In this book, author Martin Munro offers a new path into Caribbean studies based on sound. He argues that to understand and begin to transform the past, present, and future of Caribbean studies, historians must do so at the node of both sound and vision. The book makes a compelling case for a broad realignment of Caribbean studies with particular emphasis on the sonic dimensions of Caribbean art, literature, travel writing, history, and society. From there, the book illustrates how sound and vision are closely connected in the Caribbean, to the point where they almost fuse into another, hybrid sense in which might be found the knotty truths and realities of the region, its people, and its relations with others.
Munro creates a mode of analyzing and understanding the multiple dialogues between visuality and aurality in relation to race, art, tourism, media, and literature. Crossing national and linguistic borders, he presents the Caribbean as a region and, working across media, he offers an expansive exploration of visuality and sound. The book's primary materials are varied—poems, novels, travel writing, amateur films, tourist movies, music, visual art—but united by the presence of the European-Caribbean, sound-vision dynamic that shapes so many accounts of cultural encounter in the region. The book traces this dynamic across the materials to give a sense of how it reappears in different times and places to become a defining element of European-Caribbean cultural and social relations and of how and why sound in its myriad manifestations becomes such a prevalent marker of Caribbean being, culture, and society.