While celebrated at first, Jamaica has struggled a lot with its independence and its implications for the people of Jamaica as well as different subcultures. In the aftermath of racial conflicts in the years following 1962, the genre of Dancehall surfaced and established itself in the 1980s. For the people living in the inner city of Kingston, which was largely separated from uptown, Dancehall was not just music, but represented a whole lifestyle.
While Dancehall has not lost any of its meaning since then, it certainly has changed and become important to many more people all around the world. But how exactly is this type of dance related to black identity, colonialism and the experience of racism? How did it manage to conquer the streets of Jamaica? And in what way is it represented in the digital world?
Cyrielle Tamby first explores the diasporic experience of blackness, and accounts for common grounds in being Black in Europe and in Jamaica. She scrutinizes the problem of silenced narratives in Jamaica, before moving on to the different aspects of dance as a form of resistance. Using the implication of her findings, the author then examines how knowledge can and has to be rethought through cultural production in diasporic making. Cyrielle Tamby claims in this book how the richness of popular cultures from the African diaspora that circulates across numerous podcast, literature, music and dance can challenge the lack of knowledge about the history of Black people. Her work is based on literary research as well as personal experience and provides the reader with some fascinating results.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. THEORETICAL TOOLKIT AND SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
2.1. The Diasporic experience of blackness
2.2. Recalling silenced narratives
2.3. Centering body politics by looking at Jamaican Dancehall as responsive to a postcolonial malaise in Jamaica
2.4. Tracing the notion of resistance in the Caribbean
2.5. Ethnography as a method to (de)construct knowledge
3. DANCEHALL STREET PARTIES AS BLACK QUEER SPATIALITIES
3.1. Street parties as cosmos of energies
3.2. Street parties as erotic and ritualistic architectures
3.3. Refashioning processes as a strategy of survival
3.4. Conquering the street: Tensions between national and local identity-makers
3.5. Queering spatialities of black life
3.6. Epilogue
4. MAPPING A HOME OUTSIDE OF HOME: DIASPORIC-MAKING, NEW-YORK AND THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE
4.1. A home outside of home
4.2. Mapping familiarity and the unknown in the diasporic-making
4.3. Generating an economy from diasporic-making
4.4. A gendered sense of diasporic-making
4.5. Struggling outside of home
4.6. Epilogue
5. VERNACULAR LOVE: FOCUS ON TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSACTIONAL LOVE RELATIONSHIPS
5.1. Practices of street smartness
5.2. The Dancehall Hostel : Infrastructure of body-consuming
5.3. Epilogue
6. DIGITAL TERRITORIALITY: INSTAGRAM AS A VISUAL ECONOMY OF BODIES AND WORD
6.1. Archiving realities
6.2. Conflating ephemeral and permanent temporalities
6.3. Visual economy of bodies
6.4. Visual economy of words
6.5. Instagram as a vernacular poetry of resistance
6.6. Epilogue
7. CODA
7.1. Traveling across the territorialities of resistance
7.2. Repeated practices of resistance and their purpose
7.3. Rethinking knowledge through cultural production in diasporic-making
8. WORKS CITED
8.1. Bibliography
8.2. Visual, Sound and Online material:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I am thankful for my wonderful family. My parents Irène and Christian, my sisters Sonya, Alexia and Ruth, my friends “Les Moulouds” and the Jünger’s are my largest source of inspiration in becoming myself. I am constantly aware of how fortunate I am to be around them. I am and will always be deeply comforted by their care. I am deeply grateful to Nicolas Baudet, who as my schoolteacher in French literature, introduced me to the wonderful world of books and to Margarita Bönning-Ofori a.k.a. “Swaggi Maggi” who opened the doors into the Dancehall scene to me. She empowered me to pursue my dream and is a remarkable inspiration as a friend, teacher, dance partner and mentor. I am fortunate to have my dance crew Primetime Dimension. Together we traveled, danced, challenged ourselves physically and mentally. Here, I want to particularly mention Valérie Maibaum whose emotional and intellectual support sustained me throughout this project. I want to thank the Dancehall street dancers in Jamaica, who opened their hearts so that I could understand their lives. Their influence on my life has been immeasurable. I can never hope to repay this debt, but I attempt to care and share the knowledge they gave to me through Dancehall. I want also to express gratitude to my godparents Gilbert and Dominique Cadelis, who made my stay in the USA possible.
I owe special thanks to my primary advisor Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis who welcomed me at the Departments of African Diaspora Studies in UC Berkeley and made my research more productive by discussing my thesis with me, and to my second advisor, Prof. Dr. Anika Keinz, for her support alongside my master’s degree at the Europa-Universität Viadrina. Thanks to Dr. Donna P. Hope and Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah for their interest in my research, and also to Maria Sophie Braun, my cousins Avinash and Sharmila Tamby and my friend Lisa Klank for the professional proofreading.
Several remarkable music albums helped me give birth to this project. I wish to acknowledge the centrality of Chronixx’s Chronology, Solange’s a Seat at the Table, John Coltrane’s Settin the pace and Odunsi The Engine’s rare. Last but not least, I want to thank Julot, Viola, Robert and Gwena, who have, in their own ways, accompanied me on this journey since I moved to Berlin in 2011 and who will remain my brightest stars among the stars.
1. INTRODUCTION
Dancehall a mi everything.
—Vybz Kartel, Dancehall
This dancehall ecosystem is the purest form of organic creativity inside of Kingston´s Creative City of music. It developed out of the efforts of ordinary men and women who found a way to make a living from music and culture when other avenues were closed off or simply non-existent.
