the petagogy

Island Time Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology A SERIES EDITED BY PHILIP V. BOHLMAN AND TIMOTHY ROMMEN Editorial Board Richard C. Jankowsky Margaret J. Kartomi Anna Schultz Anthony Seeger Kay Kaufman Shelemay Martin H. Stokes Bonnie C. Wade Island Time Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis JESSICA SWANSTON BAKER The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2024 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2024 Printed in the United States of America 33 32 10 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83728-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83730-7 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83729-1 (e-book) 1 2 3 4 5 o o I: https: / /doi.org /10.7208/chicago /978 0226837291.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baker, Jessica Swanston, author. Title: Island time : speed and the archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis / Jessica Swanston Baker. Other titles: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. I Series: Chicago studies in ethnomusicology I Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2024022975 I ISBN 9780226837284 (cloth) I ISBN 9780226837307 (paperback) I ISBN 9780226837291 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Popular music-Social aspects-Saint Kitts and Nevis. I Popular music-Social aspects-Caribbean Area. Classification: Lee ML3917.s25 B35 2024 I one 306.4/84240972973 LC record available at https :/ /lccn.loc.gov /2024022975 1§ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/Niso 239-48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1 Island Time 33 2 The Pedagogy of Pace 58 3 Wylers and the Tempo of Development 90 4 Archipelagic Listening from the Small Islands 119 Conclusion: Connecting the Dots 147 Acknowledgments 153 Notes 157 Bibliography 173 Index 185 2 The Pedagogy of Pace As a child, I loved it when my mom told the story of the time she "wuked up" in front of the Queen. Most of her stories about home, and her childhood and early adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s were about feeling stuck, unseen, and generally stifled by the narrowness of the lane she was expected to occupy as a poor Black girl. Respectability, as the "moral force behind the coercive power of colonialism and neo-colonialism;' permeated everything. 1 She said: "Everybody was Black, you know. So it wasn't like I'm saying there's a big white man telling me I'm bad. It was other Black people telling me I'm chewing wrong, I'm laughing like a 'commoner; I'm too loud, me hair too coarse, me nose too broad: ' 2 In the Queen story, though, there is a crack in the mask that coloniality crafted for her, and her retelling of it chips at mine, too. It is 1966, and schoolchildren have lined the street as Queen Elizabeth II passes in a car, waving affectionately as they shout, "Hello, Dear One!" The girls are all dressed in white, wearing the finest shoes, frilly socks, and starched bows. Later, in Warner Park, the same girls are standing together, and watching the various demonstrations and performances presented in the Queen's honor (fig 2.1). A steel-pan orchestra played, followed by the big drum. During the latter, teachers instruct the children-especially the young girls-to "sway gently" to the music. In our North Bronx kitchen, Mom dramatically recounts her confusion: "I was fourteen years old at the time and thought to myself, 'Sway? Gently? To this?'" She tilts her head to one side, the way she always does when she wants to emphasize the irony of a particularly juicy story. "The teacher is telling me to sway, and I'm hearing that riddim:' Bending her knees slightly, she bounces to the memory of the booming bass drum while chanting its rhythm: bum badumbum, bum badumbum. THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 59 FI G u RE 2.1. Queen Elizabeth II, February 22, 1966. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh 's Febru ary 1966 tour of the West Indie s was filmed by the British Film Institute and produced into a twenty -nine - minute newsreel, which can be viewed at the BFI's YouTube channel. Image courtes y of the National Archives, St. Kitts and Nevis. "I did it for a little while;' she says, clenching the seams of an imaginary skirt and swaying in a slow, wistful two-step. "But then I just couldn't take it anymore. It got me! I went crazy!" Bum badumbum bum badumbum. Wrapping her arms around herself, she pretends to be captured by the sound, struggling to get free. "I said 'to hell with this' and started goin' on and wukin up, shakin' my bum and ting:' At this point, Mom throws her head back and winds her backside wildly, looking back at it occasionally like a hapless bystander, powerless against her batty's will. "People around me pointed and laughed; they were shocked:' I am especially tickled by her impersonations of scandalized onlookers-some with mouths agape, others using their puckered lips to point in her direction. "I was known for weeks after as 'the girl who was wukin up in front of the Queen:" Eventually, she relaxes and shrugs her shoulders: "I was young and crazy. I didn't care. I think they wrote about me in the newspaper:' 3 News of the Queen's first visit to the British West Indies was reported around the world, but the experiences of individual people-especially schoolgirls-were not of particular interest to journalists at the time (fig. 2.1). To my mother, more important than any official account was her own recognition of the poorly timed, impulsive, and indecorously Black-girl behavior she exposed in the presence of the Queen. If, as it had been throughout Britain's colonial rule, the Queen was the ultimate symbol of feminine 60 C HAPTER TWO respectability in the British colonies, then my mother's behavior was gossipworthy scandal. 4 What mediates the tempo of music and the temporality of islands? What can the musical intensity of one Black girl's body reveal about the relationship between her small-island home and the broader colonial world? This chapter discusses the centrality of representations of Black women's bodies to colonial and neoliberal nationalist discourses of proper temporality. After a description of what I call "rituals of Black womanhood;' I draw on the explicit history of anti-Black misogyny as manifested in the Sugar Islands to contextualize social aspirations after emancipation in 1834 toward middle-classness via the route of feminine respectability. While Caribbeanist scholars have argued that conversations about Caribbean femininities should move beyond discussions of respectability, the intensity of the prevailing discourses of respectability ( often subsumed into other critiques about how women move and what they desire) continues to make respectability a relevant category, even if largely through humor and satire. Respectability is also the most salient context of my own upbringing. As a millennial Black woman, notions of feminine respectability provided the boundaries of my existence, the content of my inner voice, as a good, worthy, and ultimately productive member of society. I was raised to desire heterosexual marriage, to make myself small, quiet, and useful. While "Caribbean sexuality is characterized by diversity, in which multiple partnering relationships by both men and women, serial monogamy, informal polygamy, and same-gender and bisexual relations are commonplace;' the discursive norm still emphatically centers heterosexual monogamy as a key tenet of respectable womanhood. 5 Or, as island spaces like St. Kitts and Nevis are always inclusive of the diasporic and other off-island locales (part of what Rosamond S. King calls the "Caribglobal"), my entrainment into normative sexuality by a certain generation of Kittitian-Nevisians inextricably tethers this era of sexual norms to contemporary understandings of the national and social boundaries of St. Kitts and Nevis.6 In 2022, the Kittitian writer and researcher XavienneRoma Richardson, who hosted a radio show on sexuality on the national radio station ZIZ, described the regional context of sexuality and its expression as follows: "In a region where almost one- third of girls' first sexual encounter is forced ... and where rape rates surpass the world average ... , it is im - portant that researchers, policymakers, parents and partners consider how limited sexual agency results in potentially permanent negative physical and psychological consequences:' 7 In her work on expressions of sexual agency in St. Kitts, she emphasizes that the compulsory heterosexuality of the region, THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 61 specifically in St. Kitts and Nevis, is shaped socially by myriad competing and coproducing vectors, including religion, media, and socialization. This chapter moves between performance, history, visual representation, storytelling, and ethnography to better elucidate the relationship between the island temporalities of colonization, the tempo and beat-based developments of the following chapters, and my own experiences of gender as a taught practice. This chapter posits that these experiences and histories, and the vantages they share, are rituals of intergenerational teaching about the implicit St. Kitts rules of Black womanhood. Oomanship and Rituals of Black Womanhood I grew up on soca music that described scenarios of women being "taken away;' "caught;' "infected;' or "lured" by the rhythm and sound of the musicespecially during carnival time-which apparently explained the fantasy protagonist's (usually a young woman) indecorous or impassioned behavior. These lyrics deployed the regular tropes of calypso and soca, including instructive lyrics, sexual innuendo, double entendre, and the exceptionality of carnival time. My mother's story captures the relationship between the music and the public, energized body of a dancing or performing Black