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Vibes Up: Reggae and Afro-Caribbean Migration from Costa Rica to Brooklyn

Online ISBN:
9781479827206
Print ISBN:
9781479827114
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Vibes Up: Reggae and Afro-Caribbean Migration from Costa Rica to Brooklyn

Sabia McCoy-Torres
Sabia McCoy-Torres

Assistant Professor

Tulane University
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
13 August 2024
Online ISBN:
9781479827206
Print ISBN:
9781479827114
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Making the Caribbean: Migration and Reggae from Costa Rica to Brooklyn uses a sensorial approach to ethnography to show we must rechart the Caribbean and expand it from being geographic and sociocultural phenomenon alone to sensorial and global ones that bring Limón, Costa Rica and Brooklyn, New York together as interconnected sites of Afro-Caribbean migration from the West Indies. In pursuit of this expansion, Making the Caribbean uses reggae culture as an ethnographic lens to center an analysis of migration, diaspora, queerness, Blackness, and Caribbean cultural subjectivity. Reggae is the chosen lens because it is a technology that produces affect (sensations and sentiments) and, in turn, infrastructure that joins seemingly disparate places. Reggae creates a public sphere and space (both physical and psychic) where, through affective attunement, Afro-Caribbeans create, enact, and embody empowered, proud racial, cultural, gender and sexual senses of self. The book suggests we must consider the micropolitics of the everyday, like those crystalizing in the public spaces of ethnic enclaves, performance venues, and ethnically themed bars and restaurants, as critical to identity politics, belonging, power, and sociopolitical transformations on a (trans)national level. For example: the book examines the shifting social and political terrain Afro-Caribbeans navigate to show how hetero and LGBTQ+ people together create possibilities for queer inclusion in the diaspora; particularly through embodied performance and reggae participants’ decoding of the music form’s gender and sexual normativity. This view is critical given the regular framing of reggae creators and participants as uniquely homophobic.

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