Globalization and Identity: The Discourse

of Popular Music in the Caribbean

CATHERINE DEN TANDT

Caribbean cultural studies has generally been slow to respond to the discourse of

globalization and to the challenges of globalization itself. In popular music stud-
ies, discussions of music and identity in the region tend to focus selectively on cer-
tain instances of mass consumption (for example, salsa, reggae, merengue, zouk)
and largely ignore the presence of mainstream pop. While certainly valuable, this
approach has become somewhat formulaic. Discussions of popular music in the

Caribbean focus on cultural resistance (agency/creativity) in these more appeal-

ing “local” genres to such an extent that we rarely get a sense of the actual inter-
play and importance of different levels of popular culture, especially of mass
popular culture. If the act of consumption remains key to an understanding of
contemporary culture and identity, we need to broaden the Ž eld of our analysis,
as well as our methods of analysis, and focus more on the act of consumption
itself, rather than continually replaying the “agency/creativity” debate in a

Caribbean context.

In March

1999

, a Canadian journalist and photographer visited Haiti to

report on the status of children in that country. W hen they visited the
“koko-rats” imprisoned in Fort National, a holding tank and jail for home-
less street children, a young boy sharing a small cell with

23

others called

out, “Are you Canadians? I like Céline Dion” (Goyette,

1999

). Most scholars

agree that the Caribbean region is in a state of symbolic and economic
crisis under conditions of radical globalization (Serbin,

1996

; Klak,

1997

;

Klak and Das,

1999

; Portes, Dore-Cabral and Landolt,

1997

). The koko-

rats, their extreme poverty and marginalization, as well as their engage-
ment with international pop star Céline Dion, dramatize the intensiŽ ed
nature of economic marginalization in the Caribbean today, while simul-
taneously marking the region’s participation in contemporary trans-
national capital and mass culture.

Economists, sociologists, and political scientists typically refer to the

challenges currently facing the Caribbean by citing economic restructuring,

the growing interdependence of world markets, the loss of traditional
exports, the need for marginal economies to insert themselves in a global
economy driven by international capitalism, the ensuing destabilization
of national political and social culture, the growth of poverty, and so on.
Although there is agreement as to the general characteristics of the current
crisis, academic discourse has not engaged conditions in the Caribbean,
brought on by all of the above, within the necessary coherent theoretical or
analytical framework(s). In other words, there is tremendous confusion
about globalization and its effects in the Caribbean, something Thomas
Klak and Raju Das point out in their review article of several publications
on Caribbean development:

Recent books on Caribbean political economy suggest that
conditions of underdevelopment characterize contemporary
scholarship as well as the Caribbean region itself. Recent works
tend to lack theoretical rigor and empirical substantiation for
their conceptual claims …This lack of incisiveness is both troub-
ling and ironic, given that most authors are either ardently or
implicitly supportive of the neoliberal transition for Caribbean
political economies …The region’s political economies are cur-
rently so problematic that it is hard for Caribbean scholars to
imagine an alternative to hegemonic neoliberalism and how
to move toward it. (

222

–

23

)

Klak and Das conclude their piece by suggesting that much work is
needed in order to assess “the theory and practice of Caribbean develop-
ment in the neoliberal era” (

223

).

Social scientists are not alone in their confusion. Cultural critics also

Ž nd themselves without an adequate critical or theoretical framework to
discuss and evaluate cultural production in the Caribbean under condi-
tions of globalization. Strategies that worked extremely well in the past –
postcolonial, poststructuralist, postmodern, neo-marxist, anti-colonial,
feminist, for example – do not respond so well to a cultural product that is
as much a link in a transnational chain of production and consumption as
an automobile assembled in Canada, the United States or Mexico with
parts manufactured in export processing zones (EPZs) in multiple mar-
ginalized economies throughout the world.

Caribbean literature, for example, is written less and less in the

Caribbean. Failing infrastructures, declining educational systems, lack of
funds and venues for publishing, and the migration of human talent all
make it far more viable to write and produce Caribbean literature in the

76

Catherine Den Tandt

metropolis. Although a number of its essential parts are Antillian, the text
is manufactured and marketed elsewhere and belongs to multiple spaces
at the same time. This is not the literature of “exile” that we associate
with Caribbean writers of the postcolonial era. Indeed, the generation
of Kamu Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant, and George
Lamming often lived and wrote away from their island homes. But their
literature could lay claim to a stable and holistic “home-space” – a con-
crete political project, juridical and cultural independence, and postcolo-
nial development associated with speciŽ c nation-states – that eludes much
(although certainly not all) of what we consider Caribbean literature
today.

