Noisy spaces: Popular music consumption, social fragmentation, and the cultural politics of globalization in Trinidad

Based on twenty months of field research, this dissertation examines the consumption of popular music among socially-stratified young adults in Trinidad, as a way of addressing new social identities, inequalities, and sites of struggle in global capitalism. I trace an historic transition from the nation-state as the ground of cultural and political representation, to the emergence of subjects through consumption in the "post-national" era. Calypso music voiced opposition to British colonialism in Trinidad and after independence in 1962 exemplified national culture. Deepening contradictions between political independence and the nation's position in a global economy have intensified cleavages along lines of class, race, and age. Privatization has led to media expansion, and compliance with international intellectual property law fuels alienation from Trinidadian culture. In sum, the construction of local culture as a commodity, transnational media influence, and the unequal impact of socio-economic change, contribute to the disruption of national culture, intensification of ethnic and class conflict, and to the production of community in transnational space.; My analysis of "music" included the semiotics of sound, performance context, how music organizes the activities of social groups and acts on bodies, and how music operates spatially. Extensive audience research among the dominant ethnic groups of African and East Indian descent (forty percent each), and the mixed/white population, revealed that Afro-Trinidadians belong to a social geography of oppression connected by Jamaican dancehall reggae on pirated cassettes; Indo-Trinidadians are contesting constructions of national culture from which they were excluded; while white and mixed youth participate in an "alternative" music diaspora linked transnationally through middle-class media technologies like the internet.; I argue that the adoption of foreign music like Jamaican dancehall (along with its dialect, gesture, and ideology), is a performative way to protest the nation-state and the waning promise of the liberal-nationalist project. At the same time, globalization produces a tendency towards locality, expressed in ethno-nationalist forms in Trinidad. By situating cultural consumption in the everyday lives of multiply-positioned subjects, this project contributes to diasporic and transnational analysis.