history and the history of calypso. The arrival and social impact of the GIs is presented over and over in the calypso literature. For the research that focuses mostly on the steelbands, the arrival of the GIs and the establishment of the oil refinery are mostly identified as the catalysts to the invention and development of the steelband. However, in the literature that more specifically focuses on calypso, the arrival of the GIs is described as having devastating effects on the gender, race, and sexual relations in the island. There are three main sets of characters in this story: the GIs, the women, and the calypsonians.

The GIs are identified as an invading force that, while bringing jobs, money, and an audience for calypsonians, is also seen as a catalyst for moral decay in the island as the numbers of brothels, prostitutes, and nightclubs increased. Elder describes the difficult social conditions – industrialization, a widening gap between rich and poor, pressure on housing – and then states that “It was on these conditions that World War II descended, with the invasion of Trinidad in 1939 by the American service-man, his wealth, his power and his emphasis on success” (Elder, 1964, p. 134). As an invading force, then, the GI is identified as a threat to the nation.⁴

In the literature and in this sense of an invading army, women's bodies become the very symbol of the nation. Transnational and postcolonial feminist scholarship has explored and critiqued this issue time and again – the control of women's bodies becomes equated with the control of the nation-state, the contours of women's bodies and reproductive rights become inseparable from the control of the landscape and contours of the territory. The calypso literature consistently and uncritically makes use of women's bodies in these ways. Thus, for example, in Elder (1964), Hill (1972), Warner (1982), Moore (1999), Manuel (2006), and Ho (2008), women are identified as the site at which Caribbean men stake their claim to the nation in the face of the challenge from the US GIs. Ho, for example, writes, “In defense of Trinidadians, calypsonians sang about the fury of the common man whose woman, wife or sister had been stolen from him” (2008, p. 10). Thus women are presented merely as property that could be stolen from a calypsonian, who is then pushed to use his creative lyricism to defend Trinidadians – one might say Trinidadian citizens. I would argue that in this example women cannot be said to have full membership in the category “the people” as they exist merely as symbols of, not citizens of, the nation. This inability to attain full humanity presents itself throughout the research. The scholarship is faced with the challenge of what to do about the silences. Most of the calypsonians were/are male and the calypsos recount some male perspectives on women. Much of the literature highlights various aspects of what Elder called “The Male/Female Conflict in Calypso” (1968). Of course the researchers cannot rewrite the gendered thinking of calypsonians of the 1930s and 1950s; however, if the calypso's field of engagement is being taken as a model for the modern Caribbean state, then it seems to me that the writers who are making this argument must think carefully about what this means to the democratic project. To put it another way, might scholars who read against the grain in order to intervene in imperial discourses provide similar strategies for intervening in sexist discourses?

In many cases the matter remains unaddressed. Some of the writers continued to build on the idea of the calypso as an accurate record, and thus one or two seem to take the calypsos as indicative of the inherent perfidy, greed, and highly suggestible nature of Caribbean women. Thus Manuel states that when the GIs arrived in Trinidad, “calypsonians watched with dismay as local women forsook their company for that of the free spending GIs” (2006, p. 224). Most, however, looked to psychological and social reasons. For example, Elder drew on literature that suggested that Black males were psychologically damaged by being brought up in matrifocal families. He argues that the songs reflect the calypsonian's neurosis and that it is a reversal of the Oedipus complex that is likely to affect the “man-child” for the balance of his life. At some points, Warner's (1982) analysis takes the anti-female songs less seriously than Elder seems to. Thus he suggests that the number of calypsos that castigate women for being “unclean” or “ugly” are just examples of the calypsonian being “ungallant.” This seems to dismiss these songs, then, merely as examples of bad manners. Nevertheless, Warner does take up feminist author Merle Hodge's psychological reasons to explain the male/female interplay in calypso. Warner takes up Hodge's contention that Caribbean men were psychologically emasculated by slavery, the Crown Colony system, and the US invasion in the 1930s, and they therefore sought healing through the denigration of women.

