Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel, by Njelle W.?Hamilton

摘要

How does one read musical novels? Njelle Hamilton proposes that novels inwhich music and recording technologies figure prominently offer an opportunityto consider a variety of themes, including memory, nostalgia, belonging,and the making of exilic identities. Phonographic Memories admirably ignoresthe Anglo/Hispanic Caribbean divide and takes as its objects of study LawrenceScott’s Night Calypso, Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, DanielMaximin’s Lone Sun, Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain, and Ramabai Espinet’sSwinging Bridge. In all of these, recorded music is related to memory, andHamilton explores the variety of ways it acts as the medium through whichthe characters negotiate their relationship to place and to their own pasts. Themain characters, she argues, are frequently constrained by the nostalgia andinherent conservatism of recording technology and of certain musical genres.But they also find a way forward, a way into the future that music opens up forthem.