Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class (review)

Popular and academic discourse on Caribbean society—past and present—has long centered on a dichotomous view of the region’s culture. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have argued that Caribbean culture consists of two distinct parts: an elite culture produced and replicated in the European metropole and a working class culture epitomized by the rhythmic sounds of reggae, the vibrant colors of carnival, and the sensual movements of salsa. In Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class, Belinda Edmondson offers a corrective to this established view. She argues that a prevalent middlebrow culture developed in the nineteenth century Anglophone Caribbean and persists in the contemporary literature and aesthetic performances of countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. While identifying this cultural middle ground in popular novels, beauty pageants, and music festivals, Edmondson also aptly demonstrates the ethnic, gender, and transnational considerations that shaped the Caribbean’s middle and working class cultural productions.

Edmondson begins with an analysis of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Caribbean periodicals in which she finds evidence of a socially conscious and culturally vibrant black and brown middle-class. While white elites and working class blacks offered competing interpretations of regional identity, middle-class Jamaican and Trinidadian editors and publishers articulated their vision of Caribbean society in publications like the Jamaica Times. These men built on a Caribbean belles letters tradition in consolidating a group consciousness rooted in a desire for national uniformity, racial gentility, and a modernity shaped by British colonialism and subsequent U.S. regional hegemony. Expressions of brownness—a fluid ideology that Edmondson describes as a potential marker of naturalized middle-class status, idealized creolization, and black social ascendance—were not relegated solely to periodicals. Nineteenth and twentieth century Caribbean novelists from various ideological backgrounds contributed to this brown aesthetic in novels such as Emmanuel Appadocca, Adolphus, Rubert Gray, and One Brown Girl And ¾. Despite differences among their creators, these works shared “a commitment to a social agenda that views a ‘brown’ identified Caribbean middle class as the foundation of modern Caribbean society” (p. 84).

Edmondson persuasively argues that gender considerations and transnational developments shaped this literary tradition and other Caribbean cultural productions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Caribbean’s history of slavery and the accompanying debasement of black females, Edmondson posits, created an implicit and explicit link between “black, brown, and Asian constituencies’ desire for a publicly acknowledged respectable femininity” and “the desire for social mobility and political or economic advancement” (p. 111). The feminized “brown ideal”—emblematic of the aspirational quality of middlebrow culture—takes center stage at Caribbean beauty contests. There, contest winners must ostensibly embody their nation, represent black progress, and assuage the concerns of those struggling to reconcile conflicting images of black females’ respectability and alleged promiscuity. Edmondson draws attention to how Caribbean beauty pageant participants and organizers recognize the influence of “global culture” on these local productions. She contends that Oprah Winfrey’s success, the increasing prevalence of black supermodels, and other international developments have created an opportunity for Jamaicans to affirm the beauty, professionalism, and representativeness of their dark-skinned women. Given this perspective, a reference to African American beauty pageants or an acknowledgement of works like Maxine Leeds Craig’s on the subject might have further enhanced Edmondson’s analysis of the effect of white concepts of beauty, race, and respectability on blacks in the Americas.

The link between Caribbean and African American cultures does, however, figure prominently in Edmondson’s discussion of Caribbean carnivals. Trinidad’s annual carnival epitomizes the duality of “state identified” and “tourist oriented” Caribbean middlebrow practices (p. 135). The increasing commercialization of the festivities and participation of professional and elite women reflects a broader national and regional discourse of progress also found in Barbados’ Crop Over celebrations. As these cultural products project national identity, they also cater to the cultural proclivities of black tourists. Since the mid-twentieth century, African Americans have flocked to “the overt...