Calypso music is an integral part of Trinidad's national identity. When, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked great Trinidadian musician Roaring, Lion where he was from, Lion famously replied the land of calypso. But in a nation as diverse as Trinidad, why is it that calypso has emerged as emblematic music? In Governing Sound, Jocelyne Guilbault examines conditions that have enabled calypso to be valorized, contested, and targeted as a field of cultural politics in Trinidad. The prominence of calypso, Guilbault argues, is uniquely enmeshed in projects of governing and in competing imaginations of nation, race, and diaspora. During colonial regime, period of national independence, and recent decades of neoliberal transformation, calypso and its musical offshoots have enabled new cultural formations while simultaneously excluding specific social expressions, political articulations, and artistic traditions. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work, Guilbault maps musical journeys of Trinidad's most prominent musicians and arrangers and explains distinct ways their musical sensibilities became audibly entangled with modes of governing, audience demands, and market incentives. Generously illustrated and complete with an accompanying CD, Governing Sound constitutes most comprehensive study to date of Trinidad's carnival musics.
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