Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation

U. S. citizens also helped legitimize and globalize the calypso through their participation in its production.

class privilege,

Captain C. Longridge, who in 1932 denounced jazz from the United States as "primitive music" and summoned fellow believers to "taboo the jazz dance in every shape and form."

Complex and ambiguous, women's engagements with sojourning U.S. personnel encapsulate the wider society during the years of occupation.

United States especially, policy-makersexplicitly discouraged them from cultivating Western-type desires.

people in Trinidad made patterns from the United States integral to their dress

Undoubtedly, the appeal of the jitterbug among young Trinidadian trendsetters derived in part from its provenance in the brave, antiestablishment, black American youth culture.3G

Replying to a local male who had earlier complained that women's clothes had begun to take on a masculine appearance, one female correspondent shot back that, quite the contrary, it was men's dress that was guilty of effeminacy.44 Her primary exhibit, it turns out, was none other than the jitterbug.

it referred to what the piece defined as tastelessness marked by "a contrast of luxury and squalor."$9