Preface: Talking about Culture: Re-thinking the Popular

S ince the late 1920s, Caribbean popular culture has been the subject of an incessant critical conversation among the cultural practitioners, intellectuals and critics of the region. This conversation is evident in the numerous attempts to produce local models of politics, aesthetics and philosophy, and it frames the discourses of political and cultural decolonization, the sentiments of the nationalist moment, and the claims of citizenship, identity and belonging. The popular has often been conflated with the national in ways that emphasize the latter as a primary ontological category, a foundational principle that is both source and destination of cultural practices. This is the principle that subtends Frantz Fanon’s incisive assertion of the nation as the guarantor of a national culture, and it also resonates in C.L.R. James’s reading of the Trinidad Carnival as a possible model for a Caribbean political imaginary, a democratic space which inscribes freedom in its very modalities of collective participation, and non-hierarchical creative performance. There are other assertions that deploy the popular in the service of a variety of ethnonationalisms and reductive populisms that stake out the interests of particular groups in the conflictual terrain of postcolonial nation states. Regardless of intent and effect, the varied assertions point to the centrality of popular culture in Caribbean thought.