Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar once remarked and tan-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tan-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gana" ("sitting music"), tan-singing has evolved in to a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland.

In recent  decades, however, tan-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously. Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One  of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity.

Thus, East Indian Music in the  West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tan-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music.

Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and  exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture.

Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women’s quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women’s challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises full of palm trees, white sandy beaches, and inviting warm water seem timeless. Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures.

Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures.

Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.