Caribbean Diasporas, Metropolitan Policies, and Cultural Heritage

Caribbean popular arts, and cultural heritage writ large, emerged in unique processes of creolisation marked by, but in many ways also side-stepping and overcoming, the oppressive realities of colonialism, racism, and particularly slavery. Migratory flows to the region were central to this process, but with inter-regional migration and sojourns out of the Caribbean to Europe and elsewhere in the Americas, Caribbean communities became more transnational, and so did their cultural heritage. In this chapter, we will discuss the divergent patterns of Caribbean migrations, cultural orientations, and the popular arts, with a focus on the Dutch Caribbean islands and their Diaspora in the Netherlands. In addition, we will explore the contents and consequences of the British, Dutch, and French cultural policies. In the final section, we discuss one specific and vibrant field of culture, music, as a case study of whether and how transnationalism and metro-politan policies matter.