Professor Jessica Swanston Baker (University of Chicago)
This event will take place via Zoom at this link>
Abstract:
The historically unprecedented diasporic popularity of wilders, a genre of carnival music from the Eastern Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, can be attributed to the entrepreneurialism of young Black women. Acting as public pedagogues, these women have used social media platforms such as instagram and TikTok as spaces for teaching the technical and kinesthetic distinctions between Afro-diasporic dancing styles. With some songs and riddims going "viral" within these circles, wilders, a previously unintelligible style of ultra-uptempo music, has become recognizable on the global scene as one kind of music specifically for wining: skillfully rolling, rocking, and isolating ones hips and backside. In the wake of a pop cultural moment when the term “twerk” has come to [mis]represent every kind of butt-shaking tradition in popular globalized discourse, these social media pedagogues are promoting Caribbean cultural productions, especially youth music and dance, in ways that are both resistive to the homogenizing impulses of neoliberalism, and heavily adapted to its monetizing logic. By contextualizing Black women's social media pedagogy within the broader history of Black women's bodily public performance in the Caribbean, I ask, how might understanding wining as a form of pedagogy shed different light on previous generations of Caribbean women and their relationship to music production?