womanhood beyond the scope of a stylistic metaphor espoused by men. In my mother's story, the "gentle sway" requested by the authority figure was a respectable stand-in for whatever kinds of movement the girls might have come up with on their own had they allowed the music to get hold of them, or had their bodies been allowed to tell the truth about the extent of their relationship to the kettledrum's syncopation. In colonial St. Kitts and Nevis (which lasted from 1628 to 1983), the recognition of the infectiousness of music-infectious for its repetitiousness, drive, tempo, rhythm-was just one facet of the colonial discourses of respectability and elevation that rendered some forms of Black music as "contagions" and a threat to educated, decorous, and "civilized" white subjectivity. Local Black children dancing for the Queen is one example of the ways that moving Black bodies-particularly as objects of attention for a temporary, white gaze-are sites of uneven relationship to colonial respectability as a mode of national inclusion. The felt incongruence between the fast, intricate big drum rhythm and "gentle swaying" is demonstrative of the ways that Black girls' embodiment of familiar rhythms is a public performance disciplined through the moralization of temporality and the discourse of speed. The gently-swaying girls were expressly asked to represent the 4/ 4 big drum rhythm in 2, such that the fluid motion of their flouncy skirts stood in for the staccato eighth- and 62 C HAPTER TWO sixteenth-note motions that typically accompanied this music. The legitimacy of the fife and drum band-which, by the 1960s, was used to represent the distinctive culture of St. Kitts-was dependent on Black girls' bodies to do the work of concealing the contemporary reality of the form and its bodily corollaries. The dainty two-step was meant to convey an air of bodily distance and disinterest in the music as a facet of a performance of learned European subjectivity. Within the dense rhythm of the drum rolls and syncopation of the kettledrum, each beat represented the threat of exposure, laying bare the connection between local sounds and local behavior. This example of the tempo of a woman's body being the barrier between the missteps of the past and aspirational, sovereign futures is emblematic of the tradition of decolonization through nationalism in the Caribbean. These representations and the discourse surrounding Black girls' and women's bodies is as integral to the imagined community of the nation within St. Kitts and Nevis as the big drum is. What made my mother "go crazy" in front of the Queen can be understood in the context of a general discourse of deterioration and decline related to the themes of degeneracy that characterized transatlantic discourse. 8 Since the inception of the plantation system, Black women in the Caribbean have been portrayed and understood in relation to forms of degradation that are inherent to European understandings of colonial outposts. As an augmentation of their Blackness- "the physical deformity so necessary to the invention of the servile soul" -poor Black women's bodies, "real and symbolic;' were seen as carriers of physical pathogens and as harboring illness and symptoms of contagion such as overflow (as caused by unexpressed breastmilk) and odor ( especially that caused by menstruation or sweat on laboring bodies). 9 Using illness as an excuse to avoid some work in the sugar fields contributed to the association of Black women with notions of sickness and disease and with Black women's bodies as "unhygienic:' 10 A domino effect of uprisings among sugar workers in the 1930s cascaded across the string of islands in the Caribbean Sea and beyond to the Bahamas. These post-emancipation political insurrections-in St. Kitts, Trinidad, J amaica, British Guiana, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Barbados-were responses to low wages, poor working conditions, political disenfranchisement, and deleterious health conditions. In 1920, the infant mortality rate was 408 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, and life expectancy was less than fifty years. As Hermia Morton Anthony notes, Afro-Kittitian women were subject to especially severe hardship. In the 1930s, even as she worked alongside men on a sugar plantation, a Black Kittitian woman would be expected to have a fire burning and meal cooked well before the sun rose, and she would be THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE responsible for the general management and survival of her household and any associated children. Plantation managers would sometimes refuse to pay women with money, offering only food or other household supplies, instead. White plantation managers, invested in upholding notions of respectability and patrilinear nuclear family, argued that if a woman wanted money, she should find a husband or turn to prostitution. On the other hand, as one plantation worker put it, Black women were still expected to perform arduous manual labor and were regarded, as one sugar plantation worker noted, like "men who could breed:' 11 In the face of these conditions, and, lest it go without saying, the effects of the previous four hundred years of enslavement, this collection of uprisings is significant because they led to voting rights for Black workers and ultimately some form of political independence on many of the islands. By the 1950s, the work of labor unions and a Black-led group of local political elites had deepened Kittitian-Nevisian investment in emerging notions of nationalism via various programs of social elevation. For some Black women, aspirational culture was enacted largely through forms of embodied respectability, such as modest dress and performances of piety. These acts were intended to distance upwardly mobile Black women from the ideas and discourses attached to poor Black women, who were regarded as particularly susceptible to (and as carriers of) certain kinds of contagion, especially in the form of sexual corruption (e.g., pregnancy-a girl or woman in St. Kitts and Nevis is often described as "getting children" as one might "get sick'') or music ( that may "take" or "overcome" her body). These dominant sexualized and racialized colonial frames created the social and material context that Black women have historically navigated. One other example of an alternate category that accounts for this context and the realities of Black womanhood is in Hermia Morton Anthony's 1990s ethnography of Afro-Kittitian women who participated in the labor uprisings of the 1930s. She identifies "oomanship" as "a negotiated, fluid, gender category" that "defines the relations of women in Kittitian society, [ and] their contributions to its development and transformation:' Oomanship highlights womanhood as both imposed identity and a form of labor. That "ooman" is a Kittitian-Nevisian pronunciation of "woman" accounts for the structures of oppression, modes of transcendence, subversion, and experiences of hardship inherent to the inherited positionality of Blackness and womanness in colonial St. Kitts-Nevis. One of the most important aspects of oomanship includes preparing girl children physically, mentally, and economically for the realities of Black womanhood to ensure that they are not duped by the gendered fantasies of being taken care of by a man. Oomanship does not just C HAPTER TWO articulate the conditions of hardship, it also articulates an inherited subjectivity; it is a technique for navigating the world with a body marked by the contradictions that Blackness and womanness pose to colonial categories. For poor Black Kittitian women of the 1930s, significant vulnerability to physical violence perpetrated by any man and the nonrecognition of women's labor were significant sources of myriad hardships. As material conditions improved, the choreography of Black womanhood morphed to navigate new currents and conditions. As the performative demands of a burgeoning nationalism met the ascendance of beauty pageants as a facet of carnival celebrations in St. Kitts- Nevis, the National Queen Pageant stage provided a public space for another kind of articulation of Black femininity. Staging a counter to ideas of the vulnerable and contagious Black woman's body, the beauty pageant stage-especially during the talent portion of a typical "Queen Show" -presented opportunities for feminine displays of respectable and impervious bodily control. The festivity surrounding the Queen's 1966 visit is an example of what Belinda Edmondson calls "popular culture rituals;' which include recurrent, indigenized events such as carnival and calypso competitions. The enactment of these rituals constitutes arenas for public performances. In colonial society, Black and other nonwhite women were regarded as "the antiwoman, pathological and lascivious viragos who undermine the nationalist project:' 12 In colonial society, which discursively relegated women's bodies to the domestic sphere of the home, public performance of these popular culture rituals was understood to be unrespectable and indecorous. Historically, representations of Black women in carnival have included exaggerated stereotypes of bodies and behavior. The occasion of the Queen's visit outside of carnival was another popular culture ritual that required decorous feminine behavior especially from the poorest and Blackest of its citizens. Public arenas, which are coded as masculine in the colonial framework, function as the opposite of the "respectable" and feminine private space of the home and yard. Historically, then, Black women's performances in these public spaces-which we may understand as a woman's agential doing, being seen or heard-have served since the mid-twentieth century to restrict access to the social, economic, and political benefits reserved for "respectable" citizens. Where postcolonial nationalism is predicated on patrilineal, monogamous heterosexuality, the standing of Black women-whose Blackness and womanness present an exponential threat-functions as a gauge of the moral health of the nation. That is, Black women's bodies have served as the site on and through which discourse about the nation takes place. As Edmondson notes regarding Black women's public performances at venues surrounding THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE carnival in the postcolonial period of the mid-twentieth century, "the traditional attitude of the respectable and aspiring-respectable classes toward (usually Black) women in the public sphere has been to perceive these performances as indices of Black women's innate degeneracY:'13 Respectability from Post-Emancipation to Post-Colony, 1834-1983 Living between seemingly incompatible or incongruous cultural and social structures is an integral feature of St. Kitts and Nevis. Karen Fog Olwig has made evident in her discussion of post-emancipation Nevis the existence of contradictory cultural traditions associated with essential aspects of life in Caribbean societies. 