Calypso Circuits: Trans-Atlantic Popular Culture and the Gendering of Black Nationalism

Abstract

This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s. A close reading of popular songs of the era by Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner unpacks the forms of insecurity implicit in these assertions of mastery over metropolitan femininity. While such songs updated a strong vein of misogyny in calypsos of the 1930s, however, they were not the only representations of gender relations during this period. The article closes with a discussion of emergent traditions of mutuality and black nationalist separatism that would give birth to alternative, less agonistic models of relations between the sexes.