Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture ed. by Hilary McD. Beckles, Heather D. Russell

Abstract

Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell, eds. Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture. Kingston: U of Indies P, 2015. Pp. v, 211. US$32. Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell cite uncompromising articulations of national belonging coupled with her unprecedented transnational success (she is arguably most commercially successful Caribbean musical artist in history) as impetus for their edited volume focused on performer (2). The volume's eight chapters approach artistry and persona from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including history, literature, political science, and cultural, feminist, and gender studies in order to redress ways in which black diaspora subjects and their art have historically been (mis)appropriated and (mis)represented by others (Beckles and Russell 2). Keenly aware that defiant sexuality is subject to critiques from local and global audiences, volume aims to decentre and destabilize primacy, and thus potency, of Euro-American gaze, positing instead considerations of Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial critical/theoretical corpus (4). This decentering of Euro-American gaze is one of volume's greatest strengths, and challenges of navigating such a destabilizing mission are finessed by contributors' commitments to positioning as at once 100% Barbadian and a borderless daughter of Caribbean (her mother is Guyanese) whose genre-defying dance/pop/reggae/R&B/hip-hop music has topped global charts. Beckles and Russell's introduction positions fame as carving out artistic cultural space for Caribbean and for Barbados in particular, yet volume's theoretical thrust is also in critical dialogue with important work of scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies who have explored multivalent ways in which rhythmic, aesthetic, corporal, and migratory dimensions of Caribbean diasporic spaces expand conceptualizations of Caribbean beyond its geographical confines. This notion of reading region as a historically integrated space within modernity is a central thread in Beckles' highly original chapter, Writes Back, which puts upbringing in conversation with childhood of Everton Weekes, a top-ranked cricket player who grew up on same ghetto street, Westbury Avenue. Beckles historicizes two Barbadians' backgrounds to purposely conflate global and local, thus pitting economic placement of Barbados in global South against his argument that the West began, in financial terms, in Barbados because it was here that Africa, Europe and Americas met in unholy slavery (28). Beckles makes a compelling case for expanding path of inquiry into postcolonial Caribbean by mounting a community-centered reading of how Westbury shaped in order to break conceptual traps of big island/small island and island/continent dichotomies that inhibit effective postmodern readings of archipelago (15-16). His approach reveals good gone bad image as forged in Bajan from start. Questions about badness reappear in Don D. Marshall's richly argued chapter, Rihanna as Global Icon and Caribbean Threshold Figure, which deconstructs local debates about sexually explicit lyrics and rude girl posture in order to intervene in broader discourses about culture, nationalist sentiment, and social construction of gender in Caribbean. Marshall argues that Rihanna's ethical drive and her erotic drive may pull in contrary directions, but daring to point up an unbidden dimension in her psychic life as a Caribbean female subject allows for an upping of 'anti' in anti-colonialism, leading to a more complex level of analysis (55). For Marshall, that more sophisticated reading involves applying example as a window into the resistance vernaculars of [Caribbean] youth (67), whose use of technology, he argues, represents a refusal to be objects of global culture. …