14 The Nevisian traditions did not constitute bounded, autonomous, and independent cultural units; instead, they were associated with limited spheres of life, each of central importance to the African Caribbean population. 15 Olwig identifies three key "cultural traditions" in postemancipation Afro- Nevisian society: the implementation of a hierarchical plantation system, the importance of African kinship relationships, and the influence of Methodist missionaries in promoting an ideology of respectability. She notes how in the wake of emancipation, "as the plantocracy lost its power during the last part of the nineteenth century, the ideology of respectability and its associated social institutions gradually attained a dominant position in colonial societY:'16 In post-emancipation St. Kitts and Nevis, the Methodist Church and its set of respectable morals came to represent a secondary channel to respectability that did not require wealth. Denouncing material extravagance, the Methodist Church promoted a sexual modesty that included monogamy and marriage and prohibited out-of-wedlock childbearing, which was often considered the result of premarital cohabitation. However, the ideology of Methodist respectability was not always implemented in practice. Even while respectability ideology dictated a particular approach to sexuality, especially for women, a reliance on a much wider array of kinship relationships and alternative (woman-centered) approaches to land ownership were necessary for women's survival. These familial and sexual arrangements, and the multiplicity of alternatives to respectable femininity they acknowledge, represent the local navigational techniques of Black womanhood or oomanship. While the implementation of the Methodist ideology signaled the growth of a culture of competing discourses surrounding female sexual behavior, Black female sexuality was solidified as one of the "organizing principle[ s] for a new moral order;' as anthropologist Debra Curtis put it, "prompted and institutionalized by the Methodist societY:'17 66 CHAPTER TWO Discourse surrounding women's sexuality in the twenty-first century is still historically tied to and justified by religious mores and is augmented by the acknowledgment of outside-foreign-forces that compete with Christian ideology. As Curtis writes ofNevisian girls in 2003: Staying off the streets at night, abstaining from sexual activity, heading home after school and avoiding loitering in town, doing well in school, earning high scores on exams, avoiding the negative effects of US culture, specifically BET and soap operas, avoiding boys and older men, and attending church and church-sponsored youth group activities are conditions and activities that make a girl virtuous in the eyes of the religious community . When focusing on youth, community leaders often use US culture as a gauge by which to measure Nevisian morality . Interestingly, the more closely Nevisian youth appear to mirror the customs and lifestyles of US youth, the greater the perceived threat that Nevisian youth pose to Nevisian morality . 18 Within the formulation of Caribbean nationalism's contentious relationship with foreign media, Samantha Pinto notes that "Black women's bodies come to stand in for the west-like a contagion-which has written its corruption onto their bodies:' 19 In nationalist discourse, talk about Black female sexuality in relation to popular music and dance provides a measurement for the level of restraint and moral health of local society. Going Wild: Tishima Browne and the National Carnival Queen Pageant The proof of wylers' dark side is the "disgraceful" behavior of young Black women and the perceived and anticipated violence of young Black men who hear it. This correlation between the speed of the music and what it makes bodies do is so tightly woven that it constitutes a recognizable local logic that animates various kinds of public discourse. One particularly salient example of this logic in motion occurred at the 2014-2015 St. Kitts and Nevis National Carnival Queen Pageant. Tishima Browne placed first in the talent segment and ultimately won the crown (fig. 2.2). Her talent was a dramatic monologue in which she played the role of an opinionated Kittitian woman participating in a version of exuberant exchange that Hermia Morton Anthony has described as "pung toary" or "pung melee:' 20 This is best understood as a kind of storytelling gossip during which the storyteller may "happily talk about anyone, everyone, anything and everything:' 2 1 Pung toary style, flying seamlessly between scales, referents, tenses, moods, and modes, is a decolonizing, subversive "method of discussing the minutiae, the fine details of an issue:' 22 In this instance, FIG u RE 2.2. AND 2.3. Tishima Browne performing in the talent portion of the 2014-2015 St. Kitts and Nevis National Carnival Queen Pageant, as posted on the event's official Facebook page. The caption to the two photos read "Miss National Bank, Tishima Browne: Drama-Depicted a mas maker who is determined to enjoy herself but is frustrated at the music and dress codes in modern Carnival:' Photo courtes y of the St. Kitts and Nevis National Carnival Facebook, December 28, 2014. https: // m.facebook .com/SKNCarnival/photos /a. 79599310710494 7 .1073 7 4 l 929.144056438965287 /796038507100407 /. 68 C HAPTER TWO Browne's performance was an impassioned and humorous take on generational changes in Kittitian-Nevisian society that, deploying a regional West Indian logic, mapped to relations between the tempo of contemporary soca and the comportment of Black women during carnival as proof of a changed and changing society. Browne's monologue opened: Things really change, you know? Everybody talk about how things ain' change. Yes, things change. Starting with we music. 23 The practice of performatively marking and highlighting experiences of difference or change-the shock, distortion, danger, awe-is what Tishima Browne's character performed as a through line between two generations of Kittitians and Nevisians. The older generation would have been youth during or before the 1960s and 1970s: well before St. Kitts-Nevis's independence in 1983 and shortly before or during its statehood in 1967. The younger generation experienced their youthful freedom in the sovereign, federated, and insurgent 1980s and 1990s. To Browne, "we music" meant the music belonging to the nation but reflecting the sounds of the former generation. Whether or not things had, in fact, changed seems like a cheesy rhetorical setup, but in St. Kitts and Nevis, it is an issue at the crux of political debates about the fate of the two-island federation. The notion that things had not changed constitutes a significant feature of historical treatments of the islands and saturates tourism advertisements. And yet, things like the materials people use to build houses, the western shoreline of St. Kitts, the cost of a ferry ticket across the two-mile strait between Basseterre in St. Kitts and Charlestown in Nevis had changed. Browne's monologue continued: Long time, you could have take a li'l chip. [ She subtly sways her hips and walks stage left.] Back then, the music didn't have to come with no warning label and instructions. De music these days could kill you. How you mean? Long time you ain't hear, "De Lay Lay Shang Shang, De Lay Lay Shang Shang:' [She sings the chorus of a popular 1977 Ellie Matt calypso.] But you know, your heart ain't beating too fast, you taking you li'l chip and you eyeing somebody husband-"Hey, goodnight" [She smiles at someone's imaginary husband.] Nowadays ... [A snippet of a soca song begins to play from the speakers]. 24 THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE As if possessed, Browne shook her body violently, arms jerking wildly around her. She punched and kicked the air while her head flailed behind in every direction. The music stopped, and she stopped, too. Bent over, exhausted, she placed her hands on her knees and panted with quick, deliberate breaths. The percussive sound of the stuttering voice that ravished the common woman's body was from Trinidadian soca singer Iwer George's 2001 song "Let Me See Yuh Hand:' 25 As Curwen Best notes, this song, which was both a critique and a parody, "reflected the newer directions that [soca] music was taking in the first decade of the new centurY:'26 At a speedy 166 beats per minute, "Let Me See Yuh Hand" begins with Iwer George yelling into a microphone: "Selecta! Gimme the wicked Iwer George tune dey, so fast!" By evoking the selecta, or DJ, a staple of dancehall music, George placed the song within a lineage that veered away from the musical heritage three decades of calypso and soca purists were seeking to preserve. Recognized as overly technologically reliant, insincere in its capitalist aspirations and obvious foreign influence, the reputation of "Let Me See" is a distillation of the parameters of early 2000s soca music. Calling further attention to the separation of the singer and the "tune" or "riddim;' the entire song sounds like George is not so much singing with the track as singing over it-riding on top of it. With small tonal and rhythmic discrepancies between a riddim and a voice, characterizing what Peter Manuel and Wayne Marshall call the "riddim method;' George's vocals sound more like talking than singing, and they do not adhere closely to anything we might call a melody or rhythm. 