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This chapter focuses on the literature and on the persistence of rhythm in the literary and intellectual discourse of the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. It discusses how the rhythm-blackness equation was subsequently called into question by intellectuals such as René Ménil and Frantz Fanon, both of whom sought to demystify and de-racialize issues of culture and identity. It explains the development of this discourse in the French Caribbean from the Negritude era to the 1980s, from the African-centered rhythmic poetics of Aimé Césaire through Léon-Gontran Damas's experiments with jazz rhythms and Frantz Fanon's denunciation of rhythm as an essential component of racialized Martinican identity. This more realist representation of Martinican life incorporated a reworked conception of rhythm as a living, evolving element in the lives of the island's poor.

This chapter focuses on the conceptions of race and culture, on colonial history of rhythm and its suppression in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Trinidad, on the literature and on the persistence of rhythm in the literary and intellectual discourse of the French Caribbean islands, and ultimately, on understanding these links and the role played by rhythm in perpetuating them by shifting the focus from the Caribbean to the United States. It explores the questions and traces the history of the discourses on rhythm and race in four key American places and times. It shows how rhythm has been one of the most persistent and malleable markers of race. The chapter also explores the concept of rhythm in European and African music and emphasizes how drums are used as more than just a musical instrument. Furthermore, it discusses the connections between rhythms, music, dance, and the obscured, “denigrated” identities of circum-Caribbean black peoples and cultures.

This chapter develops an understanding of the links between the conceptions of race and culture, colonial history of rhythm and its suppression, the literature and the persistence of rhythm in the literary and intellectual discourse of the French Caribbean islands, and the role played by rhythm in perpetuating them by shifting the focus from the Caribbean to the United States. Reflecting primarily on James Brown's development of a distinctively rhythmic musical style, it demonstrates how black radicals interpreted these rhythms as manifestations of living African aesthetics and also how recent critics such as Fred Moten have rejected these interpretations. It concludes with the fact that there is a sense of the ongoing, though often obscured and seldom acknowledged, connections between African American and Caribbean cultural politics and the ways in which the rhythm has been at the heart of conceptions of race, culture, and subjectivity.