Even the discourse of postmodernity, in many ways ideally suited to

describe the fragmentations and dislocations of Caribbean history and
development, can only partially help us to understand the intimate rela-
tions that exist between cultural production, capital, and global circuits
that deŽ ne contemporary Caribbean culture. Postmodern discussions of
Caribbean cultural identity have tended to stress discursive resistance,
play, subversion, pastiche, and hybridity. Such theoretical frameworks,
while they continue to be useful to describe the Caribbean on a number of
levels, cannot account for the primacy of consumer culture, the con
ation of culture, capital, and identity that marks contemporary life every-
where, including the Caribbean.

Cultural critics have been slower to respond to the challenges of glob-

alization in the Caribbean than their colleagues in the social sciences, who
at least articulate the notion of crisis and vulnerability. The very richness
of Caribbean culture in the postcolonial era allows cultural critics to avoid
this kind of discussion in favour of a literary reading, an analysis of carni-
val, of Caribbean music, of syncretism, of Afro-Caribbean cultural forms,
and other phenomena. There is so much to celebrate in Caribbean culture
that more difŽ cult questions are easily avoided or limited to precise local
contexts (as in critiques of the institutional manipulation of national cul-
ture in speciŽ c settings or con icts of gender and sexuality). Typically,
there is little dialogue between the social sciences and cultural criticism,
making it fairly easy for the latter to present, for example, readings of the
subversion inherent in cultural practices (music, carnival, poetry) while
the former traces the signs of socio-economic disintegration and political
crisis throughout the region. Certainly, it is difŽ cult to admit – and some-
times even to see – that Caribbean culture has become a complex mixture
of native and diasporic popular culture, of mass consumer culture and
folklore, traditional and commercialized, and that much of this culture is
produced outside the Caribbean and circulates back, in and out of the

Globalization and Identity

77

region, like any other globalized and highly volatile consumer product.
How can we begin to map cultural, regional, or national identities in the
context of globalization without falling back on stale paradigms and post-
colonial clichés that have little to do with the current crisis facing the
Caribbean?

The “Materiality of Everyday Life”

In his review of Swedish material cultural studies, Orvar Löfgren outlines
a series of propositions for the study of culture that I Ž nd very useful,
even though Sweden is signiŽ cantly distant from the Caribbean. He traces
the history of material cultural studies in Sweden from its early days as a
component of ethnology (i.e., the classifying and naming of objects of
everyday life) through the

1970

s, with its emphasis on culture as symbolic

production (using the tools of British social anthropology and American
qualitative sociology), to the

1980

s with its renewed interest in materiality,

speciŽ cally as the study of consumption (

95

–

98

). Löfgren points out that

in the

1980

s interdisciplinary academics began to study the ways in which

identities were expressed through consumption, introducing along the
way the new discipline of cultural studies (

98

).

The history of cultural studies is by now the stuff of anthologies (for

example, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler,

1992

; During,

1993

; Storey,

1994

). Nonetheless, Lögren’s review of the Swedish case points to one of

the great moves of mainstream cultural studies, that is, the consecration
of consumption as “cultural production,” and therefore of popular cul-
ture as a signiŽ cant locus of agency and resistance, of active creation as
opposed to passive acceptance and manipulation (

99

). According to this

scenario, consumers became political actors rather than automatons
“locked up in the iron cage held together by market forces” (

100

). This

debate has always been central to cultural studies, with earlier positions
on mass culture as mindless manipulation (for example, Theodor Adorno)
never completely giving way to the notion of consumption as creativity
(for example, John Fiske).

