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.

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.

Linguistic ideologies and the historical development of language use patterns in Jamaican music

2017

This paper presents Jamaica as a case study of the intersections between language practice, language ideologies, and music, using a historically grounded descriptive approach spanning a period of more than three and a half centuries. It describes secular and religious Jamaican music(s) and ideologies connected to them through different periods of the country's history characterised by different social and socio-political configurations (e.g., slavery, colonial rule, Independence). These systems and the emergent socialities to which they gave rise influenced the creation of new musical genres and determined to varying extents how linguistic codes were distributed by genre, and in the lyrics themselves. Keywords Jamaica; Historical description; Genre; Creole

Editorial - Reggae Studies in a Global Context

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 2018

From its origins in Jamaica, a small island in the Caribbean, reggae now commands a global presence. A substantial body of academic literature on the multilayered genre has been produced, with many scholars studying this phenomenon from a transcultural perspective, deploying a wide range of inter/disciplinary methodologies. This special issue of Interactions on ‘Reggae Studies in a global context’ documents the transformations of the music as it travels beyond the Caribbean to distant cultures and is reinvented through contact with other musical traditions. Itself a hybrid music, reggae privileges the transmutations that are engendered by cross-cultural interaction.