Beautiful Cosmos

Book excerpt: What are the musical sounds that people remember in the diaspora? What are the sounds they create? Recognising the importance that people attach to musical performances, this book explores the significance of widespread Caribbean genres in diaspora politics. Ramnarine uses ethnographic approaches to unravel creative processes of memory, innovation and production and to interrogate geographies of musical canons, hybridity discourses and culture theory. She challenges us to rethink diaspora as only being about displacement, to move beyond the limits of marginalisation and otherness, and to imagine the possibilities of 'beautiful cosmos'. Asking "where is home in the diaspora?" this book presents radical perspectives in the study of diaspora.