27 The riddim also samples from the light classical waltz "Chopsticks;' an excerpt that is synonymous with easy, nonserious, classical music. 28 Watching the pageant video from my home in Chicago, more than half a decade later, I can hear only the crowd's laughter in the background. I feel deprived of the small details in movement and sound that I am familiar with as key features of pageant attendance. The camera angle admits into view a few men watching from the wings, and their spontaneous smiles are a small consolation. Browne's character takes on a significant degree of humor and resonance because she draws on three irreducibly contradictory features of Kittitian-Nevisian sociality. First, she does this in a nested vortex of Black womanhood: a young Black woman playing an old Black woman critiquing other young Black women. Second, her vortex centralizes Black womanhood in modern notions of the nation within the St. Kitts-Nevis Federation, and in the importance of allowing space for representing Black womanhood and critiquing that same womanhood within the local community. Third, she identifies that it is specifically Black women's bottoms that are often invoked as markers for the limits of society, both in St. Kitts and Nevis and throughout C HAPTER TWO the broader West Indies. Through dance, women can exhibit control over their bottoms by either concealing them entirely or displaying them as very controlled in intricate motion in dance. Black women's backsides delimit the boundary lines of sociality. To conceal a certain body (or body parts) was to defend that body's rightful place in the public sphere. In counterpoint, to exhibit, flash, or otherwise show the same body ( or parts) could be effective offense against various incursions into public decorum. The national beauty pageant sits on the flip side of these displays of the excess of the Black female bumsee as the first space of rituals of performance for women to showcase respectability. In my experience, Black women's butts are not significantly less visible at these pageants than at other times; the swimsuit segment is a regular fan favorite. However, their visibility is part of a performance of restraint that is understood as the product of concerted development under the direction of a team of handlers. As a counterweight to the overexposed and defiantly sexual Black woman, the pageant woman reaffirms the importance of women's sounding, moving bodies as gauges of the health and trajectory of the nation. In other words, it is not that Black women are meant to be hidden as caretakers of private spaces and family life. Instead, Black women's bodies are necessarily highly visible in their societal function as performers and promoters of bodily mastery (restraint and abandon), a duty that is referenced and performed onstage or among friends in speech acts like Browne's monologue: Dat dey enough to give you a double heart attack and chikungunya. Tings not the same. Nowadays, everybody wants to play Simon Says for the carnival. If the song say "clothes off" with that, nobody stops to think Brap! Everybody naked! Tings just not de same.29 If the typical pageant woman should symbolize restraint, then Browne's performance identifies fast music as an impediment to that restraint, making it harder for the woman to control herself, her body, and her bottom in particular. When she names a series of scenarios that might temporarily trick, dupe, or otherwise force her character to relinquish autonomy over her body (including Simon Says, schizophrenia, viral infection, and heart attack), Browne's character frames speed as a categorically similar plane of experience as crying or screaming. The speed of unbridled, oversexualized, and uncivilized deviance ( exemplified in exhibitionist-style, sexually suggestive dancing and lyrics) is the same "fast-fast" speed recognized later in the monologue THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 71 in the brisk-walking, distanced professionalism of a banker at work, even as the deviant dancer and the professional banker are foils to each other. These articulations of and attestations to speed draw our attention to a conceptual constellation of social, ethical, aesthetic, physical, and metaphorical boundaries and the actions that constitute their transgression. Speed represents both the unproductive and the unthinkable, the physical, the dangerous and uncontrollable, the new, and the dubious professionalism of modern women and men who seek to participate in the best of many worlds. Speed represents the fear and trepidation of the new, of change, and of the unmeasured. The monologue goes on (fig 2.3): Well eh eh, it's only thong they do sell in St. Kitts? [Turning her body around so that her backside faces the audience, she squats deeply, cocking her bum back.] Everybody want dey bottom in de road! [In the background, the winning road march song for that year, the Small Axe Band's "Bottom in de Road" begins to play.] Look! Lock it off! [The music stops. With the left side of her body facing the audience, she bends over and strains her bum toward the crowd.]3° If "Bottom in de Road" was the anthem of that year's carnival, the phrase, coined by Iwer George in his 1997 song of the same name, is definitional for carnival across the Caribbean archipelago. Originally banned from the radio by the Trinidadian government for its lewd lyrics, the titular phrase is em - blematic of two defining features of West Indian sociality: women's, especially Black women's, bums and the road, as constituted by the public spaces where mobile carnival activities are enacted. The version of the song that harassed her character at the monologue's opening and again toward the middle was by a Kittitian wylers band, the Small Axe Band International. The speedy riddim and buoyant chromaticism came blasting through the speakers as front man Mr. World, in his expressively monotone fashion, sang "plenty bottoms in de road:' Browne's character yelled for it to be "locked off;' before the end of the chorus, "what a barn barn! Shake it up, shake it up:' She said: Imagine me a go put my good bottom in de government road. You could imagine dat? Look, you see me good bum? I have no desire to hang my bottom. Neither hang it, floss it, nor park it in de road. 'Tall.3 1 72 C HAPTER TWO Soca, Sense, and Decorum in St. Vincent and Grenada Friday, I was on Fort Street watching the parade and I see a slim ting Up and dung in she tong [thong] [Embodying the slim ting, she straightens her back and swivels her head side to side, affecting an air of confidence] [Bending toward the audience] She feel-say she look good, you see? [ She takes a beat and squarely faces the crowd] She bottom mark up like an atlas! She got the Caribbean on the left and Europe on the right [ She points to her left and right buttocks respectively.] I hear a little boy say, "Mommy, Mommy! Look, look! ... [Beat] St. Vincent and the Grenadines:' [Imitating the little boy, she bends low, extends her hand, and points her finger eagerly toward the imaginary butt]. Spread across multiple inset layers of imagining, the moment the little boy sees a map of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the blemished skin of a woman's exposed bottom at carnival is also the moment when the imaginary woman's body, led by her butt, is revealed to have always been a navigational tool for triangulating the changing status of "things" -of local society, the nation, the Caribbean, and the larger world. Attendees of the National Carnival Queen Pageant tend to be Kittitian-Nevisian residents or visitors from neighboring eastern Caribbean islands. Their familiarity with the silhouette of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, or at least its archipelagic shape, registered in the howling laughter that followed the joke (fig. 2.4). Other island imaginaries, such as those reflected in images from 1992 associated with Colombian champeta music, make similar connections with women's behinds and the mapping of units-islands-of sound in relation (fig. 2.5). Research from St. Vincent and the Grenadines underscores the conceptual junction formed by the atlas-assed woman in the story, Browne's use of the verb "feel-say;' and the political stakes of the pageant. 32 Roger Abrahams's ethnography of St. Vincent discusses sense and nonsense in terms of their relativity to time, place, and audience, noting how prevalent a subject speech and decorum were in daily exchange: "the amount of talk one hears about talk on the island ... [is] truly striking:' 33 He concluded that for Black peasant West Indian societies, performances of decorous and indecorous speech acts were a central conduit for the dramatized interplay of establishing fluency and logic and for performatively and creatively departing from them. If sense is an ideal, then nonsense juxtaposes sense by departing from it in THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 73 t • • FIG u RE 2.4. Silhouette of St. Vincent and Grenadines. © Creal Art I dreamstime.com. https: / /www .dreamstime.com /saint-vincent-s-grenadines-map-silhouette-vector-illustration-isolated-white-back ground-saint-vincent-s-grenadines-map-imagel25896118. "perceptible" ways. "Being totally out of control of the language;' he believed, was not speech at all but "making noise:' 34 Abrahams's consideration of speech in St. Vincent and Nevis as performance buoys my argument that the performance and appraisal of manners of speech and conventional acts of music making are governed by similar logics recognized in the social economies of these Caribbean islands. It is equally likely that a Kittitian or Nevisian comment on a skilled demonstration of colloquial speech or a particularly good musical performance as "sweet:' When the riddim emanating from a drum machine creates an especially driving groove, knowledgeable listeners might remark that the producer or keyboardist is "making de box talk:' Abrahams argues: "Everyday communicative behavior is judged on the same terms as more stylized performances. 