Donna P. Hope, Jamaica Observer
I spent the academic year 2017/2018 doing my research at the department of African Diaspora Studies and Geography at UC Berkeley, trying to deeply understand, as simple as it appears, why people are placed in certain spaces and not others. I knew without knowing, that I was also questioning my own presence in particular places. When I write “I knew” it feels like things make sense intuitively but are not scrutinized and reflected to be explained with words. At that moment where I needed words to understand this ongoing “sensation” that led me to conduct this research. I am conscious of this feeling of ambivalence as I sit and write about myself. It shadows the words as they form in my mind. I need to show that feeling, share experiences, ideas and memories, as they enable the reader to understand how this work emerged. I began a wonderful journey by reconsidering the need to visualize myself in my work through the “I” that asserts my positionality in writing, thinking and reflecting. It opened a Pandora´s box of interrogations about my singular relationship to my research until touching the more general epistemologies of what it means to be human in the sense of a diasporic human. This same “I” that starts “Individual” is the conflation of the vertical linear and straight alphabet form of an Indian woman born and raised in a Parisian banlieue, in other words, in a place surrounded by black people in a working-class area in France, from parents born and raised in Congo and Vietnam. While I moved to Berlin to study Social Sciences, I already felt this “sensation” that I didn’t “fit” into the academic world in France, there was something disturbing, but I did not have words to explain it, it was a “sensation”. This same sensation made me become part of the Dancehall dancing scene in Berlin with a group of women with whom I felt familiar. This sensation became neutralized as soon as I started dancing. In my social environment in France or in Germany, I was frequently asked why I started being so involved in the Dancehall scene as I did not have any “direct connection”, which in the common sense means family ties to Jamaica. By dancing, traveling to Jamaica, teaching Dancehall and then, researching it… I just knew, feeling the movement of my body was a therapeutic act, as I would embrace a response impossible to express with words I knew I had, but not fully processed. This is how I started to question the body as a powerful language against my literal absence of words, making my diasporic experience float within an untouched and wide ocean of the unknown. Paul Gilroy opened this ocean in 1993 with The Black Atlantic. He critically re-spatialized the violent experience of slavery in the Caribbean as a vantage point for the implemented system of racial and plantocratic capitalism behind the modernity of “our” western European nations. Gilroy’s linkage of the Caribbean and Europe in the space of the Black Atlantic resonates with the major notion of diaspora, derived from the Greek term for “dispersion”. Diaspora originally referred to the worldwide dispersion of Jewish people outside their homeland, the Land of Israel, and later Greek and Armenian displaced groups and today commonly evoked in reference to the African diaspora1:
"For better or worse, diaspora discourse is being widely appropriated. It is loose in the world, for reasons having to do with decolonization, increased immigration, global communications, and transport -- a whole range of phenomena that encourage multilocal attachments, dwelling, and traveling within and across nations." (Clifford 1997: 249)
Clifford points out the often misunderstood, but influential term of diaspora, which goes beyond traditional and erroneous national boundaries that cut off instead of delineating processes of cultural production, hybridity and identity building. The traumatic experiences of slavery, colonialism, suffering and displacement are significative in the formations of a sense of belonging to the continent of Africa that takes the figure of a home in the Caribbean diasporic imaginary. The diasporic identity equation is complicated by the relationship the Caribbean developed with Europe and America, a relationship Stuart Hall (1990) calls Présence Européenne and Présence Américaine2. “For better or worse”, diaspora was the analytical framework I would move within my academic journey to track the sensation I always felt. I found it so compelling to my own experience that I also interpreted my own lifestyle as “diasporic”. I also started to answer ironically “Wakanda” whenever I was asked, where I am from. This joke was the sound of a diasporic metaphor...
While I was developing myself as a professional dancer, I became more conscious of the effects of being racialized in a mostly white space like Germany. I constantly had a sense of loneliness and being misunderstood in my life´s choices and decisions, although they appeared very logical to me. On an individual scale, it felt like rewinding the movie of my life and playing the different scenes, where I had to deal with the color of my brown skin in predominantly white surroundings. But it was not enough. Becoming conscious of my diasporic experience had to happen outside of my own mind and body. I had to think more broadly and scrutinize the diasporic experience more structurally, elsewhere, in other bodies and spaces. At this time, I was also in touch with Jamaican dancers. Looking at other diasporic experiences reveals how resistance acts as a determinism in some diasporic lives. I wanted to think through the role of intentional or non-intentional strategies of resistance as a way of living the diasporic experience3. In this work, I examine the notion of resistance, when it does not appear as such, when it is not visible through a particular act, but when strategies of resistance are complicated by time and space, and by the triad of class, gender and race. By focusing my research on the diasporic realities of Jamaican street dancers, I interrogate how certain forms of living arrangements, social practices and intimate relationships can be read as strategies of resistance.
The different concepts of blackness, silenced narratives and resistance I used to frame my research question are examined in the first chapter. I also argue that Jamaican Dancehall is transgressive in the way the emergence of Dancehall dancing appears as a response to the postcolonial and political malaise that Jamaica faces after its independence. By reflecting my ambivalent position of researcher and dancer, I also discuss the role of ethnography in the construction and deconstruction of knowledge.
During my research, I became more intrigued by the mystic form the archipelago. Although the Caribbean as archipelago can be seen as a geographical materiality, it also finds its source in numerous contributions of scholars4. This metaphor illustrates the sociocultural complexities that the region faces under the postcolonial conditions of poverty. The archipelago as a site of relations reifies those connections covered by the camouflage of water. Where a sense of Caribbeanness is reflected though “repeated islands” of a “same with differences”5.