It should be clear that these accounts pathologize Caribbean gender and sexual relations. The ideas of the greedy, over-heated Black woman of low morals and the emasculated yet hypersexualized Black male are part of the colonial archive of representations that seem here redeployed within the nationalist project. What we are seeing, then, is the persistence of the moral economy of colonialism. Despite the efforts in the literature to challenge the colonial discourses of deficiency, this dehumanizing narrative still makes its presence known. This is extended to non-Black Caribbean citizens as well, though not always in exactly the same way. Though Caribbean citizens of all racial heritages run the risk of being deemed excessive in their tropicalized sexuality, many are simply written out of the narrative altogether – made invisible, in other words. For example, Shalini Puri (1997) presents one of the few accounts of the US GI invasion that references Indian women specifically. Puri's article, in general, is a less celebratory account of the political calypso than some of the other texts to which I have referred. Her work deals with the production of nationalized racial hierarchies within the Trinidadian national imaginary and provides a strategic re-reading of Indian women's agency within these accounts.

It should also be clear that this pathologizing of the men and women of the Caribbean makes their right to full citizenship suspect. There has been an unbidden hierarchizing of citizenship at the heart of the calypso literature, and this points to a significant problem. I have been suggesting that not only does calypso have a part to play in representational politics in the Caribbean – this is a case made over and again in the literature – but also that the calypso literature itself is part of the way in which calypso comes to make meaning, especially within the politics of the region. The productive nature of these academic discourses can be traced in cultural policy decisions, calypso competition criteria, and in the public discussions about the meaning, purposes, and political significance of calypso (Guilbault, 2007; Harewood, 2008b). However, the limited access to full citizenship afforded in these discourses suggests that the democratic project is failing to deliver on its independence promises. This failure is the subject of a growing body of Caribbeanist literature, especially though not exclusively, on Jamaica. Thus, Holger Henke's chapter, “Freedom Ossified, Political Culture and the Public Use of History in Jamaica” (2003), which contends that the project of freedom within the Caribbean has been ossified into a set of narrow and anemic celebrations of independence, inspired a number of scholars to examine political culture in the region. Similarly, Percy Hintzen (2005) contends that the nationalist movement included “the people” but without permitting equal rights to citizenship. The working classes were still seen as immature, deficient, if you will. In much of the rest of his work Hintzen highlights not only the ways in which access to citizenship is classed, but also how it is racialized. Caribbean feminists have launched a consistent challenge to the masculinist construction of the Caribbean nation-state. So how might these critiques of the political culture in the region inform calypso research? What strategies, then, are available to challenge the persistent effects of the colonial moral economy, even as it has snuck into a literature that has not only sought a progressive response to domination in the region, but has, in many instances, been successful in its ability to challenge some forms of control?

Envisioning Futures: Performance and “Disreputable” Spaces

I would argue that the possibilities of calypso research contributing to the freedom project of the Caribbean lie in considering the ways in which calypso performance practices exceed the ways in which they are described and analyzed in calypso research. In my own scholarship I have attempted to do this by analyzing calypso and soca through performance, and by considering those calypso music practices that are less “reputable” than the political calypso. I would also like to suggest that possibilities in calypso research also lie in asking more consistently what it means to have a multicultural society in the Caribbean, and how this might inform our theoretical engagement with the popular resistive arts.

The bulk of research on the calypso analyzes the music genre through the examination of lyrics. There are some good reasons for this. The play of language in calypso is a significant part of both its appeal and its power. I have argued elsewhere that perhaps one of the reasons that calypso has fit so readily into the idea of “the poor man's newspaper” is because of its emphasis on words. However, I have also suggested that relying almost exclusively on the lyrical content of what is, after all, a music genre limits our attention to the multiple ways in which calypso makes meaning. Thus I have sought to locate calypso within the field of carnival masquerade (Harewood, 2005, 2007) and its attendant movement, flexibility, and polysemy. My work seeks to analyze calypso performances, certainly by acknowledging the importance of the lyrical content, but also by listening to the meaning making in the music and instrumentation and looking at the costuming, dance movement, props, and the spaces of performance. This not only opens one up to the multiple ways in which calypso makes meaning, but it also pushes one to acknowledge that all meanings, whether lyrical or otherwise, are not as stable as might first appear. This not only draws attention to the polysemy of the performance practices, but also permits me to concentrate on the complex chains of meaning at play in the lyrics too. In doing this, I seek to open the texts of performance up to more and more questions. This is a different pedagogy of scholarship, one that, rather than being built on certainty, is one built on the creative potential of inquiry. Such a focus can contribute not merely to the academic quest to discover, but also to the intellectual's quest to imagine.

