PhD thesis synopsis (original) (raw)

Global reggae and the appropriation of Jamaican Creole

The present study investigates the sociolinguistics of globalisation and performance, focusing on the linguistic appropriation of Jamaican Creole (JC) by white reggae artists in reggae performances and interviews.1 By adopting a multi-faceted approach including a phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical analysis of the singing and speaking style of seven reggae artists and bands from the USA, Bermuda, and Europe, this study explores the similarities and differences between on- and offstage uses of Jamaican Creole, and whether the singers’ access and exposure to this variety as well as the topic of the song has an effect on their language behaviour. The findings provide evidence for the claim that Jamaican Creole has developed into a prestigious linguistic resource in non-Jamaican artists’ performances of a global reggae persona, both on- and offstage.

Clashing Interpretations in Jamaican Dancehall Culture

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2006

In recent decades, dancehall music appears to have surpassed its predecessor, reggae, as Jamaica's major cultural export. In her recent collection of essays written over the last decade entitled Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper continues the project she began in what is arguably the first seminal essay on dancehall culture.1 In this latter collection, Cooper offers the model of clash as a way of thinking through an array of issues surrounding the culture. The text presents the notion of clash in a variety of ways: clashes between conservative Jamaican insiders who fail to understand the worldview of lower class Jamaicans, clashes drawn along sexual and gender lines, clashes of words between competing DJs and sound systems, inter-and intra-religious clashes within Jamaican, as well as clashes between "foreign" and "native" decoders of the culture. As with any export, appropriation and expropriation of local meaning are inevitable, leading to mistranslations, different understandings, and hybridization as aspects of the culture are re-embedded elsewhere. In this article, I explore some of the problems Cooper's approach to the analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture raises by focusing on two key areas. First, I address the problems created by Cooper's privileging of the local voice over the foreign in the decoding of dancehall culture. I argue that while she appears to accept contradictory forms of meaning within dancehall lyrics, at the same time she rejects the possibility of plural interpretations occasioned by such semantic bifurcation. Secondly, I question Cooper's assertion that the violence in dancehall music is better understood as a metaphorical and lyrical game that 1.

Embodied meaning in Jamaican Popular Music

Research on popular music risks objectifying musical practitioners through insufficient attention to their lived experience. Attending to physical engagement with music, and especially how particular bodies hold and express particular experiences, reveals agency, expertise and critical engagement in ways unavailable from text or audio alone. For research in the global South, this is particularly important so as to avoid replicating colonial/imperial dynamics in research and representation. In free, late-night dance parties in Jamaica, participants express and assert meaning that comes from their embodied experience of global political, economic and cultural dynamics. These meanings are elucidated via physical immersion not only in sites of musical engagement but also in the broader social and cultural context for popular music. I demonstrate how a researcher open to the emotional and physical responses of herself and her fellow musical practitioners can better understand how and when marginalized people challenge colonial forces that constrict and reshape their agency along lines of race, gender, sexuality and class. This openness is informed as much by musical practice itself as it is by scholarly traditions, and contributes to our understanding of creativity, agency, power and politics in popular music studies.

White Faces in Intimate Spaces : Jamaican Popular Music in Global Circulation

This study explores Jamaican popular music’s changing engagement with globally networked media technologies. I combine ethnographic analysis of the street dance as a site of urban poor and Black resistance to colonial institutions with an analysis of song lyrics about video cameras at street dances. These newly networked technologies for circulating visual media in global networks affect how Jamaicans perform identity and also affect street dances’ social function. Globally networked digital media generate specific race- and gender-related pressures that reinforce existing and historic inequalities. This global visual media circulation can reshape and limit the ability of the street dance to function as site of autonomy and resistance. A better understanding of local practices can offer an alternative conceptual framework to help practitioners, scholars policy and technology designers avoid reinforcing those inequalities.

Versions, Dubs and Riddims: Dub and the Transient Dynamics of Jamaican Music

Dancecult, 2015

Dub emerged in Jamaica in the early 1970s, and, for a decade, it became a prolific and intensely innovative dimension of Jamaican popular music. Yet, during the mid-1980s, while dub flourished at the international level, influencing popular music in general, the genre of dub declined in popularity in Jamaica. How could this musical innovation, so evidently associated with Jamaica, expand and develop internationally while at the same time decline in Jamaica itself? In this paper, I explore the modalities and evolution of Jamaican music production and consumption. Through a description of the Jamaican music industry context, with reference to individual artists’ paths and a summary of Jamaican dub production, I show that even as the Jamaican music milieu was highly favorable to the emergence of dub, dub proliferated as a genre only by developing ties to a diaspora of international audiences and practitioners.

Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall. By DONNA P. HOPE

Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2011

Caribbean cultural contemporary academic and critic, Donna P. Hope, in her new book Man Vibes: Masculinities in Jamaican Dancehall, addresses the strictures of Black Male representation, the tropes of Black postcolonial Caribbean masculinity, heteropatriarchy, homophobia and sexuality in a predominantly Black Jamaican Dancehall music and culture. She marries popular culture debates with theories of gender and sexuality, while examining the progress of Jamaican masculinities in Dancehall cultures. She explores five prominent masculine debates that are well-known in dancehall music and culture. The debates are: promiscuous heterosexuality, gun/violence, anti-male homosexuality, conspicuous consumption and the noveau presentation of a fashioned and styled dancehall variant of maleness, or a biologized hypermasculinity. Methodically as a native of Jamaica, she employs both a personal, ethnographic and anthropological perspective, auditing the history of Dancehall within Jamaican popular culture.