The different sections of my work follow the lines of the archipelago, where each chapter can be seen as a repeated territoriality of resistance rooted in “a same with differences”. Therefore, chapter two depicts the street party as a territoriality of resistance. I look at how dancehall street dancers write themselves into the particular landscape of a street party in Kingston. Throughout the ethnography of two major dancehall events Mojito Mondays and Uptown Mondays, I analyze how different notions of labor, temporalities and performances are reconfigured into a mode of survival and insurgence. Thus, I also demonstrate how the conflictual relations between institutional and local power dynamics are reflected in the shifting of public spaces into black queer spatialities.
Then, in chapter three, I attempt to articulate the constitution of home with the process of diasporic making. I examine how Jamaican actors of the Dancehall culture negotiate resistance in the particular space of New York. Furthermore, I reflect some realities of the ethnographic fieldwork such as how the complex relationships of researcher / respondents affected my research.
Chapter four deals with developed strategies of resistance such as transactional and transnational love relationships. I looked at different practices of street smartness that place the vernacular as a practice of resistance. Throughout the analysis of infrastructures hosting dancehall events for tourists in Kingston, I interrogated the understanding of dance tourism as a form of gendered sex tourism.
Chapter five dives into the vernacular poetry of resistance offered by Instagram as a visual economy of bodies and word. In order to investigate this particular topic, I looked at how different narratives of survival, success and social mobility are digitally performed by Jamaican dancers. This analysis of Instagram contents demonstrates the role of digital spaces in the production of blackness as a mode of agency.
2. THEORETICAL TOOLKIT AND SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
It always seemed to me that even the most abstract theories are, to varying degrees, informed by their subjective conditions of existence: by, that is, the inner psychic dynamic of the theorist. I’ve felt this true of my own life. And this book stands as an experiment in drawing out what connections I can between my ‘life’ and my ‘ideas’, in so far as these are ever separable.
—Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger
The mapping of different territorialities of resistance requires a requisite part, that kind of toolkit we can refer to at any time. In the following, I explain some notions I have been continuously discussing throughout my work and present the methodological approach I follow.
2.1. The Diasporic experience of blackness
Let´s play with our imagination and repeat that diasporic sound in our mind: “Wakanda”... What the comic and movie Black Panther or the Black Atlantic both reveal by placing “Black” as its first and central term is the foregrounding account of racial matters in the emphasis of diaspora. Questioning what it means to be black is not just a way to illuminate the phenotypic surface of blackness. It raises the question of how race emerges from the phenotypical dimension of blackness to become a matter that defines class, gender, sexual power dynamics. Despite what appears to be phenotypical, blackness reflects the processes of othering in the construction of black subjectivities. Much has been written on how the “other” comes into being through the material experience of discrimination, poverty, violence, suffering, racism, sexualization, social determinism, socio-spatial immobility6. In an attempt to understand the various cases of mental illness and psychic disorder during the French occupation of Algeria, Frantz Fanon identified the system of colonization as a violent process, where assimilation occurred as an annihilation of the human being.
“In the man of color there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence. Whenever a man of color protests, there is alienation. Whenever a man of color rebukes, there is alienation.” (Fanon 2008 1952: 43)
So, according to Fanon, the man of color constructs himself through alienation. It suggests that dehumanizing processes are inherent to the construction of black subjectivities. Later in the book, Fanon demonstrates the way assimilation psychologically happens by assuming that whiteness must be a precondition to pursue one´s own existence:
“The black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. Long ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a white existence.” (Fanon 2008 1952: 178)
By defining the colonized relationally to the colonizer, assimilation structurally placed the white man at the top of the human scale. In this way, what is structurally preconfigured as a white privilege becomes discursively associated with freedom and with a way to achieve humanity. Consequently, the only way for black people to exist is to tend to whiteness without really achieving it. In this logical construction, black people are preconfigured to fail under colonialism. Fanon illustrates, how blackness is not a fixed identity isolated from the rest, but on the contrary, emerges out of colonial and postcolonial institutions that associate whiteness with success. Consequently, the Black Man, as Fanon theorized it, comes to cultivate the hate of his own body.
“Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate.” (Fanon 2008 1952: 37)
Here, Fanon makes an interesting point by examining the structural construction of failure and hate, which is, then embodied by the black body. The process of alienation does not stop, but still goes on until whiteness becomes a visible part of the black body. Indeed, acknowledging whiteness as a goal is not just an epistemological question. It actually finds a material resonance.
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Numerous scholars have made contributions on the way colorism is promoted in the dominant discourse to give privileges to light-skinned people on the labor market, housing market or by defining them as a beauty ideal7. In Jamaica, the flourishing business of cosmetics, whitening creams and skin bleaching treatments, also proudly assumed by the Jamaican artist Vybz Kartel, accounts for the relevance of whiteness in one’s personal achievement. The practice of skin bleaching gained more popularity since the artist´s engagement in his lyrics “washed mi face wid di cake soap” and with the sale of his own brand of cake soap in 2010-2011. The physical appearance of the artist shifted between the release of his single “Versatility” in 2009 and of his album “Kingston story” in 2011. On the cover of his single, Vybz Kartel appears as a dark-skinned and athletic man; his sunglasses, black tank top and the black background of the cover give him a defensive mode and reinforce imaginaries of a distant and self-protected man. On the contrary, the pastel tones of the rosy-beige cover of “Kingston story” match with Kartel´s light blue shirt and create a safe atmosphere. Here, the combination of an lightened skin with a slim figure covered with tattoos that became part of Kartel´s flesh gives him a certain fragility. Furthermore, Kartel´s gaze, without glasses, is directed straight to his audience. His pose with crossed arms resting on his chest emulates a kind of vulnerability and delineates an invitation to enter into his interiority. Over this period, Vybz Kartel´s song Cake soap8 released in 2010 provided a discursive acceptance of skin lightening in Jamaica and inscribed aesthetic imaginaries of power and coolness upon whiteness. Here, the purpose is not to identify whether skin bleaching should be practiced or not. Rather, I want to cast some light on the structural glorification of whiteness. I argue that the proximity to whiteness is not necessarily an aesthetic choice but rather enables the black body to cope with self-hate and failure. Regarding the structural glorification of whiteness, engaging with skin bleaching appears as a logical consequence, a strategy to ensure social elevation. More recently, the engagement with blackness evolved in the dominant discourse. On October 22nd, 2018 the singer Spice opened up the discussion on colorism on social media. To promote her new single “Black hypocrisy”, she deleted all of her Instagram pictures and uploaded a picture of herself where she appeared with lightened skin, a blonde weave and blue eyes.
