The Politics Of Caribbean Cyberculture

This book covers significant new ground, examining the impact and imprint of new leading technology on a range of popular expressions. This technology includes the internet, the computer, the cell phone, television, and radio, among others. Best argues that Caribbean culture has gone wireless, virtual, and simulated in the age of the machines.

This contribution to the study and analysis of Caribbean politics explores the political culture of the Caribbean in order to understand the regional differences. The contributors, renowned internationally for their expertise in Caribbean studies, explore the topic from their varied cultural experiences and offer a new dimension to the study of political culture.

In this volume, the editors and authors strive to understand the evolving Trans-Caribbean as a discontinuous, displacing, and displaced transnational space. The Trans-Caribbean is therefore understood as a space suspended in a double dialectic, which opposes both the hegemonic metropolitan space inhabited, as well as the romanticized, yet colonialized, "inner plantation" (Kamau Brathwaite), whose transcendence via migration perpetually turns out to be an illusion.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Caribbean island of Barbados emerged as a key player in the creation and nurturing of Caribbean popular music. And, yet, despite its vital role in the popularization of tuk music, the rise of spouge, and the Barbadian contribution to and transformation of other Carribean music traditions, there is still relatively little sustained critical literature that discusses the various strands of the island’s music culture. Curwen Best’s The Popular Music and Entertainment Culture of Barbados provides this long overdue survey of the development of Barbadian popular music and entertainment culture by focusing on pivotal phenomena, artists and movements in the evolution of Barbadian popular music and culture. Best concentrates, in particular, on transformations since 1980 and 2000 respectively, each of which marked the ushering in of new opportunities and challenges to the creation and dissemination of Barbadian popular music. His study considers the telling roles played by the expanding influence of western popular culture, the Internet, post-dancehall and post-soca aesthetics, cyberculture, digital culture, and the subterranean lure of traditional culture. Readers will find especially compelling Best’s analyses of selected artists, musical genres, and phenomena, such as Gabby, Rihanna, Jackie Opel, Alison Hinds, Rupee, Red Plastic Bag, Lil’ Rick, spouge, tuk, ringbang, gospel, dub/dancehall, calypso, soca, folk, alternative, hip hop, Crop Over, Jazz Festival, National Independence Festival of Creative Arts, BajanTube, party politics and entertainment, popular bands, music technology, the Internet and new frontiers of cultural expression. This book will be of significant interest to scholars, students and all those curious about Caribbean popular culture, the popular music of Barbados, and the impact of emerging technologies on cultural development in a small island state.

This Companion is divided into six sections that provide an introduction to and critical history of the field, discussions of key texts and a critical debate on major topics such as the nation, race, gender and migration. In the final section contributors examine the material dissemination of Caribbean literature and point towards the new directions that Caribbean literature and criticism are taking.

This book presents pioneering research that is designed to show, from a qualitative and ethnographic perspective, how new information and communication technologies, as applied to the school system and to local governance initiatives, merely reproduce traditional pedagogical approaches and the dominant forms by which power is exercised at the local level. The studies thus constitute points of departure for further thinking about the need to promote an Internet culture based on the social application of a OC right to communication and cultureOCO and an OC Internet right, OCO that will permit the establishment of true citizen participation and free access to knowledge, with due regard to personal and individual rights such as those of privacy and intimacy."

"The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions offers a comprehensive overview of Caribbean religions. The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world's religions, but the small geographic space resulted in the encounter of global religions and indigenous religious practices. The racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of this region makes brief introductions to Caribbean religions incapable of truly addressing its complex and diverse religious landscape. The Handbook also elaborates on the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region while also considering multiple geographic settings. It mentions how often Caribbean religion is studied through the perspective of a discrete religious tradition or geographic setting"--

In this new edited volume, Holger Henke and Fred Reno build on their important collection Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean (2003) and revisit some of the themes in Caribbean political culture explored some eighteen years earlier. The contributors to New Political Culture in the Caribbean consider more recent developments precipitating significant changes in the political attitudes and discourses in the region. Even the persistent themes in Caribbean political life- issues such as race, ethnicity, sovereignty, civil rights, or poverty - allow for new consideration, not only because of their longevity but also because in their contemporary form they may speak to new dynamics in society or find different forms of expression or political impact. The quality of political discourse - in terms of its content and forms of presentation - has significantly shifted over the first decades of the twenty-first century, and the impact of social media and a concomitant rise of political fringe discourses have accelerated the fragmentation of the public and polity, leading to sharper confrontations in the political sphere and giving once again rise to crude forms of nationalism. There are also various stressors and pressures that run counter to simplistic notions of nationalism and point to a great urgency for more transparent, sustainable, parti cipatory and equitable modalities of political engagement and discourses in the region.

In Plenty and in Time of Need uses music and performance as sites of analysis for the competing ideals and realities of Barbadian national culture. The book demonstrates complex relations between national, gendered, and sexual identities in Barbados, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage.

This volume explores Caribbean literature from 1800-1920 across genres and in the multiple languages of the Caribbean.