Guest Editor's Introduction: Resonance, Repetition, and Futurity Across the West Indian Archipelago

In 1963, the Grenada-born, Trinidad-honed Mighty Sparrow stepped onto the Grand Stand stage at Queen's Park Savannah and sang “Dan Is the Man in the Van,” a buoyant calypso stitched from English schoolbook verses. Carnival spectators already knew the drill—this was Sparrow's fourth Calypso Monarch title, but his first after Trinidad and Tobago's 1962 independence from Britain. By yoking British children's rhymes to a slow and steady calypso form, he exposes how deeply British colonial pedagogy had burrowed into Caribbean muscle memory. The song opens on a dubious promise of upward mobility: According to the educationYou get when you smallYou will grow up with true ambitionAnd respect from one and all . . . But mid-verse, he pulls back the curtain on the long-term ruse: But in my days in schoolThey teach me like a foolThe things they teach meAh should be ah block-headed mule“And what dey teach you?” becomes an invitation for listeners to question their own education. The ability to make the body move and the mind doubt is what dazzled C. L. R. James when he declared Sparrow “a genuinely West Indian artist.”1 As such, James wrote in 1961, Sparrow is tasked with using “whatever he has worked out to express poetically the deepest feelings and instincts of a very different environment” than the one described by his classroom imperial reader.2 In other words, even though Caribbean—West Indian—people are Western, the region remains a site of profound difference. Bearing the imprint of modernity and exceeding its categories, the Caribbean does not exist at the margins of modernity; it has been central to its making. Setting the ongoing creative and political will of Caribbean people to song, Sparrow's lyrics and musicality articulate a Caribbean sensibility that crosses island borders and positions his audiences as inheritors and interpreters of the region's history and struggles. Calypso, the form Sparrow masters, is one of the region's signature sounds, like tresillo or dembow—rhythms that morph and travel, becoming markers of accented Caribbean belongings across the archipelago.3 In this song in particular, Sparrow calls out colonial education as a shared wound. The collective he hails is bound by a communal entanglement with empire and the will to survive it with discernible style. The ability to hold humor, critique, rhythm, and feeling together in performance is the multimodal hallmark of Caribbean music.Questions about what Caribbean people are taught and the forms of knowledge they inherit—and later refuse—resurface in contemporary music. Trinidadian toaster Lady Lava, for example, rummages through the same colonial toy box and pulls out a different icon, exposing how gendered labor circulates through familiar sonic and cultural references. Where Sparrow mocked rote drills in the West Indian Reader, Lava drags the British children's cartoon Bob the Builder into the mix to question another curriculum: the unpaid labor Caribbean women are expected to perform in the maintenance of heteronormative partnership. Singing “It have no reward in bein’ de best gyal / No trophy in bein’ de best wife,” Lava critiques the neoliberal script that casts women as both entrepreneurial agents and ideal romantic partners—roles that presume they will invest materially, emotionally, and sexually in “building” men into better versions of themselves. As Carla Freeman has argued, the rise of the “entrepreneurial self” in postcolonial Caribbean economies reconfigures femininity around both affective discipline and economic productivity.4 Within this logic, women's willingness to suffer, nurture, and repair while accumulating capital becomes a tall measure of ideal womanhood. Lava cuts an eye at this expectation: Why should a financially independent, self-possessed woman take on the role of project manager to a man who is likely to mistreat or abandon her? Released as a studio single in 2025, “Bob the Builder” rides a sparse, cartoonish riddim with Lava's distinctive Trini accent cutting through the mix. The track is excellent for consenting head-bopping, but it is even better for chanting back the chorus and collectively singing along: I not Bob de BuilderI not building no man for future.By flipping the cartoon's original theme song's cheerful refrain—“Can we fix it? Yes we can!”—into a refusal, Lava rewires gendered expectations, especially the unspoken ones that don't figure into neoliberal campaigns about gender equality. The song's digital life includes images of young women posing with power tools and steel-toed boots, posting curly, girlish, handwritten lyrics as they decipher the nuances of Lava's Trinidadian phrasing. These viral performances of critique underscore how contemporary Caribbean music now travels: yard to studio to the TikTok algorithm, back through bodies, each circulation layering new meaning and members.Listening in 2025, I find Lady Lava to be such a compelling figure. The self-proclaimed “Queen of Freak” is unabashedly raunchy. Still, much of her appeal lies in how her lyricism echoes everyday talk: conversations between girlfriends, playful lessons passed between a woman and her younger cousins. Her lines land with the kind of familiarity that signals intimacy. The phrasing is more than a syntactic choice for the sake of localization; it registers a regional specificity that roots the track as both from Trinidad and of the Caribbean more broadly. Take, for example, “I not Bob the Builder,” a phrase that would take another grammatical form (“Me a nuh” instead of “I not”) if voiced in the typical Jamaican parlance more commonly associated with this flavor of delivery. “I not building no man for future,” she insists.The beat itself, sparse and percussive, recalls regional soca styles like Bajan bashment alongside the rhythmic sharpness of Antiguan iron band. But the spoken delivery and no-nonsense attitude speak to