Archiving Caribbean Identity: Records, Community, and Memory. John A. Aarons, Jeannette A. Bastian, and Stanley H. Griffin, eds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2022. 264 pp. 9780367615116

As the Caribbean is a large region with many different histories of colonization, it is important to note that this book centres mostly on anglophone Caribbean countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados. This area of the Caribbean is a unique space made up of many different cultural identities that have influenced each other and melded together over time, and as a result of this sharing, memory forms and practices specific to the Caribbean have emerged. As Aarons, Bastian, and Griffin write in their introduction, “Caribbean records can be described as diverse, dynamic, and delicate” (p. 3), and this book’s contents certainly showcase the truth of this statement. As the archival field still struggles to detach itself from literature and theory that centres primarily North American, European, and Australian ways of archival thinking, this book is a refreshing entrance into considering how other regions conceptualize recordkeeping. Due to the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and indentureship in the Caribbean, official records cannot often act as sources for memories of the lives of the colonized, and “reliance cannot be entirely placed on the record forms produced and archived in the countries of the colonizers” (p. 2). This book, then, highlights different modes of memory keeping and documentation through the lens of Caribbean culture and experience. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, titled “Tangible and Intangible Formats,” explores different archival forms beyond traditional textual paper records. The second, “Collections Through a Caribbean Lens,” examines existing collections both in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The essays take the reader through a breadth of different countries and their cultural histories, and there is sure to be something for every archivist’s interests. As a Caribbean-American with roots in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, I found each of these chapters to be truly engaging, helping to expand my knowledge beyond the North America–centric focus that is so prevalent in Canadian archival programs. Chapters range from Stephen Butters’s analysis of landscape as record, focusing on an Antiguan cricket ground, to Desaray Pivott-Nolan’s writing on postage stamps as memory from Trinidad and Tobago. Of particular note in part one of this book is Kai Barratt’s analysis of the song “Savannah Grass” by Kes the Band as an archive of carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. The savannah is an important physical space for Trinidad and Tobago’s carnival, and songs like “Savannah Grass” serve as a form of crowd-sourced collective memory. Soca songs, especially, “chronicle carnival as an experience of liberation and celebration, simultaneously highlighting social nuances” (p. 20). Barratt also writes about the use of nostalgia, another form of memory, in “Savannah Grass” through both the song’s subject matter and its connection to calypso sounds. The genre of soca also has roots in beats and structures connected to “African rituals that have been denigrated instead of being celebrated because of a brutal European legacy” (p. 26). We go from soca and nostalgia to the next chapter, where Norman Malcolm examines Jamaican Twitter, looking at the role of the virtual network in “documenting and challenging the politics and identity of the community” (p. 33). He ties this case study to Foucault’s concept of counter-memory, or the “resistance of a person towards the official versions of historical continuities” (p. 31). The chapter asks how Jamaican Twitter as an archive might serve as counter-memory and contain evidential and informational value for Jamaican society. Another notable chapter is the last chapter of part one, which is about aerial photography and satellite imagery as archival tools and focuses on Carlisle Bay in Jamaica. While perhaps a more technical and method-driven chapter, with …