Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class
It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture-which is considered derivative of Europe and not rooted in the Caribbean-and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. In Caribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century.\ Edmondson shows that...
Search in google:
It is commonly assumed that Caribbean culture is split into elite highbrow culture-which is considered derivative of Europe and not rooted in the Caribbean-and authentic working-class culture, which is often identified with such iconic island activities as salsa, carnival, calypso, and reggae. In Caribbean Middlebrow, Belinda Edmondson recovers a middle ground, a genuine popular culture in the English-speaking Caribbean that stretches back into the nineteenth century. Edmondson shows that popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals are examples of Caribbean culture that are mostly created, maintained, and consumed by the Anglophone middle class. Much of middle-class culture, she finds, is further gendered as "female": women are more apt to be considered recreational readers of fiction, for example, and women's behavior outside the home is often taken as a measure of their community's respectability. Edmondson also highlights the influence of American popular culture, especially African American popular culture, as early as the nineteenth century. This is counter to the notion that the islands were exclusively under the sway of British tastes and trends. She finds the origins of today's "dub" or spoken-word Jamaican poetry in earlier traditions of genteel dialect poetry-as exemplified by the work of the Jamaican folklorist, actress, and poet Louise "Miss Lou" Bennett Coverley-and considers the impact of early Caribbean novels including Emmanuel Appadocca (1853) and Jane's Career (1913).
\ From the Publisher"Belinda Edmondson's Caribbean Middlebrow is a timely project that offers a much-needed corrective to the well-established notion that Anglophone Caribbean literary culture has been and is being produced mainly by exiles in Britain and the United States. Arguing that middle-classness and cultural authenticity need not be opposites, Edmondson shows us that the middle classes in the English-speaking Caribbean not only consume but also produce culture and have done so since the nineteenth century. This book is required reading for anyone interested in Caribbean studies."-Vera M. Kutzinski, Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University, author of Sugar's Secrets\ "Caribbean Middlebrow makes a major and original contribution to a field of study that is at once established and increasingly pursued: the status, definition, and involvement of the Caribbean middle class at a variety of levels and locations. . . . It is remarkable for the breadth of its interrogation of various popular culture genres across time without sacrificing analytical depth in the process. It is also a unique and updated point of departure for exploring the position and practices of the Caribbean middle class in relation to the working class."-Karla Slocum, New West Indian Guide (Vol. 85, Nos. 3 and 4, 2011)\ \ \