dancehall roots. This sound, fed by both soca and dancehall streams, is more accurately referred to as zess in Trinidad and Tobago. As a zess track, “Bob the Builder” evokes the feeling of something homegrown, like friends recording in a bedroom studio or a catchy rhythm passed between dancing bodies. While Lava's refusal rejects the emotional labor of repair and restoration, it does so through a stylistic register that owes much to pan-Caribbean traditions of sex-positive, woman-centered performance. She stages a tension between new articulations of feminine agency and the unseen labor embedded in older scripts of empowerment.Taken together, Sparrow's classroom joke and Lava's construction-site warning sketch the stakes of this special issue. Caribbean music does more than mirror contradiction. That is, it does more than lay out the political stakes of its creation. Caribbean music, especially popular music, reinterprets inherited scripts, vibrates through bodies in ways that compel new forms of solidarity, and stages unapologetic acts of future imaginings. Those three motions—reinterpretation, resonance, and futurity—organize the pages that follow and tie mid-century debates about West Indian identity to twenty-first-century memory work, feminist interventions, and queer projections.The issue opens with Jérôme Camal's “Rézonans: Guadeloupean Dance as Fugitive History in the French Capital,” an ethnography of weeknight gwoka classes in suburban Paris that traces how émigré drummers turn a municipal studio into a kind of elsewhere for “embodied affective archives” that “modulate official national historical narratives.” Hope R. Munro follows with “Calypso Rose, Trailblazer and Caribbean Icon,” weaving fifty years of interviews, road-march recordings, and festival performances to show how Rose's repertoire has persistently rewritten the masculinist gender contract of calypso culture. Abigail C. Lindo's “Futurity and the Dancehall Queer/Quare: Shenseea's Reclamations of Feminine Power” shifts the focus to Kingston soundstages and digital mediation, arguing that Shenseea's lyrical “bravad(a)” and gun-finger choreography convert dancehall's macho scripts into quare projections of Caribbean futures. The issue closes with “Listening With and From Caribbean Bodies / Escuchar con y desde cuerpos caribeños (Roundtable Transcript),” where five scholar-practitioners listen to Caribbean popular music and field recordings and debate how sympathetic listening can become both method and syllabus, putting this issue's key themes—reinterpretation, resonance, futurity—into live, sonic practice.This attention to regional language and bodily expression and their aesthetic and political weight cuts across the contributions to this issue. Hope Munro's discussion of the term wajang, used in Trinidad to describe an unruly or loud woman, preserves its gendered intensity and social meaning rather than flattening it through translation. Jérôme Camal turns to Martinican historian Raymond Gama to center Antillean ways of reading diaspora, dance, and memory, where embodied movement becomes a form of historical and political knowledge via rézonans. Abigail Lindo's reframing of E. Patrick Johnson's quare as “dancehall quare” offers a vital rethinking of queerness within Caribbean sound cultures, not as identity alone but as a set of bodily and stylistic practices rooted in difference and excess. In Johnson's formulation, quare resists the universalizing tendencies of queer theory by grounding queerness in Black experience and the specificities of class, region, and performance. Lindo brings that commitment into a Caribbean frame, where dancehall becomes a space to register both feminist and queer refusals, pleasures, and gestures. Together, these essays echo Lamming and Kamugisha's insight that West Indianness, like queerness, is not a static identity but a relation made in and through encounter, difference, and repetition. Across the issue, the contributors show how sound, speech, rhythm, choreography—and their mediations—can all serve as tools for making Caribbean life audible and sensible beyond the definitional parameters of colonial and neocolonial domination. Their work invites readers to engage in an archipelagic mode of listening that attends to how meaning moves through the body and across islands, empires, and futures.These articles resonate with an intellectual tradition in Caribbean thought that is shaped by migration, encounter, and the cultivation of feeling across various forms and experiences of difference. Aaron Kamugisha's chapter, “A Caribbean Sympathy,” in Beyond Coloniality, names an assumption that threads through every essay here. Drawing on Aimé Césaire and George Lamming, Kamugisha argues that the “West Indian” identity coheres not in birthplace but in the flash of recognition that powers diasporic consciousness.5 This recognition, when “the category West Indian, formerly understood as a geographical term, now assumes cultural significance”6 takes shape through movement, encounter, and the shared experience of living with the legacies of colonial rule. It is often through meeting others in unfamiliar places that individuals begin to see themselves as part of a regional collective shaped by an empire's aftermath. Lamming captures this insight in his 1960 work, The Pleasures of Exile: No Barbadian thinks of herself as West Indian until she meets a Jamaican, a Saint Lucian, or a Grenadian “in foreign territory.”7 Out of that encounter comes what anthropologist David Scott, in conversation with Lamming, later called sovereignty of the imagination—“the active will to refuse submission to the shibboleths that seek at every turn to inspire our self-contempt and our unthinking docility, and to command our understandings of, and our hopes for, what it might mean to live as a free community of valid persons.”8 Kamugisha extends the point by revisiting Césaire's language of horizontal and vertical solidarities. Horizontal ties are