1

In his critical overview, Löfgren maintains that “cultural creativity above

all seems to belong to the underdogs of the modern world: consumers,
workers, women, teenagers, colonial and postcolonial subjects, and this is
where the concept is closely linked to ideas of counter-hegemony, to the

78

Catherine Den Tandt

1

John Storey’s anthology Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (

1994

) traces this debate

within cultural studies in “Part Seven: The Politics of the Popular” (

439

–

559

).

tactics of resistance in the world of mass consumption or in postcolonial
processes of globalization” (

101

). Consumption as creative action thus

becomes the privilege of the weak in a globalized world, whose acts of
resistance are traced by academics working in two streams: a “focus on cer-
tain Ž elds of research: shopping, fashion, interior decoration and media
use,” and a “perspective on objects as identity markers in relation to class,
ethnicity or generation” (

102

). In addition, practitioners of cultural studies

often concentrate on youth culture, on the playful use of consumer goods
and on consumption as fun and spectacle (

102

).

None of this is necessarily incorrect, says Löfgren, but as a grand narra-

tive it tends to overshadow the “more mundane or seemingly trivial aspects
of consumption” (

102

). Löfgren calls for more “blood and sweat” analysis

that asks the question: “What do people actually do with things?” (

103

).

Instead of focusing on the act of consumption as a symbol or as an icon,
we need to question how people “survive in this modern world of goods”
(

104

). In a world where “nationalization and internationalization are not

polarized developments but parallel and interdependent ones” (

109

), the

construction of identity lies in the “national framing of routines,” “how
you drink beer, order a Big Mac or what you put on your French fries”
(

106

). It is these routines, always played out against the backdrop of con-

temporary mass consumer culture, that “produce a feeling of being at
home, or the alienation of being abroad” (

106

). Mass consumption is a

“force of cultural nationalization” (

109

) and we need more ethnographies

of “everyday workings” to get a sense of identities constructed not only
through “the rhetoric of  ag-waving and public rituals, but also in the
national trajectories of commodities” (

106

).

Two key points emerge from Löfgren’s discussion. First, to reach an

understanding of contemporary cultural identities in the context of glob-
alization, cultural critics must engage with mass consumer culture, and
therefore with popular culture. Both have everything to do with building
and maintaining identities in our unstable world. Second, such a move to
address consumer culture and identity must sidestep longstanding debates
about agency and resistance (icons and symbols) and focus instead on the
observation of consumer practices themselves. We need to ask what citi-
zens are buying, using, enjoying, and how the accumulation of these
goods contributes to the construction of collective identities.

Popular Music and its Discourse

We might begin to make sense of Caribbean cultural practices cris-crossed
by global consumption by addressing the “materiality of everyday life”

Globalization and Identity

79

in the region. George Lipsitz, echoing Löfgren and others, notes: “As
transnational corporations create integrated global markets and the
nation state recedes as a source of identity and identiŽ cation, popular cul-
ture becomes an ever more important public sphere” (

5

). Lipsitz argues

further that popular music, as one component of mass consumer culture,
“speaks to currents of culture and politics emerging from fundamentally
new geopolitical and economic realities” (

5

). Lipsitz’s

1994

book,

Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place,

was a major contribution to popular music studies and the argument he
makes over and over again for the importance of popular music as a
marker of contemporary identity is fundamental:

Recorded music travels from place to place, transcending phys-
ical and temporal barriers. It alters our understanding of the
local and the immediate, making it possible for us to experience
close contact with cultures from far away. Yet precisely because
music travels, it also augments our appreciation of place. (

3

)

Lipsitz does not spend much time explaining why popular music travels so
well, as opposed to other cultural forms. Presumably, the answer is obvi-
ous. It is not so much that popular music travels while other cultural
commodity forms do not. Rather, recorded music travels faster than, say,
a book, a play, or even a movie, and is easier to pirate, reproduce and con-
sume. As a product of mass commercial culture, popular music is far
more accessible to audiences than a printed text or a live performance.

