They're not hip-hop, but each a good representation of the creative possibilities of reggae in its various mutations. If they'd played either one of these at Undisclosed Tropical Island rather than Bob Marley's most antiseptic songs, the trip would have been significantly more enjoyable. The first even lacks a political context!

Why it looks like the island next to Undisclosed Tropical Island has gone and gotten itself in the news.

The flip side to yesterday's musings on colonialism at Undisclosed Tropical Island is the less readily apparent facts. One day we took a bus tour of the northern part of the island (the southern part being more mountainous and so less inhabited), and it was not hard to notice the housing conditions were frequently sub-standard. As it happened, that evening I had dinner with someone who works for an NGO that disburses grant money to fund infrastructure projects across the world, and as additional luck would have it, her territory had previously been the Caribbean, including Undisclosed Tropical Island (though she'd never been before). She judged the island to be at least comparatively well-off: the telltale signs for worry were non-existent--the children all appeared well-fed and there were a strikingly large number of schools at all levels. Add to this some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much our hotel might reasonably clear in a year, the information supplied by our driver (who used to work construction) about the costs associated with building the hotel--in the millions just for stone--, a rough calculation of how much a good dedicated taxi driver might make in a year (there's a fair chance he makes more than I do now in US dollars, and very good he makes more than I did as a grad student), and one might begin to suspect that these American eyes only capable of seeing poverty might have been missing part of the story.

It's not difficult to see the other side: many of the homes built using government grant money (it sounded a lot like our driver named an amount in the hundreds of thousands, but I'm assuming I misheard--though it is all beachfront property so it's not impossible) have additions put on, and rather nice ones; it's possible that the sugar cane industry--shut down by the government in the middle of the last decade--might have been shut down not only because it ceased to be economically viable to manufacture on the island, but also because alternative revenue sources (i.e. tourism) could make up the difference. And this is to say nothing of the somewhat condescending idea that I might be able to look around and tell who is doing well and who is doing badly, or take the pulse of the whole island from what a vacation can indicate.*
 

*Attempts to wikipedia statistics in order to get a better sense were not particularly helpful, which just goes to show, students, that wikipedia is for the lazy and won't get you all the information you might need.

If there's a stereotypical conservative reaction to colonialism and its legacies, I think it is to deny the importance of either. Problems can be admitted--no one will go out of their way to defend Apartheid these days--but they are generally assumed to be local and particular rather than general. The legacies, it is said, of colonialism are beneficial to the formerly colonized peoples--occasionally said with a touch of bias for English, 'dignified' colonialism as opposed to the more brutal realities of, say, Belgium or France. Anti-colonialism is, by contrast, nonsense: part egregious incitement to justified violence (always quoting Sartre: "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man"), and on the other hand a prop for the sort of "race, class and gender" thinking, the "orientalism" and theory-heavy approaches that have been slowly destroying the serious liberal arts basis of the academy.

I wonder how many people who have this reaction have ever made it out to one of those places in the world that went through colonization, in its racially-loaded sense. At Undisclosed Tropical Island, it was hard to miss. The driver we hired for the week was black; so were all the waitstaff at the hotel, and almost all the staff at various restaurants and other places around the island. If you happened to be unclear on how such a large number of African-descended individuals landed in the middle of the Caribbean, one had only to venture into town and visit Independence Square, formerly one of the largest slave auction sites in the West Indies. If one happened to be curious as to who the natives were prior to colonialism, and why none seem to still live there, the answer is: the British and the French teamed up sometime in the 18th century to hunt them down and massacre them all.* Add to this the tendency of visitors to the island to be rich white people looking for an 'exotic' and 'authentic' experience (or just to get drunk and have other people do all their manual labor, up to and including moving their suitcases around), and, well, it's like that quote (incorrectly) attributed to Trotsky: you may not be interested in colonialism, but colonialism is interested in you.

As was fairly pointed out to me on several occasions after making this observation, it's not any different in the United States. The difference is one of degree and attenuation: the interaction with people marginalized by racial or ethnic identity is limited; it's pretty easy to avoid driving through neighborhoods that might bring these differences to light; and the history of race is diffused over space and time (there were slaves in North Carolina, but to the best of my knowledge there's no one place one can go with the history of Independence Square) so that one can squint and miss it, if desired. But it's probably worth sustained reflection.

There is, however, a flip side to this, which I'll address tomorrow.


*Impressively callous and surprising that the British and French, who hated each other in this period and were constantly fighting for control over various islands, would decide to put that off for a bit to wipe out the natives.

I'm not sure it would be of general interest--though given this blog's eclectic readership, who knows?--but on the plane ride back from my undisclosed tropical location, I happened to read a very interesting old New Yorker article about the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima. The article is, in fact, the entirety of the August 1, 1946 issue, so it may require a university subscription to access (I got my copy through Duke).

I was reading it out of the conviction that it might be interesting for the students in my freshmen seminar, though I am always and generally dubious about the value of straight-up reporting, especially of historical incidents where the journalist is unlikely to have all the facts at their disposal. In spite of these (somewhat justified, it turns out) concerns, I will definitely be having my students read it. The article as a whole is constantly (unintentionally) foregrounding the question of why it's is being written as it is, which is useful in thinking about the way disciplinary assumptions underlay the work everyone does (and the wide gap between common sense views, journalistic views, and academic views); the last couple pages, in which survivors of the Hiroshima blast address the ethical question of the bomb (mostly coming out indifferent or accepting of its use; no one strongly opposed) lay out the relevant considerations in a more useful way than, say, "Mr. Truman's Degree" or some of the Dwight MacDonald writings I've found on this question.

This is not a complain about reggae. Let's be clear on that from the beginning. Reggae's not really my thing, but at its best it's angry and political, it mutates readily into other genres (calypso, ska, and my personal favorite, dub, in which the bass is turned way up in the EQ and a lot of spring reverb is featured. Lyrics not necessary, though what lyrics there are will likely be subjected to tape echo. Glorious stuff), and it mixes well with punk (The Clash are the obligatory mention, but I always opt for Stiff Little Fingers, "Roots Radicals Rockers & Reggae").

But you will never hear any of this at undisclosed tropical island. Instead, you will be forced to listen to an endless diet of those two upbeat Bob Marley songs, various top-40ish songs translated into kettle-drum format, and a selection of radio stations whose organizing principle is so esoteric as to be fit for a Borges essay: how do Journey, Michael Bolton, and Taylor Swift belong on the same channel? (I have a theory about this: the radio stations play what they imagine rich old white people want to hear. It's an ugly mirror to look into). Anyway, with all this relentlessly enforced cheeriness, it's important to cut through the treacle. And nothing cuts through treacle better than Sonic Youth. Nothing quite like watching the waves roll in while listening to "Eric's Trip."

"Sugar Kane" because it's from the poppy Sonic Youth album, Dirty, and because the notable agricultural feature of undisclosed tropical island was sugarcane, now growing wild because it's no longer being harvested.