74 CHAPTER TWO FIG u RE 2.5. Arriba Caribeiio Vol. 2, compilation album cover inscribing dance music styles from across the Caribbean on a woman's bottom using an ink-stamp. Reprinted in Deborah Pacini Hernandez, "A View from the South: Spanish Caribbean Perspectives on World Beat;' World of Music 35, no. 2 (1993): 66. Little distinction is made between formally and obviously structured expressive performances-such as singing a song, dancing, or telling a folk taleand ordinary expressive interactions. Thus while there would be no confusion in the community between a Carnival song and an everyday argument, they would be recognized as being related to each other as controlled contest forms and evaluated as performances:' 35 More than being judged by the same evaluative terms, everyday com - municative behavior often occurs as stylized as events that are understood as performances. Browne's performance of an animated "giving word" ("gee wuhd;' as my grandmother might have said) was not any more expressive than an offstage version shared between friends. Expressive components of her monologue-like bringing in language from currently circulating songs; making associative linkages between topics, sounds, concepts, and tenses; demonstrating kinetic energy; singing, dancing, and embodying various characters-are all characteristics of everyday communication in St. Kitts THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 75 and Nevis. The stage magic of rehearsed musical cues and impeccable hair and makeup are the biggest things differentiating Browne's performance from others, just like it, happening elsewhere. It is exactly her performance of familiarity, with its different forms and logics of speech and relation that are meaningful in St. Kitts and Nevis, that marks Browne's presentation as masterful in the pageant. Her ability to affect a Kittitian accent and use it to critique the behavior of Black women marks her performance as authentic, decorous, and funny in its focus and metaperformance of (mis)behavior that is inauthentic, indecorous, and illogical. Tings Change, Part 1: Women's Contagion Tishima Browne's dramatic monologue on the threatened respectability of women during carnival time delighted the crowd. Prancing back and forth on the stage, she conjured an elder who was exasperated with the behavioral norms of today's young women. Browne weaves this thread throughout her monologue: Tings really change, you know? Everybody talk about how things ain' change. Yes, tings change. Starting with we music. Long time, you could have take a li'l chip. [ She subtly sways her hips and walks stage left.] Back then, the music didn't have to come with no warning label and instructions. De music these days could kill you. How you mean? Long time you ain't hear, "De Lay Lay Shang Shang, De Lay Lay Shang Shang:' [She sings the chorus of a popular 1977 Ellie Matt calypso.] But you know, your heart ain't beating too fast, you taking you li'l chip and you eyeing somebody husband-"Hey, goodnight:' Nowadays ... [A snippet of a soca song begins to play from the speakers. As if possessed, she shakes her body violently, with her arms jerking wildly around her. She punches the air and flails her head. The music stops and she stops, too. Bent over as if exhausted, she places her hands on her knees and pants.] Dat dey enough to give you a double heart attack and chikungunya. Tings not the same. Nowadays, everybody want to play Simon Says for the Carnival. If the song say "clothes off" with that, nobody stops to think 76 C HAPTER TWO Brap! Everybody naked! Tings just not de same .... To me we schizophrenic. You hear me? To me, we schizophrenic. Because one day you could see a man and a woman unashamedly wukin it and chookin' it half naked through the streets in Carnival. Then the next day, they well decent decent in de bank a walk and give me attitude .... Ain't my fault the man behind me watchin' you bad because he can't believe you own clothes .... Schizophrenic, I tell you. You forget! You forget when your forehead was on the ground and your bumper was in the air? You want decent man? You want to get married? You catch fish based on the bait you set out. If you set a rat trap, what you expect to catch? A rat! 36 Browne's bikini top was somewhat obscured under the colorful, oversized cowl of her folkloric quadrille masquerade costume-another performative regional approximation of local heritage. The slit in her long and colorful, plaid wraparound skirt revealed the short shorts she wore underneath. The suggestiveness of her costume bolstered the claims of her character, who ex - claimed at the end of her speech, "You see me? I am going to dance and have fun, but not at the expense of my dignitY:' In an effort to describe how women's behavior has become radically different since the mid-twentieth century, when national carnival began, Browne's character compared Ellie Matt's "Shang Shang" (1977) to Iwer George's "Let Me See Yuh Hand" (2001) as an example of down-tempo, easy music that accompanied innocuous flirting and was conducive to a woman's living a fun but productive and otherwise meaningful life.37 Browne's ability to use her body to represent the wild, uncontrolled, and deleterious effects of the fast music-the pace of which could cause a "double heart attack"-comically stood in direct contrast to her performances of an earlier time and music. Most striking to me was her character's assertion that dancing to that music could also give a listener chikungunya, a viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes that first appeared in the Caribbean islands in 2014. The collapsing of a contemporary ailment with the timeless degeneracy of Black womenand the injection of the notion of contagion and disease-is a true constant of carnival celebration and the recurrent discourse surrounding women's participation in the annual national event. The crowd howled with delight when Browne mimicked the fast-walking and stone-faced bank employees THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 77 on Monday morning after having spent the previous weekend participating heartily in carnival activities. She was affecting a commonly understood persona: the professional woman. While public performances of respectable Black womanhood have become a marker of modernity and cultural progress in the Caribbean, regional notions of respectability have broadened-or at least shifted and meldedwith what Carla Freeman has described as a "discourse of professionalism'' that, by the early 2000s, superseded respectability as the new form of aspirational culture for women in the Caribbean. 38 In the wake of neoliberal economic policies and significant changes in the labor landscape across the Caribbean, professionalism-as displayed by what Freeman has called "pink collar workers" in Barbados-is characterized in part by ideas and objects like punctuality, productivity, high heels, makeup, and most importantly, "the promise represented by the computer:' 39 Essentially, an embrace of some aspects of US corporate culture has come to coexist with (if not replace) aspects of traditional respectability such that, as Edmondson argues, the upper middle class of the Caribbean "does not see its women 'wining' in the streets at Carnival as incompatible with the professional discourses of the office and the upwardly mobile home:' 40 This may be the case comparatively speakingthat is, a professional, middle-class woman can now be seen enjoying herself at carnival in a way that would have been disastrously disreputable for her fifty years ago-however, even as respectability has shifted to professionalism and the good news of gender equality has reached the shores of postcolonial nations like St. Kitts and Nevis, the resistive pleasure of Black women's wining is best enjoyed as a counter to an otherwise fully realized middle-class existence. Feminist campaigns to promote wining as a normal part of Black Caribbean women's sociality rely heavily on images of Black women doctors, lawyers, and politicians who also wine. While the vision of the Black woman wining in the street may not be incompatible with contemporary notions of professionalism, Browne's performance suggests that the performance of an older prevailing logic is still relevant. In referring to the switching between carnival behavior and professionalism as "schizophrenic;' she points to an incongruence in women's social behavior that is indicative of other kinds of social ills of the nation. Other parts of the five-minute monologue elaborate: bad men are chosen by disrespectful, sick, schizophrenic women who believe that their bodies are attractive enough-despite dark, marked skin-to be paraded and unclothed in the streets; women who wear thongs in the street are schizophrenic to believe that they should have any say in the type of attention they receive as a result. 