Lipsitz thus makes a strong argument for popular culture, and popular

music speciŽ cally, as a “mechanism of communication and education, as
a site for experimentation with cultural and social roles not yet possible
in politics” (

17

). Standing Ž rmly along one side of the agency/creativity

debate, he defends commercial culture as a legitimate site of identity for-
mation: “Concepts of cultural practice that privilege autonomous,
‘authentic,’ and non-commercial culture as the only path to emancipation
do not re ect adequately the complexities of culture and commerce in the
contemporary world” (

16

). However, his presentation is not a wholesale

endorsement of commercial culture. He wants Ž rst of all to locate com-
mercial popular music that intercedes in dominant discourses. At the same
time, he warns that commercial culture can “collapse boundaries and ren-
der historically speciŽ c cultural expressions little more than fashions to be
appropriated” (

11

). These are the “dangerous crossroads” of his title and

this balancing act, that is, locating resistance/empowerment in commer-
cialized popular music that shares the commodiŽ ed space of “circuits of

80

Catherine Den Tandt

investments and commerce” (

10

), underlies each chapter of the book.

Lipsitz’s examples are drawn from hip hop, rai, reggae, and “world music”
generally, including “ethnic” pop music in the United States (such as the
Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans, Chicano punk rock, Puerto Rican
music in New York), Québécois chansonniers, and Australian Indigenous
music. He also discusses various examples of Euro-American appropri-
ations of Third World music (Paul Simon, David Byrne).

In example after example, Lipsitz seeks out moments of empower-

ment and resistance. He argues that commercialized genres of music,
“Whatever role they serve in the proŽ t-making calculations of the music
industry …also serve as exemplars of post-colonial culture with direct rele-
vance to the rise of new social movements emerging in response to the
imperatives of global capital and its attendant austerity and oppression”
(

27

). According to Lipstiz, these “new social movements” are the space of

agency and creativity in the face of global capitalism. Marginalized cul-
tures, already “experts about displacement and the qualities needed to
combat it” (

7

), are most able to take advantage of the opportunities (for

activism, empowerment, etc.) offered in a world ruled by “ ‘fast capital’
and the equally rapid mobility of ideas, images, and people across national
boundaries” (

29

). Lipstiz remarks, for example, that “At a time when

African people have less power and fewer resources than at almost any
previous time in history, African culture has emerged as the single most
important subtext within world popular culture” (

36

).

For Lipsitz, “subaltern sensibilities” can be expressed through highly

commercialized genres of world music, in this case hip hop and other forms
of diasporic African music. His comment on the power and in uence of
diasporic African music reminds us of Löfgren’s observation that cultural
studies reserves creative action for “the underdogs of the modern world”
(

101

). Here Löfgren also adds that “There is often very little body work in

these discussions of cultural creativity” (

102

). Indeed, the breadth of Lipsitz’s

examples is impressive but the book never speciŽ es exactly what these “new
social movements” are or what they actually accomplish. This is an import-
ant point, precisely because of the increased economic and political fragility
of the marginalized spaces Lipsitz foregrounds. The “resistance” he traces is
always case-speciŽ c and remains highly discursive (as opposed to outright
political action by collectivities seeking widespread change).

Dangerous Crossroads is thus an example of one kind of approach to the

study of popular culture. The book celebrates the potential of commercial
culture but wants mostly to locate moments of resistance, empowerment,
and agency within commercial culture. The examples Lipsitz privileges are
drawn from the “margins,” for him a space ideally suited “to express a more

Globalization and Identity

81

general sense of cultural displacement engendered everywhere by mass
communications, population migrations, and the destructive effects of ‘fast
capital’ on traditional communities” (

30

). For him, popular music becomes a

very speciŽ c category of commercialized “local” music that moves from the
margins to the center: various kinds of “world music,” for example, reggae,
salsa, or chicano popular music. For Lipsitz, the category of popular music
does not include what we could vaguely call “generic pop” music moving

through the margins. In other words Lipsitz would happily talk about salsa
making its way to Amsterdam but not Céline Dion moving through Haiti.

This is an important distinction because popular music studies in the

Caribbean have tended to follow the Lipsitz model, that is, to locate resist-
ance and identity in some brand of commercially successful local music
form, for example, salsa, merengue, calypso, reggae, or zouk. These local
music forms are always already hybridized but they are often seen as rep-
resentative of the local space (or important to the creation of a local space)
in the Ž rst instance, and commercialized commodity forms in the second.
Studies of popular music in the Caribbean are typically highly sophisti-
cated, multi-valenced, and they often include at least one layer of internal-
ized critique. For example, Frances Aparicio’s

