The secondary status of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music is explored with an emphasis on recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, and reggae as the region’s most widely globalized music. Early guitarists in Jamaican popular music, Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt, are referenced, alongside analyses of the instrument in the reggae recordings of The Wailers, and the works of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh featuring other players such as Donald Kinsey in lead guitar roles. The chapter utilizes first-hand interviews with key figures and also focuses on Eddy Grant as one of the most visible Caribbean guitarists through his international pop star career spanning several decades. The twenty-first-century emergence of the Trinidad-based metal act Orange Sky, fusing rock and reggae influences, is also discussed.

This chapter explores how Black youth in the British colony of Bermuda engaged decolonization, Black Power, and Black internationalism through Reggae, Dancehall, and sound system culture in the “global 1990s.” Centered on a racially charged 1995 referendum on independence in which, out of 58.8 percent of eligible voters, 73.6 percent voted against and 25.7 percent voted for independence, it argues that it is critical to explore Black anticolonialism through soundscapes and not just ballot politics, as Black Bermuda is a sonic culture. The era’s Reggae sound system clashes often invoked long-standing racial and colonial tensions, such as one between Bermuda’s Souljah One and British DJ David Rodigan. Through archives drawn from print media, government surveillance, and audio recordings, it shows that while sound system culture could not “free decolonization,” it played a crucial role in galvanizing the Black and working-class Progressive Labor Party’s youth base in its first political victory in 1998.

This chapter shifts the discussion of globalisation onto Jamaica’s reggae and dub musics, introducing readers to an international network of sound system cultures that, by borrowing upon Jamaica’s history of musical innovation and Rasta ideology, helped to create subgenres based around more localised notions of inclusivity. Through this analysis, the chapter provides a chronological deconstruction of globalisation, introducing some of the ideological and musical features of Jamaican reggae and dub that became pulled into the commercialised ‘global pop’ margins through these sub-genres.

The parallel and intersecting relationships among the written and oral literatures, folklore, musics, performative arts, and orature of the Anglophone Caribbean have been well documented, giving rise to a large body of critical work in literary and cultural studies by scholars such as Mervyn Morris, Kamau Brathwaite, Gordon Rohlehr, and Funso Ayejina. Sustained treatments such as Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1993), Kwame Dawes’ Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing (1999), and special issues of academic journals illustrate the growing acknowledgement of these oral–scribal intersections. With a steady growth from the 1920s onward, these cross-genre, cross-media fertilizations reached a high point in the 1970s with the rise and globalization of new forms/expressions of urban music, against the background of major local, regional, and global shifts such as the escalation of nationalist contentions; the Black Power movement; and in Jamaica, the ‘official’ recognition of Rastafari, and the emergence of new dub poetry and other newer genres. The consolidation and recognition of the synergies between orature and literature have in turn fashioned a substantial body of theorizations and scholarly contemplations out of which have emerged terms such as oraliterature, novelylspo, reggae aesthetic, among others.

Waves of early twentieth-century Asian migration to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean migration to and from Panama bankrolled the education of a new black and brown middle class. This essay argues that we can hold more of the Caribbean literary tradition within a single frame if we reconfigure the archive so as to highlight the moments when the educational advances the concurrent migrations facilitated allowed both African and Asian Caribbean communities to exert greater control over the terms of their representation. It advances three approaches to rethinking Caribbean literary history. The first examines how early twentieth-century Caribbean fiction represents both groups’ changing attitudes towards money and modern subjectivity. The second considers how migrants’ counterintuitive investments in imperial expansion complicate the political stakes in Caribbean nationalist narratives. The third juxtaposes literary and non-literary forms of cultural production in Jamaica and Panama to demonstrate how, in privileging written texts, we obscure the contributions marginalized groups make to what we think of as national cultures.