41 Women who desire marriage and family will be unable to catch a good man. CHAPTER TWO Evidenced by the following examples-and, as noted by M. Jacqui Alexander, standing as a challenge to colonial ideology of the nuclear heterosexual and patriarchal family-female sexuality and erotic autonomy have historically been problematic for the state. This is particularly true because adherence to colonial notions of citizenship "perpetuate[s] the fiction that the family is the cornerstone of society;' while erotic autonomy "signals danger to the heterosexual family and to the nation:' In this way, citizenship is "perennially colonized with reproduction and heterosexuality" such that "erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely, a possible charge of irresponsible citizenship, or no responsibility at all:'42 Female sexual autonomy, then, "signals danger to respectability-not only respectable middleclass families, but most significantly to Black middle-class womanhood:' In Alexander's discussion of female erotic autonomy in the Bahamas, she notes that lesbians and prostitutes are seen as "major symbols of threat" for their "embodiment of the dangerous eroticism:' 43 However, in much popular discourse, it is the dancing woman-embodying her supposed neglect of motherly duties and lack of sexual chastity, and standing in apparent contradiction to colonial middle-class mores-who symbolizes a threat to Kittitian and Nevisian citizenship. Working within the frame of respectability and reputation, scholars of Caribbean women's issues (such as Carla Freeman and Belinda Edmondson) have broached the topic of a broadened notion of resistance and unconventional avenues toward respectability. As these scholars have noted, the outward performance of female sexual prowess works in direct contradiction to typical ideals of respectability. While globalized movement and change have long been parts of both the Caribbean economic context, the "flexibility" brought about by neoliberal economic policies has begged for research that, in Freeman's words, "shed[s] light on some of the ways in which respectability is sought, contested, and is actively re-constituted in the contemporary context:' 44 In this way, Freeman sees respectability as no longer functioning solely as a form of gendered oppression and sexualized nation building. Instead-in line with ideological notions of the neoliberal agenda's emphasis on individualism-she suggests that various actors employ respectability differently as a tool. Naturally, some are in positions to utilize it to more beneficial ends than others. With this in mind, Freeman focuses on professionalism as taking the place of respectability insofar as professionalism is considered a way of circumventing the traditional respectable role of the keeper of private aspects of daily life (including staying at home with children, cooking, cleaning, and attaining patriarchal, familial association with the male head of household who financially maintains the family by working outside THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 79 of the home) through the accumulation of wealth and status via traditionally male roles. 45 In her work on middle-class or middlebrow culture on islands such as Jamaica and Trinidad, Belinda Edmondson also suggests that in these larger Caribbean nations, traditional respectability has been replaced by Americanstyle professionalism. This professionalism is "informed by a familiarity with American manifestations of middle-class culture;' such as reading romance novels and participating in beauty pageants, where the beauty pageant "covers roughly the same terrain as the romance novel-social aspiration, nationalism, and pleasure:' 46 Respectability through professionalism in some Caribbean contexts refers to the power to consume American goods and affect a sense of African American middle-class femininity. In the contemporary moment, colonial respectability can be seen as the specter of ongoing anxieties about modernization, economic growth, nationalism, and cultural authenticity, which manifest in self-realized gender roles.47 It is this self-realization that catalyzes nationalist discourse around the "cultural dance" portion of an annual beauty pageant, while individual performances of local, secular dance are the subject of discussions of fast girls and bad parenting. Next, I discuss one local site of online engagement, at SKNVibes.com, and annual ritualized public performances, queen shows, where those discussions of improper parenting commonly occur. The Toon Center and the Rhetoric of Delinquent Women The Toon Center is a popular aspect of SKNVibes.com, the most prominent news and entertainment website in St. Kitts-Nevis. Every day, a cartoon depiction of local cultural criticism is posted, and not surprisingly, many of the topics in the comments section-particularly immediately after carnival and Christmas-concern the behavior of women. Specifically, the cartoons often critique women's association with local music. One cartoon, "Is This What We Encourage?" (posted on January 3, 2014-the day after the end of carnival season), depicts two women dancing on a stage surrounded by conservatively dressed parents and children. One dancer is crouching and facing away from the crowd; the second is standing on her head, smiling widely with one leg in the air. Both women have been drawn with motion lines around them to suggest that their bodies are shaking (fig. 2.6). The eyes of the children are drawn as literally bulging out of their heads. "Is this what we encourage?" The comment section was split. On the one hand, this type of dancing is inherently and explicitly sexual to the point of vulgarity and is a problem that plagues not just St. Kitts and Nevis but Afro-descendant people on a global So CHAPTER TWO FIGURE 2.6. "Is This What We Encourage?" Published in "Toon Center-Is This What We Encourage?; ' SKN Vibes, Januar y 3, 2014, https: //www.sknvibes.com/toon s/details.cfm?Idz=98. Reproduced with permission from SKNVibes.com. scale. One commenter suggested that allowing children to view this type of dancing is a major factor in the prevalence of pregnancy in young girls: I am so glad that the cartoonist did this. From watching and reading the cartoon I realize the emphasis is on the CHILDREN carried those kind of places by ADULTS to watch those kind of VULGARITY or ADULTS behavior. Now, I saw an incident on Dec . 26th, 2013 @ Party Central, where these women was wuking up on stage and the DJ called a 9 year old girl to participate in it. I started shouting out to him, "tek she outta ah it, that's not her place to be:' That was very distasteful. lord forbid, in the next year or 2, she belly big, everybody wants to know what happen . If we as adults exposed children to these things, what do we EXPECT, that they act all holy, No!! Adults, those behavior by children are not CUTE or a LAUGHING thing . STOP n!! let them take their time to grow and enjoy childhood . I HATE it with a PASSION. NOTHING BUT STRIPPERS GONE WILD! NOT A LAUGHING MATTER, BUT A BIG DISGRACE TO OUR RACE! Its not only in Basseterre . Its wherever we gather & they are trying to pass this dry s@x off as dancing and it is NOT! It is a disgrac e to see our young girls and old women too lowering themselves to this kind of behavior . Its very circus like and I don't see animals behaving this way!48 On the other hand, as one comment demonstrates, the other side of this discussion recognizes the possibility for other interpretations of this type of dance. Without specifying exactly who the "we" represents in the historical approximation of this type of public dance, one commenter asks: "Would you prefer we waltz or do the 2-step? The problem is not in and of itself the dancing but our societal values that are warped to place sexual currency to our ac- THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE 81 tions. In some cultures nudity is a way of life yet remember in some countries women would be stoned for indecency simply for showing their eyes. We exported this dance to the world and then reimported it as vulgaritY:'49 In posting local values and criticisms as "warped;' the commenter suggests there was an original or unaltered set of values that would have regarded the display in the cartoon-or at least the display that occurred on December 26, 2013-as culturally relative. In contrasting this dancing, which has been referred to as "vulgar;' with a codified European dance such as the waltz, and with what is an equally codified and generally non-Caribbean folk and popular dance (the two-step), the commenter subtly references a hierarchical valuation of European-or at least non-Caribbean-movement and music over that which is emanating from St. Kitts- Nevis. Of particular interest here, however, is how and why this type of discussion takes place because of, on, and in Black women's bodies. Another cartoon furthers the critique of female bodies and their expected roles. Entitled "Parenting Standards out the Window;' it depicts two relatively scantily dressed, pregnant women interacting in a nightclub setting (fig. 2.7). One woman proclaims her love for the band-presumably a wylers bandand the other agrees, commenting that she wanted to get in her last "jam'' (dance session) before the arrival of her baby. In the background, another young woman stands next to a stroller. Many of the commenters agreed that this type of behavior is a widespread problem, is indicative of skewed priorities, and is proof of the questionable parenting often blamed for many of the social ills-particularly violence, theft, and teen pregnancy-that are perceived as plaguing the nation: FIGURE 2.7. "Parenting Standards out the Window:• Published in "Toon Center-Parenting Standards out the Window;• SKN Vibes, December 11, 2013, https:// www.sknvibes.com /toons/details.cfm?Idz =86. Reproduced with permission from SKNVibes.com. 82 CHAPTER TWO This picture is so true . The young people them feel like them going die if they miss a session . And when they children are born they want them to be different when they don't set an example. Oh plz, a large number ofKittitian women have no moral code, no respect, no principles, nothing and that goes for pregnant and non pregnant . skn woman and dey low standards all bout de place wid big belly in de dance and when jam sweet them a worry and say mine you push me dung when they should be home .. . and if them get shub want cause big scene 50 The idea of these women's pregnant bodies even occupying the space of the dance is indicative, as one person wrote, of a lack of morals, respect, and principles. Another commenter suggests that people who participate in jam sessions or attend dances have some degree of ambivalence toward their own participation. In noting that young citizens behave as though the dance were very important to them but wish for a different set of priorities for their own children, the commenter elucidates the ingrained notions of shame and female appropriateness that underlie many interpersonal interactions despite the nature of the actions themselves. These ingrained notions inform most of the other comments, which are representative of the informal discourse surrounding women, music, and dance in the region. Music-the sounds, the spaces, and the dances-constitutes one site of struggle over the regulation of sexuality or the performance and rehearsal of rituals of regulation. 