Look Pon Likkle Chiney Gal’: Tessanne Chin, The Voice, and Globalized Caribbean Identities and YouTube

Tessanne Chin, winner of the fifth season of the American vocal competition, The Voice, was asked throughout the season to perform “otherness,” specifically “Caribbeanness” for the show’s judges and audience. From her first performance on, the cartographic impulse of empire, the mapping of discourses onto her “exotic” body went into motion. She was fetishized for her distinctly Caribbean “voice” and body. In direct response to complex intersections of Orientalist and colonialist discourses of race and nation, Jamaicans and many others in the Caribbean basin and diaspora took to YouTube to both support Chin and question the “gaze” to which Chin was subjected. Taking Tessanne Chin as the case and YouTube as a platform, I analyze Caribbean usage of a digital platform that has been deemed very “Asian” and read it both as an attempt by these subjects to inscribe Caribbean diasporic identity into historical and national memory through the digital archive and as a way to push back at limited and limiting discourses of embodiment. In doing so, I answer Timothy Chin’s call to question the “relationship between Chinese Jamaicans and the discourses of national, cultural, and racial identity” (107), but I am doing so through YouTube where technology, history, and cultural production, and “platform” converge.