Video is now available for our recent New Book Salon with Jessica Swanston Baker. In Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (University of Chicago Press, 2024), ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media-based resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—thus neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but also the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. Baker discussed the book in conversation with 3CT fellow Adom Getachew.