51 Tings Change, Part 2: Queen Shows and the Pedagogy of Desire In the discourse surrounding women's bodies and behavior is a tension between public displays of immorality by Black women as the product of innate degeneracy and as an effect of an unwelcome foreign imposition. Women are harbingers and markers of change. Regarding the way women dance publicly in St. Kitts and Nevis, my uncle Irving noted: There's a saying in the Caribbean : "Where tings does start is not where it does end:' It started one way, and now it's a completely different thing . It started as sensualism and turned into extreme sexualism bordering on vulgarity . .. I guess the music has a lot to do with it. Music has such power . 52 The power of music to influence-to infect, to contaminate-is a guiding principle by which beauty pageant contestants are expected to perform. On beauty pageants in the US Virgin Islands in the 1990s, Cynthia Oliver writes: THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE As a training ground for upward mobility, the contest imposes restrictions to which contestants must be willing to adhere . These strictures eliminate the "rude gal;' the Carnival "mas dancer;' and the "dance hall queen;' women whose values or talents are explicitly based on their abilities publicly to demonstrate their sexual prowess . The pageant queen is the antithesis of this woman . She is not asexual but rather is, as Williams suggests, "in control:' Upper-middleclass and elite women do not perform their sexuality in public. They indicate . Their dancing in public spaces offers a measure of sensuality . Where "wukkin up" or "goin' on bad" (explicit imitations of intercourse) might be the most obvious demonstrations of what a woman's hips and legs can do sexually, the "cultured" woman "wines" swaying her hips gently in a smooth figure eight or a circle. She gestures somewhat demurely toward sexual possibility, not allowing herself to get worked up, to really sweat. She remains cool, dignified, and controlled while demonstrating an obvious knowledge and valuing of calypso and its accompanying dancing . She is not trying to say that she is not a part of local culture but instead communicates that she knows it well and still can hint at the sexually knowledgeable woman who lies underneath her veneer, unleashed only under the most personal of circumstances . 53 This is the pedagogy of desire. My interlocutors who participated in queen shows suggest that the performance of "not allowing" -both symbolically with their movements and more literally in song lyrics and dramatic monologues-is also a central feature of Kittitian-Nevisian pageantry and a marker of respectability. Performing respectability in the queen show-as with any regime of differentiation-often includes scathing (if humorous) critiques of the degenerate, unappealing Black woman figure as scapegoat for the nation's ailments. This is an interesting reprisal of a popular form ofNeagar Business, where lower-class men discussed, made jokes about, and theatricalized circulating gossip about members of the upper and planter classes, and sometimes others of their own class who were not adhering to the social codes of the time. While lower-class women were typically present for festivities, the actors and musicians in Neagar Business troupes were almost invariably men. Within the troupe, at least one man was designated to play a woman, donning a dress or skirt and padding his body to create exaggerated breasts or a bottom as necessary for each skit. Queen shows, as they were imported with carnival from Trinidad, were intended to function as an elevated alternative to the "lower" forms of Christmas entertainment. The first carnival queen show was held on December 31, 1957, in Basseterre's Warner Park-the same park that housed the celebrations of Princess Margaret's visit in 1955 and Queen Elizabeth's in 1966.54 The 1957 show showcased the daughters of St. Kitts' wealthiest white and mixed-race CHAPTER TWO FIG u RE 2.8. Judy Mestier (left), the first winner of the St. Kitts Carnival Queen title, 1957. "Carnival - New Years Day;' Historic St. Kitts (Nation al Archives, St. Kitts & Nevis), accessed March 13, 2023, https: // www.historicstkitts.kn/events/carnival. Image courtesy of the National Archives, St. Kitts and Nevis. residents, and much of the commentary describing the evening's events likened the contestants' "charm and grace" to that of Princess Margaret. The winner, Judy Mestier, was described in the St. Kitts-Nevis Tribune as fine as "Dresden China'' with beautiful qualities like a "moonlight nocturne" (fig. 2.8). The late 1950s also saw the peak of nationalist and pro-independence sentiments, which had grown exponentially in the preceding decade. St. Kitts' most expansive labor movement-the impetus for its first proletariat political party-had begun in earnest in the late 1930s. By the late 1940s, it was headed by Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw. The year 1951 saw what Vincent Hubbard has described as "the greatest shift of power in St. Kitts since Europeans had displaced Indians in the early 17th century"; all Leeward Island citizens received popular suffrage and "were able to vote and control their own destinY:'55 Bradshaw, who by 1952 was leader of both the Trade and Labour Union and the Workers' League, the governing political party in St. Kitts, was also a vocal supporter of the pending West Indies Federation. Ultimately, the Federated West Indies project failed, although during its short-lived tenure, Bradshaw served as minister of finance from 19 58 to 1962, when the federation dissolved. As the Black middle class grew, and Black Kittitian-born governmental representation was installed, critiques of lower-class expressive forms shifted to focus on poor Black women and girls.56 By the 1960s, when the talent portion was added as a standard segment of pageants, performances that critiqued the behavior of outsiders-particularly lower-class, "unrespectable" Black women-became a normal feature of the queen show. Sometimes the depic- THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE tions were empathetic: a grieving mother laments not having sent her sons to Sunday school because they are both imprisoned criminals, or a schoolgirl details the hardships created by mothers who allow their daughters to be sexually abused in exchange for money. But the underlying theme was that Black women who are bad mothers are a significant source of national ailments. This performative formulation bears resemblance to Roger Abrahams's description of symbolic landscapes in St. Vincent in the 1960s: "It is only the most egregiously rude-the thief, the vexatious fellow, or the child who has no sense-who directs community contempt on himself and reflects badly on the woman who has raised him. She can control the melee (malicious gossip) only by making a kind of repeated public confession, called a cursing, that the boy is unmanageable even in her yard; by this the community ascribes the fault, at least in part, to bad spirit in the child and not to bad upbringing:' 57 We might read these queen show skits as a ritualized performance of a similar kind of motherly grievance on a contemporary public stage. Warner Park is a multifunctional space: it has been an arena for royal pomp and circumstance; it has hosted decades of cricket matches; and every year it turns into Carnival Village, the official space where events such as the Calypso King and Queen finals, the Soca Monarch and Miss Talented Teen competitions, and the National Carnival Queen Pageant take place. As is customary for this latter event, one band provides all the live music for the pageant and offers a twenty- to thirty-minute performance before the "evening wear" segment, which is typically followed by pronouncement of the winner. Green House-billed "The Number 1 Rock and Reggae Band from St. Kitts and Nevis"-provided the musical accompaniment in 2012-2013.58 The polished band played a number of American R&B and Top 40 hits between pageant segments. The band's set list included a rendition of Psy's "Gangnam Style" - complete with carefully approximated Korean lyrics-and a fifteen-minute loop of the chorus of Rihanna's hit "Shine Bright Like a Diamond" to accompany the evening-wear parade. Green House's accompaniment added a Black, American, and upscale feel to the event. Like many of the Caribbean events broadcast on American TV (particularly BET), a foreign-looking, light-skinned, young woman from Barbados hosted the event. Her presence seemed to be an affront to many in the audience who wondered why a Bajan (Barbadian) would host their national queen pageant. 