Folk and Fantasy: Colonial Imaginations of Caribbean Culture in Mid-Century Calypso Album Cover Art

Abstract

This article explores the reflections of Caribbean culture found in mid-century calypso album cover art. Calypso cover art offers important documentations of Caribbean folk life and cultural identity pre-independence, but at the same time, facilitate the exportation of colonial fantasies about local life to attract tourists. The images examined invariably construct Caribbean islands as “places to play” (Sheller, 2003) and its people as carefree and even childish natives. We use semiotics and critical visual analysis to analyze mid-century record album cover characterizations of the primordial rhythm of folk life and caricatures of native culture, as well as the ways touristic esthetics adapted Calypso, including the figure of the Coconut Woman, as a soundtrack for colonial fantasies and fuel for the colonial gaze. This article reveals how minor, even peripheral, objects such as Calypso records promoted as fun and festive consumer goods reveal powerful, yet relatively unnoticed, insights into visual communication.

Keywords:

• Calypso
• record albums
• graphic art
• visual culture
• Caribbean
• identity
• popular culture
• postcolonialism

Notes

1 See the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/golliwog/

2 See Australian Cartoonist’s 2018 depiction of Serena Williams, a Black, woman tennis player after the latter’s altercation with tennis officials and following penalization during the 2018 U.S. Open Finals https://twitter.com/damonTheOz/status/1039312474942492672

3 As written about in the works of Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott. See Walcott, Derek. 1992. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, the Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

4 This is a title usually reserved for the winner of the longstanding Carnival completion birthed in Trinidad and Tobago. Giving this title to Belafonte arguably constituted cultural appropriation, in line with colonial ideologies that marked the time.

5 Historian Judith E Smith’s 2017 entry on Harry Belafonte’s 1956 Calypso album is one of the “short, scholarly write-ups about selected titles” in the National Recording Registry.

6 Coded in this sentiment is the idea that Caribbean speech patterns are incoherent, unrefined and perhaps less desirable, echoing long established patterns of European derogation of vernacular languages. Historically, locally derived languages have been “marked by a social bias according to which non-Europeans were incapable of learning European languages adequately” (Mufwene, 2016, p. 348), an argument used to buttress the notion that native peoples were substandard.