Caribbean Pop Culture in Canada: Or, the Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Caribbean Pop Culture in Canada; Or, the Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation Rinaldo Walcott (bio) Deborah Cox, one of the current divas of rhythm and blues music, is a black Canadian. Such a statement about Cox is clearly not transparent in that it does not say much about her or Canada. Cox, whose parents are from Guyana, grew up in Canada listening to various African American musics played at home. Cox spent her formative years working the Toronto music scene and eventually had to give up on Canada to secure the kind of pop culture stardom that she currently enjoys. She was recently featured on one of Canada's leading news magazines, Macleans, as "Canada's Queen of R&B".1 Cox is also featured as a model for one of Canada's leading clothing companies, Roots Canada, and numerous entertainment shows have done televisual and radio segments on her career. The dynamics of Cox's move to the United States are deeply implicated in her newfound fame at home in Canada. This belonging to Canada and not, lodged between Guyana and the United States, is a symptomatic condition of Canadian blackness. As a symbol, Cox represents the networks of black [End Page 123] diasporic realities, desires and the circulation of "black" artefacts, which constitute a connective web of diasporic identifications, hopes, disappointments and desires. But Cox's success in the United States might be understood in relation to some important tensions concerning Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada and the question of belonging to the nation.2 In effect, her success raises difficult questions concerning the slippery language of popular culture and national belonging when questions of blackness enter the conversation. These questions become even more pointed when the terrain of popular culture is explored. In "What Is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" Stuart Hall cautions against the installation of a singular notion of black popular culture. Hall writes: "By definition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation."3 Hall's comments are apt for popular culture in Canada for many reasons. I will only note a few here. The contradiction that Caribbean equals black in Canada; that black popular culture in Canada is mainly a copy or version of African American popular culture; and, finally, that Canada as a nation does not have a "native" popular culture are only some of the most obvious reasons why "popular culture is a contradictory space" in Canada. Because of the above contradictions, in the Canadian context popular culture and what it signifies always remain a site of "strategic contestation". I offer here a reading of popular culture in Canada, referencing its Caribbean/black genealogy, but I could as well offer a reading which references its African American trace. But, as we shall see, to offer a reading that is exclusive to either trace is a problem that refuses to go away without asserting the inherent contradictions. In fact, Hall's insights are a useful caution once more. He writes that in black popular culture, strictly speaking, ethnographically speaking, there are no pure forms at all. Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagements across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural tradition, of the negotiations of dominant and subordinate positions, of the subterranean strategies of [End Page 124] recoding and transcoding, of critical signification, of signifying. Always these forms are impure, to some degree hybridized from a vernacular base.4 His comments speak accurately to Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada, and I attempt to demonstrate the pleasurable impurity of Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada below. To think Caribbean popular culture in Canada is to think the simultaneity of the conceptual terrain and the problematics of the discourse of heritage and the discourse of the popular. It is often claimed that Canada does not have a popular culture.5 While the view of a non-existent popular culture in Canada has been recently contested in the anthology Pop Can and in the earlier Mondo Canuck, such contestations are recent to discussions of popular culture in Canada.6 Therefore, given the scepticism which accords Canadian popular...