Monday, March 26, 4:15 p.m.
United States
Since its debut in the early 1990s as a locally produced genre of carnival music in St. Kitts-Nevis, wilders has been embraced by a younger, post-independence generation and rejected by an older, conservative group who considers the music’s tempo to be “too fast.” Positing an association between “fast” music and “fast” women, this talk explores how the musical and social merit of wilders is largely conceived of in terms of the genre’s correlation to women and their bodies. The discursive relationship between the criticism of wilders and that of Kittitian and Nevisian women illustrates how a local aversion to being “too fast” is indicative of the persistent and fraught relationship with colonial ideals.
