The literary and sonic traditions of the archipelago are equally critical to Caribbean study. The musical soundtrack of island life is inseparable from studying the radical political tradition of the region, and I center this approach in a course I have been teaching since 2015 titled Caribbean Writing, Reggae, and Routes. Vernacular oral traditions trace the roots and routes of the Caribbean and its diaspora to Africa, Asia, and Europe. Each year that I teach the course, music and the sounds of natural and built environments become more essential to the argument of Caribbean critical theory and much more than an accompaniment to novels and poetry featured on the syllabus. In the course, which is both born-digital and born-musical, students annotated literature and songs using online platforms in the first iteration in 2015.1 The course has become more digitally and musically engaged as I have encouraged students to produce their own soundtracks, embedding them in maps in a practice I call “sonic un/mapping.” This multisensorial method of reading the Caribbean archipelago attunes a spatial awareness. Sonic analysis requires attention to the spatial because sound is quite literally how our ears perceive the vibrations that bounce off our environment. As such, my sonic praxis has become amplified by digital geographic technologies...
Read the full article from Archipelagos: A Journal of Caribbean Digital Praxis.
