Format: Hardback
        
        
        
        
            Pages: 312
          
                              
            ISBN: 9780819568588
          
                              
            Pub Date: January 2008
          
                                                            
                                          Imprint: Wesleyan University Press
                                    
                              
            Illustrations: 37 illus.
          
                    
                Price:
      
                £36.95
            
  
          
          
          
                          In stock
                      
        
          Description:
      
      
        Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using historical sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture's contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.