Three editions of the Jamaica Times from 1905. Images from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Some weeks back, Antilles’ “In hand” series cast a glance at Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow, which examines — as her subtitle has it — “leisure culture and the middle class” in the Caribbean, with a focus on Jamaica and Trinidad. This week the CRB publishes a full review by Brendan de Caires — as well as Vanessa Spence’s review of Pauline Melville’s novel Eating Air.

Caribbean Middlebrow covers a broad range of cultural phenomena, including “mid-nineteenth-century novels, fin-de-siècle newspapers, the gentrification of dialect poetry, the social politics of beauty pageants and jazz festivals, and transnational markets for popular fiction.” Edmondson has clearly put in some time in the archives, and readers who might like to follow her — investigating, say, how a nascent West Indian literary culture was charted in late-nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century newspapers — could do worse than browse the virtual stacks of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or dLOC, a project of the University of Florida. This is a searchable library of digitised documents and publications — maps, photographs, books, journals, pamphlets, newspaper clippings and whole newspapers — all freely accessible to scholars, students, and ordinary readers. The Jamaica Times thumbnails above come from dLOC, where you can read entire editions of the paper from c. 1905. So does this film poster by the Cuban artist Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, designed for the 1975 Italian version of Zorro starring Alain Delon — which I’m reproducing here simply because I like it (three cheers for archives!):

Zorro poster (1976), by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs. Image from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

The history of leisure culture in the Anglophone Caribbean for the last 150 years is very much the story of the nascent black middle class and the aspiring black middle class, striving to reconcile their origins in black-identified culture with its aspirations for social ascendance and international recognition . . . There are intellectual histories that address the emergence of the black and brown middle class in the Caribbean, but these tell a story of political, not cultural, ascendance. Authentic Caribbean culture is assumed to be the preserve of the working class.

“Middlebrow” is a heavily loaded word, generally used disparagingly to describe an attitude to art and culture rooted in social aspirations and anxieties, rather than aesthetic or intellectual appreciation. Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class, a new book by Belinda Edmondson, caught my eye the other day as I was sorting through the pile of recently arrived review books. Edmondson, who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has written “a history of middle-class popular culture . . . aspirational culture — in the English-speaking Caribbean from the mid-nineteenth century to the present moment.” On a quick skim, it looks like a fascinating contribution to the recent and exponentially growing body of scholarship on the Caribbean “popular.” I’m looking forward both to a more careful read and to the full review that will appear soon in the CRB.

Edmondson’s history starts with late-nineteenth-century newspaper culture in Jamaica and Trinidad, then moves on to “Brownness, Social Desire, and the Early Novel” (Emmanuel Appadocca, Rupert Gray, Jane’s Career) and the “gentrifying” of dialect poetry by Louise Bennett. Subsequent chapters look at beauty pageants, the proliferation of jazz festivals across the Caribbean, and the Calabash Literary Festival’s efforts to market itself as “a standard of Caribbean literary authenticity.” The final chapter looks at recent Caribbean pop fiction, focusing on Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction, Colin Channer’s “urban relationship novels,” and Valerie Belgrave’s romances, examining the interactions and contradictions between literary ambitions and marketing imperatives, aesthetics and branding. Here, for example, is Edmondson’s take on Channer and “the ‘new’ Caribbean writing . . . inspired by a globally positioned ‘reggae aesthetic’”:

Positioning himself as a sort of America-inspired literary rebel, Channer takes as his creed the Bob Marley lyric “I want to disturb my neighbour”: in other words, literature should provoke.

Provoke what, though? It is hard to see any, save erotic, provocations in his oeuvre, most of which derives from the popular African American “urban relationship” genre, despite his insistence to the contrary. (Indeed, the “new” aesthetic in Channer’s work seems to consist mostly of a tendency toward explicit depictions of sex.)

You can read the opening chapter of Caribbean Middlebrow, “Making the Case for Middlebrow Culture”, at the eScholarship website.