Créolité, (Im)Mobility, and Music in Dominica

Abstract

This article examines how Dominican musicians, festival organizers, and their audiences negotiate two rather slippery concepts: the complex of creole/creolization/creolite  ; and the question of borders and (im)mobilities, in other words who moves where and how. Music provides sites and sounds in which creole possibilities and mobilities of various kinds are explored, challenged, and rethought. I illustrate these ideas with reference to two types of expressly creole, Dominican popular music (cadence-lypso and bouyon) and their central role in Dominica’s World Creole Music Festival. Both genres find artists reflecting on what it means to perform creole music and how such performances might facilitate new mobilities. The World Creole Music Festival stages these genres as part of an attempt to generate global creole solidarities. The significant challenges confronting this endeavor suggest that a reevaluation of what creole can mean in Dominica and a better understanding of how these meanings are embedded in contemporary mobilities can yield new insights not only into the production and staging of Caribbean genres, but also into the nature of the creole itself.