First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage.
 
The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture. 

Music is the most popular and dynamic aspect of Caribbean expressive culture. From the well-known genres—salsa, merengue, reggae, calypso, and bachata—to more localized forms like chutney and kaseko, this wide-ranging book surveys Caribbean music's prodigious diversity and colorful history. Enhanced with numerous illustrations and musical examples, Caribbean Currents is an up-to-date overview of the region's music, covering Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Suriname, and smaller islands like Martinique and Guadeloupe. Engaging descriptions of musical forms and innovations, festivals and dance halls, as well as musicians and fans, are situated in

This revised and expanded version features:

* Twenty-seven new illustrations

* Recent developments in the region's music, such as the emergence of reggaetón and timba

* A new and extensive study of Jamaican dancehall

In Cassette Culture, Peter Manuel tells how a new mass medium—the portable cassette player—caused a major upheaval in popular culture in the world's second-largest country. The advent of cassette technology in the 1980s transformed India's popular music industry from the virtual monopoly of a single multinational LP manufacturer to a free-for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption.

Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they were also a vehicle for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercial vulgarity, and, disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of hate-mongering and religious chauvinism.

Cassette Culture is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of a technological revolution now occurring throughout the world. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in modern India, communications theory, world popular music, or contemporary global culture.

The contradance and quadrille, in their diverse forms, were the most popular, widespread, and important genres of creole Caribbean music and dance in the nineteenth century.  Throughout the region they constituted sites for interaction of musicians and musical elements of different racial, social, and ethnic origins, and they became crucibles for the evolution of genres like the Cuban danzón and son, the Dominican merengue, and the Haitian mereng.

Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean is the first book to explore this phenomenon in detail and with a pan-regional perspective. Individual chapters by respected area experts discuss the Spanish, French, and English-speaking Caribbean, covering musical and choreographic features, social dynamics, historical development and significance, placed in relation to the broader Caribbean historical context. This groundbreaking text fills a significant gap in studies of Caribbean cultural history and of social dance.

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.

Today's popular tassa drumming emerged from the fragments of transplanted Indian music traditions half-forgotten and creatively recombined, rearticulated, and elaborated into a dynamic musical genre. A uniquely Indo-Trinidadian form, tassa drumming invites exploration of how the distinctive nature of the Indian diaspora and its relationship to its ancestral homeland influenced Indo-Caribbean music culture.
 
Music scholar Peter Manuel traces the roots of neotraditional music genres like tassa drumming to North India and reveals the ways these genres represent survivals, departures, or innovative elaborations of transplanted music forms. Drawing on ethnographic work and a rich archive of field recordings, he contemplates the music carried to Trinidad by Bhojpuri-speaking and other immigrants, including forms that died out in India but continued to thrive in the Caribbean. His reassessment of ideas of creolization, retention, and cultural survival defies suggestions that the diaspora experience inevitably leads to the loss of the original culture, while also providing avenues to broader applications for work being done in other ethnic contexts.