1998

monograph on salsa,

Listening to salsa. Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures,

explores salsa as a signiŽ er of Latino and Puerto Rican identities in the
United States and on the island while at the same time deconstructing gen-
der relations within the salsa music industry, in salsa performances and
song lyrics. Paul Austerlitz’s

1997

book on Dominican merengue traces the

importance of the music form for the construction of Dominican identity
while also paying close attention to its co-optation by dictator Rafael
Trujillo and his authoritarian regime. Nonetheless, cultural critics tend to
seek out these music forms in order to locate a contestatory presence
within them. For instance, Aparicio opens her preface with the following:
“This book originally emerged out of my desire to give personal and cul-
tural meaning to academic work, that is, out of a profound need to reclaim
the knowledge about Puerto Rican culture that had been denied to me
through a colonial education” (xi).

The other option available to critics, of course, is to trace the ways in

which these same local music forms have been inŽ ltrated by Western com-
mercial interests. This is the balancing act that deŽ nes Lipstiz’s narrative, as
I pointed out earlier. He comes out more strongly on the one (resistance)
side, but must always acknowledge that “other” possible reading. In an
essay on reggae, Mike Alleyne argues that Bob Marley was the Ž rst
Caribbean artist to receive large-scale Ž nancial backing from the Western
record industry, and that the promotion of his work established precedents

82

Catherine Den Tandt

for mass-market commodiŽ cation of Caribbean music (

92

–

93

). According

to Alleyne, this presence of Western capital transformed the Caribbean
musical text in order to make it more appealing to a Western rock audience
(

95

–

96

). For Alleyne, the history of reggae and its commercialization/

co-optation re ects a general pattern in the Caribbean where “Caribbean
people are being ‘remixed’ out of autonomous cultural representation on
the world stage, having creative exclamations defused and subsumed by a
simultaneously foregrounded and historically resonant Western hegemonic
agenda” (

101

). In his article, Alleyne takes on Paul Gilroy, who argues the

opposite tack, reading Bob Marley’s music as an example of “cross-cultural
outreach aimed especially at uniting the threads of the black diaspora” (

99

).

W hile discussions of popular music in the Caribbean tend to follow one

or the other of these two patterns, neither can successfully map processes
of identity-formation in the Caribbean under conditions of globalization.
If we take Löfgren seriously, in order to begin to understand the effects of
globalization on culture or to simply understand globalized cultures, we
neet to engage not only recognized “local” commercialized music forms
but also the circulation of popular music in general. George Lipsitz is cor-
rect when he argues that popular music is a key marker of identity, but we
need to engage the totality of music in circulation, not just the comforting
choices. At the same time, the debate between agency and co-optation has
become fairly formulaic; the same critical moves are repeated over and
over again, applied to different music forms but typically coming up on one
side or the other.

W hat are people buying and what are they doing with the things they

buy? W hile so much of the discourse surrounding globalization is con-
fused and contradictory, one thing remains clear: consumerism and iden-
tity are the key terms for cultural analysis today (as cultural studies has
always maintained) and all the more so in the context of globalization.
The key debates for cultural theorists revolve around consumerism and its
interaction with traditional categories of identity such as class or nation.
W hat is the relationship between economy and culture? Does con-
sumerism free individuals to create their own patterns of identity beyond
the restrictions of class? To what extent do alternative social organizations
rely on patterns of consumption? W hat is the relationship between con-
sumption, status, class, and inequality?

These are the kinds of questions rehearsed in a recent issue of New

Literary History entitled “Economics and Culture: Production, Consump-

tion, and Value,” especially in an article by Sharon O’Dair. Summarizing
some of the debates about consumption, O’Dair argues against the notion
that consumption has done away with class as an organizing principle for

Globalization and Identity

83

social groups or that consumerism has become a democratizing force in
our contemporary world, as numerous social critics and economists main-
tain. She does, however, foreground status, “deŽ ned largely in terms of
one’s relationship to consumption, that is, in terms of one’s lifestyle or cul-
ture,” as a key element of social organization (

338

).

