Rihanna: Barbados World-Gurl in Global Popular Culture ed. by Hilary McD. Beckles, Heather D. Russell (review)

Hilary McD. Beckles and Heather D. Russell cite Rihanna’s “uncompromising articulations of national belonging coupled with her unprecedented transnational success” (she is arguably the most commercially successful Caribbean musical artist in history) as the impetus for their edited volume focused on the Barbadian performer (2). The volume’s eight chapters approach Rihanna’s artistry and persona from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including history, literature, political science, and cultural, feminist, and gender studies in order to redress the ways in which “black diaspora subjects and their art have historically been (mis)appropriated and (mis)represented by others” (Beckles and Russell 2). Keenly aware that Rihanna’s defiant sexuality is subject to critiques from local and global audiences, the volume aims to “decentre and destabilize the primacy, and thus potency, of the Euro-American gaze, positing instead considerations of the Caribbean artist and her oeuvre from a Caribbean postcolonial critical/theoretical corpus” (4).

This decentering of the Euro-American gaze is one of the volume’s greatest strengths, and the challenges of navigating such a destabilizing mission are finessed by the contributors’ commitments to positioning Rihanna as at once “100% Barbadian” and a borderless daughter of the Caribbean (her mother is Guyanese) whose genre-defying dance/pop/reggae/R&B/hip-hop music has topped global charts. Beckles and Russell’s introduction positions Rihanna’s fame as carving out artistic cultural space for the Caribbean and for Barbados in particular, yet the volume’s theoretical thrust is also in critical dialogue with the important work of scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies who have explored the multivalent ways in which the rhythmic, aesthetic, corporal, and migratory dimensions of Caribbean diasporic spaces expand conceptualizations of the Caribbean beyond its geographical confines.

This notion of reading the region as a historically integrated space within modernity is a central thread in Beckles’ highly original chapter, “Westbury Writes Back,” which puts Rihanna’s upbringing in conversation with the childhood of Everton Weekes, a top-ranked cricket player who grew up on the same ghetto street, Westbury Avenue. Beckles historicizes the two Barbadians’ backgrounds to purposely conflate the global and the local, thus pitting the economic placement of Barbados in the global South against his argument that “the West” began, in financial terms, in Barbados “because it was here that Africa, Europe and the Americas met in unholy slavery” (28). Beckles makes a compelling case for expanding the path of inquiry into the postcolonial Caribbean by mounting a community-centered reading of how Westbury shaped Rihanna in order to break the conceptual traps of the “big island/small island and island/continent dichotomies that inhibit effective postmodern readings of the archipelago” (15–16). His approach reveals Rihanna’s “good girl gone bad” image as forged in “Bajan badness” from the start.

Questions about Rihanna’s “badness” reappear in Don D. Marshall’s richly argued chapter, “Rihanna as Global Icon and Caribbean Threshold Figure,” which deconstructs local debates about Rihanna’s sexually explicit lyrics and “rude girl” posture in order to intervene in broader discourses about youth culture, nationalist sentiment, and the social construction of gender in the Caribbean. Marshall argues that “Rihanna’s ethical drive and her erotic drive may pull in contrary directions, but daring to point up an unbidden dimension in her psychic life as a Caribbean female subject allows for an upping of the ‘anti’ in anti-colonialism, leading to a more complex level of analysis” (55). For Marshall, that more sophisticated reading involves applying Rihanna’s example as a window into “the resistance vernaculars of [Caribbean] youth” (67), whose use of technology, he argues, represents a refusal to be objects of global culture.

The volume also broadens readers’ knowledge of the music industry in the Caribbean. With much attention historically placed, for example, on Jamaica’s musical contributions, Mike Alleyne charts a new course in “International Identity: Rihanna...