What She Go Do: Women in Afro-Trinidadian Music by Hope Munro (review)

In What She Go Do: Women in Afro-Trinidadian Music, Hope Munro presents an examination of women's presence and agency in Afro-Trinidadian music during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This work is an extension of her dissertation on the same subject and continues a line of research intersecting gender and Caribbean popular music that became popular in the 1990s. In this work, Munro investigates carnival as the primary performance context for many female musicians and as an energizing and cathartic space for free expression where participants have the opportunity to "play themselves" through masquerade (181). Where masquerade is a revelatory act that allows masqueraders to express and acknowledge themselves beyond colonial and hegemonic social boundaries and quotidian life, carnival features the calibration between values of respectability and reputation.

Calypso, soca, and steel pan music are crucial components of carnival, allowing singers and musicians to create social dialogues and communal experiences that will benefit the audience. During much of the twentieth century, musicians of Afro-Trinidadian music were predominately male. Women in mainstream Trinidadian audiences had to wait until the debut of Calypso Rose in the 1960s to enjoy female musicians who provided an alternative perspective on social issues. Female voices in music have since continually grown louder. In this book, Munro argues that women's more substantial role in music is due to musical changes and innovation along with changing social conditions for Trinidadian women.

Munro states that her avoidance of Eurocentrism and essentialism in her work is in agreement with the approaches of well-known Caribbean music scholars in the Caribbean and North America such as Carolyn Cooper, Shannon Dudley, Jocelyne Guilbault, Peter Manuel, and Deborah Pacini-Hernandez (25). Munro supports her argument by presenting a historical and ethnographic account of females' involvement in Afro-Trinidadian music during Trinidad's colonial and postcolonial period. The works of Gordon Rohlehr, Rudolph Ottley, and Hollis Liverpool ground her discussion on early calypso and carnival during the colonial period. She notes that before the 1800s, Afro-Trinidadian women were active performers in calinda (stick fighting) and carnival. By the end of the century, Afro-Trinidadian music had no place in Trinidadian females' lives. Colonists responded to the early 1880s Canboulay riots with the prohibition of stick fighting during carnival, resulting in the male-dominant scene of Afro-Trinidadian music. Women were thrust out of carnival's public sphere and pushed into the realm of respectability, their newly "naturalized" social place, while men turned to music to display their masculinity.

Munro points to the concerns about social mobility, economic security, and morality that fixed women's place away from Afro-Trinidadian music in the early twentieth century. Women's movements and American occupation during the early twentieth century led to an increase in the agency of Trinidadian women. Munro uses the examples of Lady Iere and Beryl McBurnie to show how women began to make drastic changes to Trinidadian culture through musical performance and folk education while remaining respectable during the 1930s and 1940s. During independence, steel pan, calypso, and carnival were celebrated and became part of a "re-enculturation" that counteracted the cultural silencing caused by British colonial rule and edified Trinidadians. Economic prosperity and social and intellectual movements like Black power and second-wave feminism led to a general feeling of optimism and allowed women the space to have an increased presence and role in carnival and Afro-Trinidadian musical performance. Her historical account proves that attitudes toward Trinidadian culture affected the number of opportunities women had in the music scene.

After providing a historical account of women in Afro-Trinidadian music from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Munro uses her ethnographic work in Trinidad that began in the late 1990s to discuss female musicians and the role of performers in postcolonial Trinidadian music. Munro shows how music can be a liberating yet restricting space for musicians with the example of...