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iii. Hamilton, Grace Latoya (10/22/2018): Spice´s picture promoting her new single “Black Hypocrisy”. Instagram. @spiceofficial.
On the next day, she admitted having photoshopped the image and released a video, where she sings “I get hate from my own race, yes that´s a fact, because the same black people say I´m too black”9. By engaging with colorism in her work and with her audience, Spice maneuvers to address skin bleaching as a practice of physical alienation and to account for blackness as a mode of existence in Jamaica.
2.2. Recalling silenced narratives
Although the construction of black subjectivities is clearly delineated and materially exemplified by cosmetic consumption, I argue that there is a something that makes this construction fragile and surrounded by the politics of invisibility. Defining blackness through whiteness does not disappear from itself after the political independence as we would hinder a bad germ from growing. The process of whitening one´s skin does not make the blackness disappear, so it follows that, even though these people get paler they remain black, if not by skin tone, then by experience. This is where the politics of time needs to be scrutinized. The scholar Ann Laura Stoler has critically engaged with disconnected temporalities by reconsidering the duress of occluded imperial formations in present and future postcolonial societies:
“Duress, then, is neither a thing nor an organizing principle so much as a relation to a condition, a pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind. It may bear no immediately visible sign or, alternatively, it may manifest in a weakened constitution an attenuated capacity to bear its weight. Duress is tethered to time but rarely in any predicable way. It may be a response to relentless force, to the quickened pacing of pressure, to intensified or arbitrary inflictions that reduce expectations and stamina. Duress rarely calls out its name. Often it is a mute condition of constraint.” (Stoler 2016:7)
Duress is, then, this imperceptible process of slow violence that is systemic to the present and shape of our future. In this way, Ann Laura Stoler approaches time as a matter of violence. Similarly, in his attempt to give a resonance of a silenced past in our noisy present, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the past (1995) claims that processes of erasure, neutralization or watermarking of narratives of black people are active acts of violence:
“Thus the presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral nor natural. They are created. As such, they are not mere presences and absences, but mentions or silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one “silences” a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis. “ (Trouillot 1995: 48)
I submerged into my deepest feelings, while I was reading Stoler’s and Trouillot’s verses. I was touched and deeply concerned by their claims. I was experiencing flashback scenes of my childhood. I was visualizing daily scenes of my life, living in my mind as unsolved mysteries, but with this unexplainable sensation that one day, I would unlock the secret of this mental movie. I remember thinking that we don’t belong to history because I never heard one word about black people in my history class at school. I remember when I was given a table sheet with all the dates of decolonization and independence of the “Third world” states that I had to learn by heart to test my knowledge about decolonization. A simple one-sided table with columns, lines, numbers, dates, country names ranked in the chronological order of history. It was everything I had learned about decolonization at school… Alongside my obstinacy to learn these numerous dates, I was wondering, where were the human voices hidden in this table sheet. Where were people’s action accounted for in the written history of decolonization? Regarding the ambiguous relationship between humans and the writing of history, Trouillot evokes the two sides of historicity, where history is not just a process but also a narrative built on, around, and with humans:
“People are not always subjects constantly confronting history as some academics would wish, but the capacity upon which they act to become subjects is always part of their condition. This subjective capacity ensures confusion because it makes human beings doubly historical or, more properly, fully historical. It engages them simultaneously in the sociohistorical process and in narrative constructions about that process” (Trouillot 1995: 24)
Looking at obstructed narratives of silenced subjectivities would appear as a long journey of walking through the underground path of knowledge soaked by a heavy and cemented coat of duress, with a simple torch that would illuminate the dark zones of historical production. But, how do we see, touch, feel, hear and recognize muted narratives? Thinking about how we recognize and unveil “blackness” from invisibility, opens ways to think about, how people live and happen in environments, where they were “never meant to survive”10.
Thinking through invisibility, environment and places where those never meant to survive can live, all of this suggests that space is deeply intertwined with the possibility of existence. Exploring the human and the production of space at their interstices would help to emphasize how “this tension, between the mapped and the unknown, reconfigures knowledge, suggesting that places, experiences, histories, and people that ‘no one knows’ do exist, within our present geographic order.”11 The convergence of studying black life through black studies, and space through geography is materialized by McKittrick & Woods’s understanding of Black geographies.