The focus on performance also permits more effective engagement with the new music style, soca. In much of the literature, soca is cast as the profligate child of calypso and a direct contrast to the legitimate work that is done by the political calypso. Part of soca's “failure” is seen as its seeming rejection of the calypsonian's sophisticated word play. In contrast to the dismissal of soca, Jocelyne Guilbault asks what I think is an extremely important question, reproduced in one of this chapter's epigraphs. My research seeks to think through what is to be gained by examining the “disreputable” spaces of soca performance instead of keeping the focus on the reputable and legitimated styles of the political calypso. I ask what is the political work that is being done in these, in some ways marginalized, but in other ways extremely popular, spaces of performance.

One of the answers that emerges from the examination of soca and its relationship to the political calypso ideal is that these disreputable spaces are also the spaces for female and youth performances. Thus, dismissing these spaces also delegitimizes youth and female voices within the nation-state. It must be acknowledged that performances are not without their problems (though I have equally suggested that calypso performances are also problematic). Rohlehr's (1998) contention that soca performances often make women available for male consumption is right on the money. However, my examination of soca singer Alison Hinds' performance (Harewood, 2006) is not posed in the heroic, triumphant genre of the political calypso narrative. Rather, it seeks to examine the complex meaning-making strategies taking place in the new musics in the new spaces.⁵ How might we attend to different ways national identity is imagined in the performances of female performers and their fans? This is a key question, it seems to me, because of much of what I have outlined above – that only certain ways of imagining the nation have been legitimated in the dominant nationalist project. My work seeks to find ways to pay attention to the multifocal lenses through which nation and identity are performed.

In this section of the chapter I have paid some attention to the possibilities of the instability and multiplicity of meaning. I would also contend that the acknowledgment of this instability of meaning can lead to a reassessment of and return to one of the most important research strategies that has been used by calypso scholars – their willingness to read against the grain. Earlier in the chapter it was suggested that calypso scholars sought out alternative sources and strategically read the colonial archive. Given the problems outlined above, I believe that calypso scholarship can take up this strategy, this time reading across the grain of the dominant nationalist canon. For example, more critical engagement with the racial and gender hierarchies at play in calypso performance and within the calypso research can potentially lead to a reassessment of the ways in which the category of “the people” has managed to narrow the definition of citizen (Harewood, 2008a, 2010). Part of this critical engagement must take a long hard look at an even more fundamental question: What are the pros and cons of examining the popular arts when colonial history has often meant that there has been a racialized and gendered division of labor around the symbolic arts? Within my own work I have sought to address this by looking at what factors shape the spaces of performance. However, more work also needs to pay attention to identifying the impact of particular definitions of “popular” and “popular arts” within the racialized environment of the Caribbean.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have sought to examine the productive nature of calypso research. The chapter seeks to examine, therefore, representation of calypso within the calypso literature and how this links to representational politics. The chapter has examined key themes that have come to the fore in calypso literature – the uses made of history and the significant place that the political calypso plays within the literature. I have sought to suggest that the calypso literature is an important part of the way in which calypso is assigned value. The discourses articulated within calypso research are part of the way in which calypso makes meaning, and, because calypso is so closely tied to representational government within the region, we should acknowledge the narrow conceptualization of citizenship that is articulated in the scholarship as having material effect on democracy within the region. Certainly the notion of citizenship presented in the calypso literature does not exist there alone. In fact, what I am drawing attention to is a societal, commonsense understanding of narrowed citizenship, and that we as scholars can attend to this by paying close attention to the relationship between calypso literature, calypso performance, and parliamentary practice.

Nevertheless, I have also suggested that calypso and soca offer counter-discourses that can challenge the dominant nationalist narrative and the emphasis on limited citizen participation. It is the contention of this chapter that paying attention to alternative ways in which the nation and ideas of national unity are being imagined through calypso and soca requires research strategies that try to focus on calypso and soca's polysemy. Ultimately, my argument in this chapter has been one that has sought to think through the project of democracy within the Caribbean in part, as an imaginative project. Within this imaginative project the role of the academic is not only that of critic. The calypso scholar has always been engaged in a creative exercise. Thus the ability to read against the grain, to cultivate new sources of knowledge, and to demand visibility in the face of colonial erasure has played its part in the anti-imperialist work of the region. I would contend that these creative practices must be put to use in the ongoing project of freedom in the Caribbean.

