AlterNative Archipelagos and the 1952 Caribbean Festival: Musical Mobilities Escaping ALCOA’s Extractive Tourism

Abstract

Caribbean cultural tourism is deeply entwined with American empire and its trans-oceanic mobilities, yet transnational Caribbean cultural production constantly exceeds and escapes such limiting constructs. Music and dance are some of the greatest enticements of travel around the Caribbean region, both for the artists who produce that music and for the audiences who participate in it. In many ways, the Aluminum Corporation of America (hereafter ALCOA) was spreading mid-century American Empire through cultural promotion of Caribbean arts, music recordings, and cultural tourism — imagined as access to a kaleidoscopic archipelago of sounds, rhythms and inviting styles of dance. However, Caribbean music creators and consumers also had their own transnational cultural agendas and musical itineraries, suggesting their competing constructs of a transnational musical space. How did the archipelagic imaginary of Caribbean tourism intersect with, interfere with, or otherwise intensify the intra-regional and transnational artistic and musical mobilities that imagined the archipelago on different terms? In this essay, we combine the insights of a cultural sociologist (Sheller) and a musicologist (Martin) to interrogate the meanings of the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (hereafter Caribbean Festival) in shaping divergent archipelagic spaces and competing musical itineraries and Black Atlantic soundscapes, both imperial and anti-imperial. Following