“A number of closely related trajectories illustrate how black human geographies are implicated in the production of space. One trajectory consists of the ways in which essentialism situates black subjects and their geopolitical concerns as being elsewhere (on the margin, the underside, outside the normal), a spatial practice that conveniently props up the mythical norms and erases or obscures the daily struggles of particular communities. A second trajectory has to do with how the lives of these subjects demonstrate that “common-sense” workings of modernity and citizenship are worked out, and normalized, through geographies of exclusion, the “literal mappings of power relations and rejections.’ Finally, although often camouflaged by these same processes, the situated knowledge of these communities and their contributions to both real and imagined human geographies are significant political acts and expressions. Black geographies disclose how the racialized production of space is made possible in the explicit demarcations of the spaces of les damnes as invisible/forgettable at the same time as the invisible/forgettable is producing space – always, and in all sorts of ways.” (McKittrick & Woods 2007: 4)
My particular interest in working with Black Geographies is to look at the production of history in neglected materials. This approach does not assume to “discover” things as it centers the researcher in the production of knowledge. It rather postulates that things are “camouflaged”. They already exist and the work of the researcher is to account for “this unknown” as a form of knowledge. From this perspective, the researcher is meant to acknowledge and map the unknown trajectories where human life is left imprinted. Gloria Wekker put forward this Black Geographic approach in her work about intimate relationships among Afro-Surinamese women, mentioning that “Working-class culture, like other cultures in the black Diaspora, is an oral culture, replete with proverbs, verbal arts, storytelling, riddles, and songs” (Wekker 2006: 111)12. In this way, the richness of materials explored in the field of the Black Geographies, as in my work, is not limited to academic contributions. It extends to the world of performances, literature, music, the spoken word, artwork, photography, documentaries. To this extent, I refer to Katherine McKittrick words that “knowledge is not just produced, but shared”13. Thinking through theorizing as a form of sharing is a challenging way to consider the relationship between the researcher and its matter. In my research, I was very much concerned by the way marginalized people make sense of space. In the process of theorizing, I began to concretely produce and share knowledge at the margins by occupying peripheral spaces of the paper sheet. I was not attempting to shift the periphery to the center, but I aimed to valorize the periphery as a location of knowledge. In doing so, the footnotes and the literature used are of importance as I develop conceptual notions closely related to my work and I also share the contributions of other scholars who explored these same notions in their own projects. Musical and video materials are also used as a way to mobilize the body as a receptor of knowledge though its sonic and visual senses.
Thus, thinking through Black Geographies, which means to connect the spatial boundaries of bodies and place together, is the vantage point to begin the discussion around Jamaican Dancehall.
2.3. Centering body politics by looking at Jamaican Dancehall as responsive to a postcolonial malaise in Jamaica
Stuart Hall brings into the conversation the complexity of theorizing a culture as it involves a work of representation with “the production of meaning through language”14. This complexity to emphasize cultures is illustrated by the reaction of a group of dancers to the trivial question what is dancehall: “It is like asking me what does eating mean? Of course, it depicts the process of aliments being ingested and then swallowed. But with this, you miss all the other dimensions related to popular or gastronomic food, cooking, appreciating food, sharing with your community. I mean, if I define it, you will just have a very boring description, you’ll miss all the spiritual vibes, all the things making us alive within dancehall, living dancehall, you got it?” In reconciling language with cultural representation, Jamaican scholars have emphasized dancehall as “… music, space, attitude, fashion, dance, life/style, economic tool, institution, stage, social mirror, ritual, social movement, profile, profession, brand name, community, and tool of articulation especially for inner-city dwellers who continually respond to the vibe expressed through the words” (Niaah / Hope 2007: 221)
This definition and the seminal academic projects of Sonjah Stanley Niaah (2010), Donna P. Hope (2006), Carolyn Cooper (2004), Deborah Thomas (2004) and Norman C. Stolzoff (2000) enabled me to develop my research on dancehall culture. Yet, with no means to fall into the reproduction of knowledge already circulating in their precious contributions, I decided to use their works as a base, an orientation and impulse to start my own project, where the dancehall scope would be visualized through the trope of dancing, by focusing on the lives of street dancers in Jamaica. With my unconditional love for dancehall culture and my ethical attempt to not essentialize dancehall to a “boring description”, I let the representation of dancehall cultivates from itself by growing up through language, ethnography and the different chapters of my work.
The emergence of the dancehall dancing can be traced to the first Dance Halls, large public spaces in Kingston, where Black Jamaicans used to gather and dance to the musical selection marked by the evolution following the sensual rhythms of mento and calypso in the 1940’s, soul and r’n’b in the 1950’s, ska in the 1960’s, reggae in the 1970’s with a shift to the proper musical style of dancehall from the 1980’s onwards. The musical shift to dancehall revealed dance steps such as skank, cool and deadly, rubba bounce, simma, mud up. Originally from the Kencot Community of Kingston, the break-dancer and dancehall pioneer Bogle created the most famous steps of the Old skool era of the dance with some of his friends in front of his yard at the Roses Corner situated on the Lincoln Avenue. Dance moves like bogle, zip it up, pop your collar are still danced today at dancehall parties all over the world. Bogle’s murder in 2005 had a strong mediatic reception in Jamaica and influenced numerous young men from Bogle’s community to choose the path of dancing. The dancing scene was flourishing in the streets of Kingston, establishing the names of Shelly Belly, m.o.b or Ravers Clavers among the most influential dancers and dance crews of what became the Middle skool era. The musical evolution of dancehall toward more electronic sounds and faster rhythms of the riddims impacted the dance moves created from 2010. It was the beginning of the new skool era where dancehall moves are characterized by a higher technical complexity and a faster coordination of movements than in middle skool and old skool. The evolution of dance is intrinsically linked to the social conditions shaping the Jamaican ghetto’s life. Therefore, there is a need to consider the production of a space such as Jamaica in order to contextualize the emergence of Jamaican Dancehall is the 1980’s.
