The Steelband Movement examines the dramatic transformation of pan from a Carnival street music into a national art and symbol in Trinidad and Tobago. By focusing on pan as a cultural process, Stephen Stuempfle demonstrates how the struggles and achievements of the steelband movement parallel the problems and successes of building a nation. Stuempfle explores the history of the steelband from its emergence around 1940 as an assemblage of diverse metal containers to today's immense orchestra of high-precision instruments with bell-like tones. Drawing on interviews with different generations of pan musicians (including the earliest), a wide array of archival material, and field observations, the author traces the growth of the movement in the context of the grass-roots uprisings of the 1930s and 1940s, the American presence in Trinidad in World War II, the nationalist movement of the postwar period, the aftermath of independence from Britain in 1962, the Black Power protests and the oil boom of the 1970s, and the recession of recent years. The Steelband Movement suggests that the history of pan has involved a series of negotiations between different ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, and social organizations, all of which have attempted to define and use the music according to their own values and interests. This drama provides a window into the ways in which Trinidadians have constructed various visions of a national identity.

In this wide-ranging study, Stephen Stuempfle explores the transformation of the landscape (material environment) of Port of Spain from the cocoa boom era at the turn of the twentieth century through Trinidad and Tobago's independence from Britain in 1962. In addition to outlining the creative work of planners, architects, engineers and builders, he examines depictions of the city in journalism, travel literature, fiction, photographs and maps, and elucidates how diverse social groups employed urban spaces both in their day-to-day lives and for public celebrations and protests. Over the course of the seven decades considered, Port of Spain was a dynamic centre for interactions among British officials; American entrepreneurs, military personnel and tourists; and a rapidly growing local population that both perpetuated and challenged the colonial regime. Many people perceived the city as a vanguard space - a locale for pursuing new opportunities and experiences. By drawing on a rich array of written and visual sources, Stuempfle immerses the reader in the sights and sounds of the city's streets, parks, yards and various buildings to reveal how this complex environment evolved as a realm of collective endeavour and imagination. He argues that the urban landscape served as a key site for the display and negotiation of Trinidad's social order during its gradual transition from colonial rule to self-government. For Port of Spain's inhabitants, the construction of a modern capital city was interrelated, both practically and symbolically, with the building of a society and a new nation-state.