forged “by experience, politics, and sympathy”; vertical ties reach back to an originary unity that precedes colonial partitions.9 Together they produce what Kamugisha terms Caribbean sympathy: a deliberately cultivated capacity to feel with others whose trajectories of rupture and reassembly echo one's own.10 That sympathy is neither sentimental nor accidental; it grows from what Lamming called an education of feeling, a retraining of the senses after colonial discipline.11The essays gathered here make those solidarities audible. Each centers a regional keyword to show how Caribbean music is less about fixed identity and more about a shared feeling-with across islands, times, and diasporas. In Jérôme Camal's study, gwoka classes in suburban Paris generate sympathy that pushes back against the French state's amnesiac colonial memory. Hope Munro's deep timeline of Calypso Rose turns biography into a method for listening to fifty years of feminist critique embedded in horn lines and tent talk. Abigail Lindo traces how Shenseea's performances of excess convert dancehall's toughest tropes into quare self-fashioning. A transcribed roundtable returns to Sparrow, modeling what an education of feeling looks and sounds like mid-conversation. Music, and the writing it inspires, are consistent sites where Caribbean sympathy is rehearsed.The work of this issue builds on decades of sound scholarship focused on Caribbean music. While chronological borders are porous, something like a generational tilt becomes clearer when we zoom out. The first postindependence cohort of Caribbean music scholarship—Jocelyne Guilbault's Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993); Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood (1993); Peter Manuel, Kenneth Bilby, and Michael Largey's survey Caribbean Currents (1995); and Gage Averill's A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey (1997)—labored to secure Caribbean popular genres a slot on the world music map and to dislodge an older folk-purist model.12 Insisting that Caribbean genres like zouk, dancehall, and calypso deserved the same scholarly attention that had long been granted to other Afro-diasporic genres, they asked how music mediated outside forces like nationalism and globalization. By the 2000s, ethnographies such as Timothy Rommen's “Mek Some Noise” (2007) and Funky Nassau (2011), Michael Largey's Vodou Nation (2006), and Shannon Dudley's Music from Behind the Bridge (2007) deepened that impulse, exploring how Caribbean people negotiate authenticity, religion, and global commerce through changes in instrumentation and rhythm.13 Running parallel was a literary and cultural current among Jamaican feminist scholars. Cooper's Noises in the Blood opened the door for serious engagement with Black women's bodies as wielding musical, political, and spiritual power in the early 1990s; Donna Hope's Inna di Dancehall (2006) extended these meditations; and Sonjah Stanley Niaah's Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (2010) traced the genre's spatial politics.14 Treating lyrics, slang, and performance as critical theory, these studies rewrote a male-centered canon and named gendered, “vulgar” forms of knowledge that colonial respectability had dismissed. This era of Caribbean music scholarship fixed Jamaica and Trinidad as gravitational centers for understanding Caribbean popular music as a legitimate archive of regional thought.Later work in the 2000s also saw a decisive widening of the scholarly lens beyond the Trinidad-Jamaica axis. Curwen Best's Culture @ the Cutting Edge (2005) set the tone by “moving away from the customary exclusive focus on Trinidad and Jamaica” to track ringbang in Barbados, gospel circuits in the eastern Caribbean, and the growing role of music video and web streams in small-island production.15 On the Francophone front, Brenda Berrian's studies of cadence-lypso and Kassav’ (2000) joined Guilbault's analysis of zouk in pulling Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica into wider view.16 Meanwhile, Hispanophone scholars mapped reggaetón's Afro-diasporic itineraries: the anthology Reggaetón charted the Panama–Puerto Rico–New York loop (2009), and Petra Rivera-Rideau's Remixing Reggaetón showed how the by These studies that Caribbean popular are forged in regional and diasporic and are all part of the same sonic debate and than how Caribbean genres into global more work regional sounds to the circuits the terms of is a in the it listening as a form of colonial that Jérôme Camal's ethnography the Dance the and of as a ethnography and Caribbean theory to aesthetic out by such as Michael (2007) and Bodies A Caribbean music no as an of global through Caribbean sound, new terms are forged from regional practices and are used to and Caribbean music is, in this not a of what has been to colonial and an for and what might that the roundtable on listening that scholarship also in the of Caribbean sympathy: of and and by of the same whose work I in the the essays in this issue back to Martinique, and the that first postindependence their returns are not but for the those sites for and the essays with for queer feminist and new with and In they familiar with to new sovereignty of the as the capacity not to but to it into a collective cultural with the of archipelagic listening that I in my and the in and as Lamming West through the movement between islands, it also a mode of listening of that movement as it In I that sound is a site where Caribbean is not as a or is of but as a listening or and of older or rhythmic from other islands, to a These become as both and as both and West Indian, through sound and It is a method shaped by the and its issue of Music the by and it through archipelagic to sound not as cultural but to Caribbean memory, and the of political The articles and listening roundtable together Caribbean sonic that creative and as of meaning in an The their and Caribbean music that listening can be both an and a