| Sumario: | This article demonstrates how the history of Kassav, the French Caribbean music group founded in 1979, sheds light on the cultural politics of French Caribbean music and the history of "global France." It argues that Kassav's music represents an inventive cultural and commercial response to patterns of neocolonial and capitalist exclusion in the French Caribbean, one that drew on the islands' own cultural resources to fashion a new musical form, called zouk, that has had lasting influence. Kassav owes its commercial success in part to a global music industry hungry for new musics from postcolonial peripheries and to Paris's role as a world music capital. That Kassav was seen in metropolitan France as "Caribbean" or "world" music, rather than "French," speaks to the historical and racial fault lines that obscure the Frenchness of the French Caribbean to many in the Hexagon.
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