In his book The dead yard, Ian Thomson (2009) offers the materiality of a work on black geographies focused on the socio-historical production of Jamaica. Thomson’s work deals brilliantly with the historical, social, political and racial conditions of what he calls a “postcolonial malaise”15 Jamaican people face and have embodied such ways that create a status quo or the inability to develop politics of change and progress since Jamaica’s independence in 1962. Thomson tracks imperial formations of Duress, a reliable way of connecting the absent past to the hypervisible present that surrounds places, where “conflicts has been the legacy of empire”16. Thomson’s historiography of places across his systematic comparative approach of slave and plantation estates during slavery, the pre-independence of Jamaica and today highlights the plantocratic system ruling Jamaica in the 21th century. With these ideas in mind, I want to focus on Thomson’s analysis of the political situation Jamaica faced between the 1940’s and the 1980’s which is endogenous to the emergence of the dancehall culture in the 1980’s.
After a series of strikes and riots in 1938 against political underrepresentation, Alexander Bustamante created the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, while his cousin Norman Washington Manley created the People’s National Party, or PNP.17 While figuring out ideological differences with his cousin, Bustamante founded in 1944 a more conservative political party, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Although the erosion of the British Empire was looming, Britain continued to deny the general elections organized the same year where Bustamante won. Only in 1962, in one of the climaxes of the Cold War, the British Empire had to recognize the independence of Jamaica, in which moment the United States became a more intrusive force in the Caribbean18. In the 70’s Norman Washington Manley’s son Michael Manley served two terms under the left-wing premiership with his reforming vision of making out of Jamaica a project of colorblindness, also called creolism19. The idea was to reimagine Jamaica without racialized hierarchies, but it consequently undermined the color prejudices and strong racialized system that was in place over three centuries of slavery20. In this attempt, Manley adopted a Garveyist position by centering the proximity to Mother Africa in the building of a proper Jamaican national identity. This afrocentric vision was also a way to challenge the imperialism of Britain and the United States. Although significant social reforms were implemented during Manley’s era21, the optimism of a greater future attached to the creolist project of Jamaica’s national identity was too idealistic. Also, Michael Manley’s proximity to Fidel Castro through the nationalization of electricity, telephone, transport as well as bank companies was also perceived as unrealistic, given the geographical closeness to America and the strong diasporic ties between Jamaica and the “New World”22. The leader of the opposition Edward Seaga started to develop his rhetoric response to Manley’s anti-capitalist project by approaching the United States for his campaign. Michael Manley won unexpectedly the election in 1978. The political tensions between the PNP and the JLP turned clearly into racial matters, making practices of clientelism increase. It became then normalized to buy electors depending on their racialized position within the Jamaican social order, for example, as the black ghetto communities and gangs driven by the PNP began to fight the white and brown middle class considered as privileged. In their populist attempts, both the PNP and JLP approached Rastafari and ghetto communities through music, by providing guns for protection or giving privilege to dons and their communities. Jamaica was concretely facing a racial war materialized by the violence and death acts within its stratified class and political system.
Jamaica’s foreign debt which nearly equaled 90 % of its domestic budget and the worldwide oil crisis in 1979 pushed Manley to accept the emergency aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pushing Jamaica into even more economic vulnerability towards the United States (Thomson 2009: 199). The more intrusive economic imperialism of the United States upon Jamaica and more generally upon the Caribbean reflected the power dynamics of western societies to neutralize the expansion of Fidel Castro’s socialism during the Cold War. The JLP’s leader Edward Seaga supported by the United States won the 1980’s elections, whose political reforms increased Jamaican’s dependence to Reagan’s free market policies that reinforced the implementation of racial capitalism in Jamaica. It is the complex interaction of a contextual Cold War, colorblind national identity and the plantocratic system rooted in British and US imperialism that colors the postcolonial living realities of inner-city people of Kingston.
Thomson’s work on identifying the conditions of a “postcolonial malaise” in Jamaica is very insightful to scrutinize, how the consolidation of whiteness and Britishness in Jamaica, rooted in the values of respectability and colorblindness, is relational to a refusal for poor black people to embody them23.
Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten
iv. Tamby, Cyrielle (Mai 2018): Wappings Thursday, Kingston Jamaica.
With the assumption that Jamaica is stuck in a social and political status quo, Thomson’s vision of change and progress is based on a one-sided understanding of resistance rooted in the radical value of direct and active refusal. In this way, by analyzing Jamaica from “above”, Thomson overlooks, how Jamaican people manage to live in a system that treats them as “human failure”, where modes of insurgence are not necessarily revealed as such. When they are expressed under the politics of dirt, disconcerting, disrupting, excess, bling or conflated in what Deborah Thomas calls “modern blackness”, but relegated to the “low art” by the western white male eye24: “Low art, for Adorno, encompassed the vulgar in both form and content: crude simplicity, stupefying effects, a propensity for encouraging social passivity and intoxication” (Mbembe 2005: 71). In the article Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds based on Adorno’s hierarchization of aesthetics content, Achille Mbembe (2005) points out precisely, how certain performance practices such as music and dancing are misunderstood or perceived as futile because of the lack of consideration for places and space. In other words, Mbembe critics Adorno for silencing, obstructing or occluding the significance of cultural practices like performances. Mbembe shifts the dominant understanding of aesthetic performances beyond the discursive categories of ugliness or beauty. The connection to places and spaces produces aesthetic significations in forms of narratives:
“To tell the story of life in Congo’s cities, music calls on and produces heterogeneities of representation. Here as in theatre and painting, signification takes place through the juxtaposition of words, colours and sounds, an alchemy in which each element both retains and loses a part of its intrinsic power” (Mbembe 2005: 80).