O’Dair’ s discussion of inequality and liberation recalls the agency/

co-optation debate so often present in discussions of Caribbean popular
music. But there is an important difference. Here, the emphasis is no longer
on the thing consumed but rather on the act of consumption itself and on the
performance of the object of consumption subsequent to its acquisition:

What counts, in other words, is less the positionally acquired
money to buy a high-tech stereo system, for example, or for
that matter the system itself, than a position that only emerges
in and through the performance of getting the system in the
Ž rst place and the subsequent performances in which it con-
tinues to be deployed. (Evan Watkins, cited in O’Dair,

340

)

As such, the question is not whether a particular music form resists dom-
inant structures of power or represents a marginalized social or political
identity. Rather, one can ask how the purchase of that music form, and
subsequent exchanges (both material and symbolic) in which it Ž gures,
contribute to the formation of status groups and thus to the formation of
group identities.

Any discussion of Caribbean cultural identity revolving around the con-

sumption of popular music, must not only consider commercialized “local”
music forms but all of the best-selling genres of popular music that circulate
in and out, interacting with local music, which has itself always traveled
out and back again. How is the consumption of Celine Dion performed
in Haiti? What does it mean to purchase Falling Into You (

1996

) in Haiti, as

opposed to Michigan or Montreal, the CD in a fancy store in Pétionville
in American dollars, or the pirated cassette on a street corner? What does it
mean to aspire to the purchase of a Céline Dion recording? How does that
purchase interact with the consumption of local music and how is it used in
subsequent exchanges? How signiŽ cant is the Haitian market in global
terms and vice versa? If there is meaning here, what happens when the
Ž gure of Céline Dion fades, to be replaced by yet another international pop
phenomenon? To ask such questions does not diminish or threaten the rich-
ness of the local space, as documented, for example, in Peter Manuel’s

Caribbean Currents, or the vitality of local commercialized music such as

that of the group Boukman Eksperyans so prominently featured in the

84

Catherine Den Tandt

Lipsitz book. But it might allow us to glimpse “what is actually going on,”
and not just what we wish to see.

In

1994

Gage Averill published an excellent essay on nouvel jenerasyon and

mizik rasin, two commercialized forms of post-Duvalier Haitian popular
music that have, as he argues, contributed signiŽ cantly to the formation of
contemporary Haitian social and political identities. In his article he ges-
tures twice towards international pop music. He notes at one point that “In
commercial music [local Haitian commercial music], the inordinate eco-
nomic power and draw of foreign markets (and the resulting intercession
of foreign mediators) works to shape products to conform to foreign
expectations” (

16

). In his conclusion he adds, “SigniŽ cantly, both move-

ments accept the basic imported features (or ground rules) of commodiŽ ed,
commercial pop music as a given, such that they are restricted to manipu-
lating  exible expressive codes within a rigid, globally homogenized
framework” (

179

; his emphasis). Today we need to do more than gesture

impatiently or with regret towards the in uence of generic pop on local
music forms. If consumption is identity, this picture is devastatingly incom-
plete. Carlos Santana’s

1999

grammy winning recording Supernatural sig-

naled an important come-back for an old rocker. A combination of classic
soft rock tunes and numerous vaguely sounding (sometimes explicitly
sounding) latino melodies with lyrics in Spanish, and even a little rap, the
recording demonstrates how difŽ cult it is to trace national boundaries
along traditional lines in the production and performance of popular
music. Certainly, Supernatural indicates how important the margins are for
the center, especially given that Santana’s album coincides with the “Latin
craze” that also brought us Buena Vista Social Club (

1997

) and Ricky Martin.

But what happens when pop melodies travel back, to, and through the
margins? It is not enough to simply dismiss this presence as cultural imperi-
alism. Nor can we ignore it altogether. The interlocking grid of communi-
cation technologies, cultural capital, consumer culture more generally, and
ongoing inequality and marginalization makes for increasingly complex
relationships between the local and the global. My argument is fairly basic.
I think we need to start looking at the whole picture.

This is easier said than done, in part because it requires a more quanti-

tative approach to the study of culture. In order to ask “what citizens are
buying, using, enjoying,” to return to the earlier part of this essay, cultural
critics in the humanities need to borrow some of the traditional strategies
of the social sciences: Ž eldwork, broad sets of examples, the use of “native
informants,” and most importantly, collaborative approaches among
scholars. None of this comes naturally to cultural studies practitioners
whose training and background, whether as sociologists, literary critics,

Globalization and Identity

85

anthropologists, or musicologists, is heavily in uenced by postmodern and
poststructuralist approaches that question and even discredit more trad-
itional methodologies. It is no exaggeration to say that the philosophical
foundations of cultural studies as a Ž eld of inquiry stand in opposition to
more narrow applications of quantitative methods of analysis. Certainly,
we cannot ever forget that we “read” culture rather than collect and quan-
tify cultural artifacts.

