In Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker takes readers on a fascinating journey into the world of wylers, a distinctive musical form characterized by its remarkable speed. This groundbreaking study examines how this seemingly simple musical element becomes a powerful lens through which to understand the complex relationships that define postcolonial Caribbean life.
Baker argues that the speed in wylers serves as a highly subjective metric for measuring several crucial tensions in Caribbean society. It captures the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity, the struggle for women's bodily autonomy against nationalist fantasies that would curb that freedom, and the material realities faced by Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence.
One of the most significant contributions of this work is how it challenges existing scholarship on Caribbean music. Traditional research has often privileged the bigger islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—while neglecting the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations. Baker traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media-based resonances of wylers, revealing the unbounded nature of musical exchange throughout the region.
The archipelago emerges as a particularly useful model for understanding the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics underlying Caribbean performance. Through this framework, Baker demonstrates how the archipelago and its various speeds ultimately become meaningful mediums for postcolonial, postmodern world-making, offering readers a fresh perspective on Caribbean identity and expression.
Published as part of the prestigious Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology series, this book is essential reading for scholars, students, and anyone interested in Caribbean culture, ethnomusicology, or postcolonial studies. It provides both rigorous academic analysis and accessible insights into how music continues to shape and reflect Caribbean identity in the modern world.