In this passage, narratives are built up out of a patchwork of visual, sonic and affective stories. The narratives produced are intrinsically sensorial, recalling every human sense. I interpret Mbembe’s vision as a way to incorporate a black geographic approach in cultural studies, a way to attach things to human senses.
Furthermore, Mbembe’s ability to place the space of the body at the epicenter of epistemologies enables a reading of performances as sites of resistance:
“The body is not so much “harmed as it becomes a site of transgression, the locus of a blurring – between the transcendental and the empirical, the material and the psychic. In addition to existing as flux, the body is also a force-field of contrasts. Music engages in a struggle with these forces. Never simply movement of the human form, Congolese dance embodies something that resembles a search for original life, for perpetual genesis, and, through this, for an ideal of happiness and serenity” (Mbembe 2005: 85)
By situating the body at the interstices of the “transcendental and the empirical”, Mbembe complexifies the understanding of the body as a site of continuities and discontinuities. In doing so, he elevates the power and the meaning of the body in social politics. He is concerned by the body as an agency and is interested in the way it legitimates or disrupts power dynamics that categorize humans in terms of race, class or gender. This approach of the body which is, beyond the flesh, a mode of agency is foregrounded in my work as I am engaging with the possibilities and sites of resistance suggested by performances.
2.4. Tracing the notion of resistance in the Caribbean
Resisting practices have been numerously accounted by academics rewriting the past to dismantle production of silences. In his historical account The Black Jacobins, the Caribbean writer C.L.R. James (1938) explored the evolution of race in the complex class divisions on San Domingo. He examined alliances to one racial group or another throughout the Haitian revolution (1791-1803) as a way to resist one’s racialized human condition of slave. In doing so, James identified how economic and social classes are produced by racial distinctions. The notion of resistance is also embodied by Toussaint Louverture, depicted as a leader of revolution who knew how to resist the slave system from inside, by using ways to blur the intellectual boundaries that separate the slaves from the freemen : “The leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural advantages of the system they are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this rule.” (James 1989:19). More recently, Steve Striffler (2002) has recounted the story of the rise and fall of the Ecuador’s United Fruit Company, one of the biggest banana plantation enclaves operated by the United States. Striffler demonstrated, how offshoring controls of multinationals have been involved in the reproduction of structures of domination. He also combined historical and ethnographic evidences centering agrarian reforms and the political struggles of workers in the fall of the enclave. In illustrating struggle as an everyday process, Striffler challenges the utopian forms of resistance, revolution and struggle often conceptualized as full and global processes. On the contrary, alongside narratives of workers of the plantation industry emanate a discursive and material understanding of struggle as a local and gradual process, an everyday resistance expressed by practices of refusal and strikes against the enclave’s control over family structures, ownership of land and geographical mobility25. Striffler’s work belongs to a number of postindependent contributions asserting that the Caribbean continues to be colonized within the neoliberal structures of racial capitalism, revealing the tiny amount of control the Caribbean has over its own economic resources, movement, development and a cultural dependency to transnational corporations26. Following this idea, the hypervisibility of neocolonial relationships in tourism has been highlighted by Caribbean scholars, who focused on racialized processes between tourists and locals. Their works put forward western processes of othering black subjectivities and the consumption of the Caribbean as an idyllic paradise for sex tourism27. These projects are also in conversation with an approach of resistance as not specifically intentional, negotiated across sexualities and liminalities. Particularly, the ethnographic accounts of Angelique Nixon (2015), Noel Stout (2014) or Jafari Allen (2011) reveal, how sex tourism is also performed as a daily resisting practice for sex workers, who seek economic opportunities and mobility within neoliberal structures. These different historical and postcolonial genealogies of resistance emphasize resistance more as a process than a fixed state. It allows me to understand resistance contextually, focusing on the Caribbean in the 20th and 21th century, where resisting means transgressing neoliberal structures.
This transgressive potential of Dancehall reminds me of a conversation I had with the dancer John Bling, when he mentioned that “Dancehall is this wild child in the middle of a homogeneous class of good pupils”. By reading between the lines of incomprehension, vulgarity, ugliness, dirt, futility delineated by the western eye toward certain modes of cultural production emulating a sense of blackness, I identify Jamaican Dancehall as responsive to a “postcolonial malaise”, where spatial politics of bodies and places become sites of transgression and sites of resistance.
My understanding of Jamaican Dancehall as transgressive is also influenced by my ambivalent position as part of the Jamaican culture and at the same time still an outsider. In some ways, I distance myself from Jamaican dancers in the way that I did not grow up in Jamaica. I am not Jamaican. I am conscious of missing some of the private jokes in patois, but I am quite proud of myself as I still manage to get that sense of irony as we play a lot with it in French Banlieues. This outsider/insider position was important to develop my research with the ethnography. Before I introduce the methodological approach, let´s start with, how I became more involved in the Dancehall culture.
2.5. Ethnography as a method to (de)construct knowledge
When I started dancing dancehall in 2012 in Berlin, I did not know that it would take such a central role in my life. Back then I met my dance teacher Maggi alias swaggi maggi. In 2014 I went to Jamaica with her for the first time to develop my dance experience. Since then, I went back to Jamaica regularly to take intensive dance classes, attend street parties and visit the dance community. Going to Jamaica is a sleepless experience. I was attending dance classes every day, going to street parties every night, talking with the dancers in between with the feeling that sleeping was not as necessary as one thinks. I always scratched some notes, emotions, feelings on my notebook as I knew, I would use this material to write my bachelor thesis about the gender politics in the performance of dancehall. Something changed when I moved to Berkeley in 2017 to study African Diaspora Studies for my master thesis. I started being in contact with two professors in cultural studies, Sonjah Stanley Niaah and Donna P. Hope, whom I visited at the University West Indies Mona in Kingston. I went more frequently to Jamaica and my scratched notes became daily accounts, I preciously kept in several notebooks.
