Island Time

A close look at how wylers, a popular musical style from the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, expresses a unique mode of relation in the postcolonial Caribbean.

In Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that its speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations to the promises of economic modernity, women’s bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy, and material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago thus emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance and make it a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.