NOTES

1 Britain ended its slave trade in 1807 and from that point on patrolled the area of the Triangular Trade in order to stop rogue slaving.

2 Soca music is a more contemporary style of carnival music that emerged from calypso in the 1970s. It tends to be marked by faster beats, recurring lyrics, digital music production techniques, and often fusions with other regional and international forms of music.

3 When I say “colonial” in this context I do not mean to suggest an unbroken line in which race and gender mean exactly the same thing today that they meant in the colonial period. Rather, I am seeking to highlight two things. First, the persistence of these forms of ordering – colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender – but also international economic structures that continue to shape the contemporary period. This highlights the second reason I am using the term colonial – to highlight the flexibility of these concepts. Although the world changes, global capital changes too and constantly redeploys hierarchies as a continually changing strategy of survival.

4 Of course Trinidad and Tobago was a colony at the time; nevertheless, the sense of national unity and the desire for national self-government were certainly stirring.

5 My work also focuses on Barbados and the Caribbean diaspora rather than on Trinidad and the Caribbean diaspora, which is the focus of the bulk of calypso literature.

REFERENCES

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London, UK: Verso.

Brown, E. D. (1990). Carnival, calypso, and steelband in Trinidad. The Black Perspective in Music, 18 (1/2), 81–100.

Crowley, D. (1959). Toward a definition of calypso (Part I). Ethnomusicology, 3(2), 57–66.

De Leon, R. (1980–1988). Calypso from France to Trinidad: 800 years of history. San Juan, Trinidad: General Printers.

Elder, J. D. (1964). Color, music, and conflict: A study of aggression in Trinidad with reference to the role of traditional music. Ethnomusicology, 8(2), 128–136.

Elder, J. D. (1966). Evolution of the traditional calypso of Trinidad and Tobago: A socio-historical analysis of song change. (Unpublished PhD dissertation.) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Elder, J. D. (1968). The male/female conflict in calypso. Caribbean Quarterly, 14(3), 23–40.

Elder, J. D. (1969). From congo drum to steelband: A socio-historical account of the emergence and evolution of the Trinidad steel orchestra. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies.

Gershenhorn, J. (2009). “Not an academic affair”: African American scholars and the development of African Studies programs in the United States, 1942–1960. Journal of African American History, 94(1), 44–66.

Green, W. (1993). The creolization of Caribbean history: The emancipation era and a critique of dialectical analysis. In H. Beckles & V. Shepherd (Eds.), Caribbean freedom: Economy and society from emancipation to the present: A student reader (pp. 28–41). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.

Guilbault, J. (2007). Governing sound: The cultural politics of Trinidad's carnival musics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, S. (1994). Cultural identity and diaspora. In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: A reader (pp. 392–403). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Harewood'S. (2005). Masquerade performance and the play of sexual identity in calypso. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 5(2), 189–205.

Harewood, S. (2006). Transnational soca performances and gendered re-narrations of Caribbean nationalisms. Social and Economic Studies, 55(1–2), 25–48.

Harewood, S. (2007). Masquerade as methodology . . . or why cultural studies should return to the Caribbean. In C. McCarthy, A. Durham, L. Engel, A. A. Filmer, M. D. Giardina, J. Logue, & M. Malagreca (Eds.), Globalizing cultural studies: Ethnographic interventions in theory, method, and policy (pp. 61–78). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Harewood, S. (2008a). Manning the borders: Blackness, nationalisms and popular culture. In C. Teasley & C. McCarthy (Eds.), Redirecting cultural studies: Transnational perspectives on popular culture and public policy in neoliberal times (pp. 39–54). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Harewood, S. (2008b). Policy and performance in the Caribbean. Popular Music, 27(2), 209–223.

Harewood, S. (2010). Tings brown! Nationalists, regionalists and tourists making claims on the state. Cultural Studies, 24(7), 214–233.