59 Throughout the evening, she was the butt of many of the crowd's jokes. For example, when she paused briefly after stumbling over her words, a man yelled toward the stage, "You suppose' to come from Barbados and you cyan' read?" At one point in the evening, the host playfully remarked that she heard "St. Kitts and Nevis people can wine almost as good as Bajans:' She didn't use the 86 C HAPTER TWO correct nomenclature for persons from St. Kitts and Nevis, and in response, one woman in the crowd stood up and shouted, "They let you come here when you ain' even know we are Kittitians and Nevisians?" With a fake, highpitched British affect she added, ''And we don't wine!" Leaning back slowly into her chair, she concluded in a deep, comical Kittitian accent: "We does wuk up!" Rattling the Barricades The participatory nature of the National Carnival Queen Pageant is evidence of the fully local and folklorized nature of the event. For audience members, the queen show has an air similar to any rowdy calypso show of the season. Each time I attended a calypso show with my cousin Fiona, I was tickled by the vigor of her participation. We'd arrive early to get seats toward the front of the stage, chatting and laughing with other early arrivals, and grab concessions before the start of the show. By the middle of the first calypsonian's song, Fiona had both feet stuck between the poles of the metal fence between audience and stage, leaning the top of her body over to yell more directly and emphatically at and with the performers. I could not anticipate what she might say. Anything from "Dat ain' de right key!" for a performer singing under pitch, to more traditional exclamations, like "Kaiso!" would fly out in her distinctively husky voice. While I knew about calypso, had memorized lyrics of Lord Kitchener and Mighty Sparrow songs, and had a solid grasp of the tradition's history, I had not experienced calypso as a live participant in the intense, swirling, loud context of a carnival-time calypso tent. Fiona laughed at me in the way that big cousins do. Gripping the top of the metal fence, she chastised me playfully, shaking with each word. "You're supposed to yell back, Jess!" The metal barricade, especially as Fiona used it as a platform for responses and critiques of the calypsos, was an anchor for her own stream of sound, interpretation, and improvisation. The song "By de Breath;' by calypsonian King Komis, wittily describes how Komis is so ahead of his competitors that they are gassed and spent in an attempt to keep up with him. He sings "They breaking a sweat, hear them'' as backup singers breathe heavily and rhythmically.60 Fiona, by the second chorus, was shaking her water bottle around, yelling, "Baai! Gee dem dis! Look like dey need some wata!" (Give them this! It looks like they need some water). While Fiona, then in her early forties and a respected high school teacher, would not be spotted during J'ouvert with her legs on a metal fence, something about her engagement with the barrier, her playful touch and utilization of it, reminded me of other engagements with those metal fences I had seen in the days and years before. THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE To Fiona, the metal barricades invited a kind of engagement with the performance on the other side. The materiality of individual barricadesportable, relatively transparent-meant that the instrument was more symbolic than anything else. It was clear that what such barricades signaled was a recurrent pretext for what they were actually used for. The metal fences are among the physical things that transform the various spaces, like Fort Thomas Hotel and Warner Park, into venues for the kinds of events that mark the recurrence of different seasons on the islands-Christmastime, carnival season, the "off-season" music festivals in the summer. The same barricades mark the winding path new arrivals are forced to traverse from the sweltering tarmac of Bradshaw International Airport to the customs kiosks. Being perpetually marked as outsiders and anomalies, Black women are in close conceptual proximity to colonial categorical boundaries policed through discourses and performances of restraint, morality, and contagion. Pushed into those positions, Black Kittitian and Nevisian women have historically stood on, wrapped around, danced on, and shouted from the barricades, rattling the fences and making these boundaries useful by highlighting their contradictions. This enactment of oomanship is predicated on a learned "ability to read a concrete situation of power and consciously choose an ideological position that poses the most adequate opposition to [a] power configuration:' 61 Conclusion: Oomanship and the Ideal Beauty Pageant Queen The ideal image of the beauty pageant queen is characterized by a certain level of extreme bodily control via willpower, wisdom, and training. For Tishima Browne, her body moved slowly, and seduction lay in her reservedness. To conjure the pathological Black woman, Browne threw her body around wildly and made specific reference to the speed of the music, which carried diseases of the body (chikungunya) and the mind (schizophrenia). The degenerate Black woman, in her portrayal, also affected a sense of pathological speed in her moving quickly and unselfconsciously between the carnival road to the bank lobby, where her fast walking-another form of bodily speed with social meaning-was read as a farce. If the seventeenth-century notions of creole contagion were predicated on the idea that New World inhabitants contaminated the "pure" aesthetic, social, and cultural forms of the Old World, Browne's representation of the pathologically ill Black woman gestures toward similar ideas. Within Browne's performance, we are able to see an explicit castigation of Black women in relation to fast, regional music-laying out often unspoken 88 C HAPTER TWO yet ever-present ideas. She emphasizes that the music and the women who dance to it are ill; the pathologically fast music constitutes a unidirectional relationship wherein male musicians tell women to engage in socially deviant behavior and the women comply without question or regard-like a game of Simon Says. Browne invokes professionalism as an area where women participate in another kind of socially deviant speed, because their professionalism is fundamentally incompatible with having "your bottom in de road:' 62 Browne briefly mentions the bad behavior of men, but she emphasizes that women's pathological behavior begets the wrong kind of attention (in the bank and elsewhere) and precludes participation in other respectable institutions such as marriage. In noting that some women want to be married but behave in a manner that attracts that wrong kinds of men-"rats" -Browne's monologue participates in a much larger body of social commentary that dangles aspirational and respectable social mores (like a professional job and heterosexual, monogamous marriage). It is important to note that Browne did not write the monologue herself. Beauty pageant contestants throughout the Caribbean region are groomed and trained by an extensive team of "handlers;' many of whom have participated in pageants themselves as contestants, talent producers, costume designers, or coaches. So we might better understand Browne's monologue as an amalgamation of ideas meant to do a particular kind of nostalgia work in holding up national ideologies. She took on a deep Kittitian accent and drew the crowd in through the idea of superlocal knowledge. As an ambassador of St. Kitts-Nevis, her job requires knowing local culture, and that requires demonstrating that she is aware of local values-especially with regard to Black women, who function as an almost singular barometer of the nation's moral status. Despite changes in contemporary social politics and normsincluding the general acceptance of professional women ( e.g., women who own homes and cars and are financially autonomous)- the moral status of the nation becomes even more bound up with the status of "respectable women;' as St. Kitts and Nevis becomes more visible and accessible in the global tourism and economic scene. Key to Browne's performance is that she was portraying a woman whose ideas of what is socially acceptable and which kinds of music promote respectable behavior were presumably formed during a much earlier time, before independence. She portrayed a body that was too frail to comfortably dance to the tempo of contemporary Caribbean music. However, if, as Browne's performance suggested, the mas dancer and the bank clerk are understood to an older generation as socially incompatible, then the silhouette of new representations of Black womanhood are steeped in familiarly THE PEDAGOGY OF PACE paradoxical worldviews. Oomanship, then, as a subjectivity, as a form of personhood, cannot be measured by any one act or even any pattern of acts. It must be measured by the autonomous decision to perform different, seemingly antithetical ways of being, particularly with an awareness that a set of physical parameters (a Black, feminized body) precludes equal recognition. Oomanship describes a set of ideals and philosophies that articulate an optimistic sense of Black women's survival. Browne's monologue similarly hinges on a shared understanding of wylers as containing nested deviations from expectations. Before 2015, wylers was widely considered derivative, backward, indicative of a diminished musical capacity, and a product of decolonial nationalism's failure to provide the sonic corollary of a foundational myth. Many of these critiques have been mapped on to temporal norms-locally constituted temporal thresholds or frames-that posit wylers and its adherent sonic and bodily practices as "too fast:' The following chapter expands the temporal scale of this political context.