'Watch out my children': Gospel music and the ethics of style in Trinidad and Tobago

In this dissertation, I formulate a concept I call “the ethics of style,” whereby I analyze the performative geography of the musical and ethical dimensions of Caribbean Protestantism. Drawing upon my fieldwork in Trinidad and Tobago, I investigate the central place that gospel music occupies in mediating and articulating the ethical and religious dilemmas produced where local expressions of Protestant faith intersect with a transplanted, North American, Pentecostal worship-ideal.; Several competing visions of Protestant Trinidadian identity emanate from concert stages and churches, each balancing the expressive realities of Trinidadian faith and the younger, increasingly pervasive North American model. Ethical considerations of religious identity, musical borrowing, and the paradox of unity in the face of denominationalism drive much of the legitimizing discourse enveloping musicians in the sacred and public spheres of Trinidad and Tobago. Local, non-Pentecostal church communities confront ethical dilemmas mirroring those of the gospel music industry, and an ethnographic analysis of Mt. Beulah Evangelical Baptist Church illustrates these struggles.; Discussions of nationalism, regionalism, and transnationalism are often conflated with these legitimizing discourses, providing additional avenues of investigation into religious identity in Trinidad and Tobago. By exploring the circumstances through which musical style creates ethical linkages extending from the global to the local and back again, I reach conclusions that lay the groundwork for a sweeping reconsideration of the extent to which modern and postmodern Protestant church music shapes identities in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.