Henke, H. (2003). Freedom ossified, political culture and the public use of history in Jamaica. In H. Henke & F. Renfro (Eds.), Modern political culture in the Caribbean (pp. 111–140). Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

Hill, E. (1967). On the origin of the term calypso. Ethnomusicology, 11(3), 359–367.

Hill, E. (1972). The Trinidad carnival: Mandate for a national theatre. London, UK: New Beacon Books.

Hintzen, P. C. (2005). Nationalism and the invention of development: Modernity and the cultural politics of resistance. Social Economic Studies, 54(3), 66–96.

Ho, C. G. T. (2008). Popular culture and the aesthetization of politics: Hegemonic struggle and postcolonial nationalism in Trinidad carnival. Transforming Anthropology, 9(1), 3–18.

Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

James, C. L. R. (1973). The Mighty Sparrow. In D. Lowenthal & L. Comitas (Eds.), The aftermath of sovereignty: West Indian perspectives (pp. 373–381). New York, NY: Anchor.

Liverpool, H. (1998). Origins of rituals and customs in the Trinidad carnival: African or European. Drama Review, 42(3), 24–37.

Mahabir, C. (1996). Wit and popular music: The calypso and the blues. Popular Music, 15(1), 55–81.

Manning, F. E. (1990). Calypso as a medium of political communication. In S. H. Surlin & W. C. Soderlund, Mass media and the Caribbean (pp. 415–428). New York, NY: Gordon & Breach.

Manuel, P. L. (2006). Trinidad, calypso and carnival. In P. L. Manuel, with K. M. Bilby & M. D. Largey, Caribbean currents: Caribbean music from rumba to reggae (pp. 216–248). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Marshall, T. (1986). History and evolution of calypso in Barbados. Cave Hill, Barbados: University of the West Indies Press.

Moore, Z. (1999). Postcolonial influences in Spanish diaspora: Christian doctrine and the depiction of women in Tejano border songs and calypso. In C. McCarthy, G. Hudak S. Miklaucic, & P. Saukko (Eds.), Sound identities: Popular music and the cultural politics of education (pp. 215–235). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Patton, J. H. (1994). Communication and cultural identity through calypso and poetic discourse. ISER Bulletin of Eastern Caribbean Affairs, 19(3), 53–68.

Puri, S. (1997). Race, rape, and representation: Indo-Caribbean women and cultural nationalism. Cultural Critique, 36, 119–163.

Quevedo, R. (1983). Attila's kaiso: A short history of Trinidad calypso. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies Department of Extra Mural Studies.

Ramsey, K. (2000). Melville Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, and the politics of African diasporic, dance anthropology. In L. Doolittle & A. Flynn (Eds.), Dancing bodies, living histories (pp. 196–216). Banff, Alberta, Canada: Banff Centre Press.

Regis, L. (1999). The political calypso: True opposition in Trinidad and Tobago 1962–1987. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

Regis, L. (2007). Black Stalin: Kaisonian. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publications.

Rohlehr, G. (1985). “Man talking to man” calypso and social confrontation in Trinidad from 1970 to 1984. Caribbean Quarterly, 31(2), 1–13.

Rohlehr, G. (1990). Calypso and society in pre-independence Trinidad. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Author.

Rohlehr, G. (1998). “We getting the kaiso we deserve”: Calypso and the world music market. Drama Review, 42(3), 82–93.

Rohlehr, G. (2001a). A scuffling of islands: The dream and reality of Caribbean unity in poetry and song. In B. Meeks & F. Lindahl, New Caribbean thought (pp. 265–308). Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

Rohlehr, G. (2001b). The calypsonian as artist: Freedom and responsibility. Small Axe, 9(1), 1–26.

Schwarz, B. (Ed.). (2003). West Indian intellectuals in Britain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Shohat, E. (1995). The struggle over representation: Casting, coalitions, and the politics of identification. In R. De La Campa, E. A. Kaplan, & M. Sprinker (Eds.), Late imperial culture (pp. 166–178). London, UK: Verso.

Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Thomas, D., & Slocum, K. (2008). Caribbean studies, anthropology and US academic realignments. Souls, 10(2), 123–137.

Warner, K. Q. (1982). Kaiso! The Trinidad calypso: A study of the calypso as oral literature. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press.