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  • Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean by Francio Guadeloupe
  • Richard Kent Evans
Guadeloupe, Francio.
Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 272 pp. $34.95US (paper). ISBN 978–0-5202–5489–3.

Francio Guadeloupe’s Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and Capitalism in the Caribbean is an engaging historical and ethnographic study of the function of religion on the island of Saint Martin and Sint Maarten. SXM, as it is more commonly referred to, is an island of thirty-seven square miles that is split into a Dutch half (Sint Maarten) and a French half (Saint Martin). In the book, Guadeloupe returns to the island where he spent some of his youth to explore its unique “politics of belonging.”

The argument of the book is that SXMers refuse to conform to the overarching narratives that Caribbeanists have constructed. There is very little ethnic tension and few instances of tourists exploiting the island and its resources. It is not an island deeply influenced by the legacies of slavery. It did not seem to Guadeloupe that SXMers were a silenced subaltern. Rather, when Guadeloupe surveys what makes life on SXM unique, it is the islanders’ pragmatism. “All relationships,” Guadeloupe claims, originate from a shared commitment to the “money-tie system”: the networks of economic exchange from wealthy Western tourists and the industries within the island and throughout the Caribbean that make sure the tourists keep coming.

He pursues this throughout each of the book’s six chapters. The first, “So Many Men, So Many Histories,” is a meditation on the ways SXMers have constructed a usable (and tourist-friendly) past, which exists, often, with little relation to the histories that one might find in the archives. Deeply influenced by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on the Caribbean and his broader theory of history and historiography, Guadeloupe explores how the history of (im)migration on the island defies standard Caribbeanist historiography. To tell this story, Guadeloupe reports on the narratives of the past that local tour guides offer to tourists. These SXMers offer a history of the island that is cleansed of a messy past. It is an unproblematic history; one that allows tourists to imagine that the island’s locals have always lived there, happily anticipating the arrival of the next cruise ship.

The tour guides should not be blamed for having little connection to the actual history of the island. As Guadeloupe explains in chapter two, the Caribbean tourism boom of the 1960s changed the island dramatically. As a result, many of the people who live there today came from somewhere else. Few SXMers can trace their lineage on the island back more than a couple of generations. Because no one can claim to be “native” to the island, everyone can claim to belong. But belonging on SXM means participating in the “hegemonic performative space” of the tourist industry and the money-tie system that supports it.

In chapter three, Guadeloupe articulates his theory of religion as it functions on SXM. The key to understanding religion on SXM, according to Guadeloupe, is to study how islanders have developed a unique kind of Christianity—a “metalanguage of inclusiveness”—that supports the money-tie system (75). The religion, as it were, on SXM is that no one should feel like an outsider: not the tourists whose dollars underwrite the island economy and not immigrants from elsewhere in the Caribbean whose cheap labour makes SXM an [End Page 141] attractive port of call. Christianity, minus denominationalism, dogma, othering, hierarchy, or orthodoxy is rendered as a “one love” ideology, put to use supporting the tourism industry.

Chapters four, five, and six—the chapters that will be of particular interest to readers of this journal—introduce us to three SXM radio disk jockeys who promote and, at times, challenge the island’s one love ideology over the airwaves. DJs on SXM are cultural elites. They are celebrity intellectuals who perform a unique identity as both political and religious leaders, often while condemning both politics and organized religion. DJs use conscious reggae and calypso to encourage...

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