As such, I am not suggesting that we all become quantitative social sci-

entists. Nonetheless, one of the problems of cultural studies is the ten-
dency towards anecdotal and case-speciŽ c analysis. This is exacerbated
under conditions of globalization, where the multitude of possible refer-
ences is so overwhelming that it becomes difŽ cult to do more than offer
individual readings of speciŽ c texts in speciŽ c contexts and then general-
ize from this fairly limited basis. Discussions about the Caribbean are
often especially anecdotal because scholars attempt to comment on the
region as a whole, yet they are rarely able to manipulate data from the
Hispanic, Francophone, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbeans. For example,
Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s major contribution to the study of Caribbean
identity, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective
(

1989

in Spanish;

1992

in English), speaks for the region but is in fact fairly

Cuba-centric in its choice of examples.

In the context of Caribbean popular music studies, “looking at the whole

picture” means taking generic pop music or international or United States
pop music into consideration in discussions of identity. It also means explor-
ing this presence across a wide Ž eld of examples and using this knowledge
to help us read and critique contemporary cultural trends. There are clear
material consequences to the kind of interdisciplinary project I envision.
Social scientists are generally better funded, better trained, and better
organized to undertake quantitative research. We need to Ž nd the means
and the vocabulary to articulate such projects within the contexts of our
own Ž elds, without sacriŽ cing the close readings that are our greatest tool.

I’m speaking here of measuring sales records of different recordings in

speciŽ c island settings and across the region, interviewing citizens of dif-
ferent age groups, of exploring radio stations and their play lists, the pub-
licity campaigns that fund them, the presence of local music forms and
their interaction with mass culture, the circulation of underground music
and its economic importance. If we combine this kind of work with the-
oretically sophisticated readings of cultural practices, perhaps we could
begin to address some of the confusion that surrounds the discourse of
culture and globalization in the Caribbean. Certainly, it would help us
move beyond the increasingly empty and repetitive discussions of agency

86

Catherine Den Tandt

and cultural corruption that I point to in the last part of my essay. Unlike
popular music studies in mainstream (Anglo) cultural studies, discussions
of popular music in the Caribbean, and in the postcolonial world in gen-
eral, focus on cultural resistance to such an extent that we rarely get a
sense of the actual interplay and importance of different levels of popular
culture, especially mass popular culture.

My own focus on practices of consumption, somewhat hypothetical

since I do not actually undertake the analysis here, is vulnerable to accus-
ations of political whitewashing, especially in the postcolonial context.
Indeed, cultural studies in general is vulnerable to such an accusation, as
Doug Saunders points out in his review of Thomas Frank’s recent book,

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of
Economic Democracy (

2001

):

In this book’s most provocative chapter, Frank turns the hose on
his own colleagues, the humanities scholars at North American
universities, who turned en masse during the late

1980

s and

1990

s

to a novel discipline known as cultural studies, in which acts of
mass-cultural consumption are analyzed as radical feats of self-
identifying transgression. Despite its radical roots, the main-
stream of cult studs, as the Ž eld came to be known, today bears
a strange resemblance to the ofŽ cial corporate theology of
“consumer sovereignty,” in which the act of purchase is as good
as voting. (D

8

)

There is a lot to think about here, but as I hope I have made clear in my
essay, I am not simply repeating the gesture of mainstream cultural stud-
ies to celebrate agency in acts of mass consumption. I do argue that con-
structing identity today has a great deal to do with consumption, and I
think that Caribbean cultural studies, popular music studies in particular,
focus selectively on certain instances of mass consumption (salsa, reggae,
merengue, zouk) in order to seek out the presence of a very speciŽ c kind
of cultural resistance, transgression, or agency. This work is valuable, but
its elaboration has become somewhat formulaic, and therefore, limited in
its ability to address Caribbean identities today.

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88

Catherine Den Tandt