Alongside my intensive immersion in Jamaica, I started reflecting about ethnography by questioning my relationship as both a researcher and dancer in Kingston as fieldwork. Writing ethnography requires to be careful about te dangers of objectifying and “othering” the informant28. The power of writing ethnographically materializes this invisible power dynamics of knowledge production. Like Kirsten Hastrup who argued in Writing ethnography: state of the art (2005) that “the identity of the others, as such, is relational”, I attempt to acknowledge processes of othering in my work by reflecting my relationships with my informants (Hastrup 2005: 120). For this reason, representation politics play a central role in my attempt to produce writings with people rather than of people .
Ethics of representation raise questions about accessing and building trustful relationships with marginalized social groups. It is revealed in the auto-ethnographic account of Gina Ulysse’s relationships to the informal network of female street sellers in Jamaica in her work Downtown Ladies (2007) . Ulysse offers a materiality of the complex outside-inside perspective embodied by the researcher in “temporarily going in everyday lives of people” (Ulysse 2007:181). Unlike Gina Ulysse, I visited Jamaica a few times, before it became my fieldwork. First, it was a complex experience of negotiating two different identities of dancer and researcher. Among dancers, we don’t really talk about our roles in our other lives, outside of Jamaica. Although a few dancers knew that I was a social scientist, it never played a role in their lives. But when I started talking more concretely about my project of writing a paper about dancehall, our conversations turned into more intensive, focused and serious interactions about the political and social situations they were facing. These conversations were taking a central place in my research, expanding to a larger spectrum of dancers not just from Jamaica, but also from Europe and America, taxi drivers, cigarette sellers, cooks, artists, tv producers. Stuart Hall asserts that we can seek for representation of cultural politics but are never able to account exactly for it, as our positions vary: “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned” (Hall 1990: 222). In this way, conversations had the potential to bring visibility to different positionalities. Besides the important material produced out of these informal conversations, I also considered the interviews I made personally with nine dancers, over the four years of research, as well as interviews collected from video documentaries. Some narratives remained anonymous, in order to protect the privacy of the informants. However, for the most general part of my work, I asked my formal and informal interlocutors, if I could use their names and quote some of our conversations. There was a double ethnographic approach behind it. It would account for visible positionalities. It would situate the dancehall network as a co-producer of knowledge by sharing thoughts rather than falling into the appropriation of thoughts.
Observing, listening, feeling and memorizing moments during the day at classes and in the nocturne street parties opened the doors of an unknown spirituality. I enjoyed feeling while seeing, moving while reflecting. Alongside my repeated visits to Jamaica, I forgot the conflictual relationships of my identities of researcher and dancer. Where conflicts are turned into conflation. This conflation of my dancing body and my reflective mind worked so harmoniously that I could feel my entire soul thriving. Dancing with, while, in and without, or within researching… Those were powerful ways to critically engage with superposition, conflation, or juxtaposition of my roles alongside my work. In doing so, I acknowledge my auto-ethnographic position of thinking my own non-verbal and verbal interactions with environments as a research tool.
Dancehall culture is at the interstices where the sonic and the visual meets to produce explosive sounds, shiny lights and flashy modes of aesthetics. Through its accurate movement, dancing stimulates and responds to these sensorial tropes of sonic and visual, making dancehall undeniably resonating across our three-dimensional world. How do we write with enough contrasts and relief to make three dimensional forces existing? In the attempt to make this work touch the edges of our circular and living world, the writing is supported by numerous visual accounts of Instagram posts, photo and video materials. And with the sonic decorations of musical quotes and lyrics, the reader becomes spectator and listener of this matrix of resistance.
Thinking about how we squash a three-dimensional dancehall culture into a flat piece of paper, leads to critically engage with the process of flattening. The movement of flattening is similar to the one of being forced to bow oneself in front of a superior Being. It reveals how power dynamics could be intertwined with the process of writing. Challenging groveling can be reformulated into how we use writing as a power to challenge imperial formations forcing us to bow ourselves in front of the colonial traces of western knowledge production. In this way, my contribution follows a political statement developed by feminist standpoint theorists, who attempt to resist a particular intellectual position: the predominantly western white male eye striving to keep his privileged position unmarked on behalf of what he understands himself as being a sense of “objectivity”29.
Thinking about Audre Lorde who queries how the “tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy” (Lorde 1979: 25), I chose to tackle some old-fashioned tools and build this intellectual project on the works of black scholars whose academic interventions are accurate for my topic. Therefore, the analytic framework of this project is based on the important contributions of Jamaican scholars focusing on Dancehall studies such as Donna P. Hope, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Carolyn Cooper and more generally on black scholars of the African diaspora such as i.e., Deborah T. Thomas, Paul Gilroy, Francoise Verges, Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, Homi Bhabha, Gina Ulysse, Krista Thompson, Kamala Kempadoo, Angelique Nixon, Noel Stout, with a focus on the queering approaches of i.e., Rashad Shabbaz, bell hooks, , Audre Lorde, Nadia Ellis, Jafari Allen, Katherine McKittrick.
Besides, in the attempt to produce a decolonizing praxis through the politics of writing, I was intellectually inspired and personally moved by Caribbean scholars such as i.e., C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Michel Rolph Trouillot, Vera Bell, who have engaged with poetry in their intellectual production. They managed to reveal the beauty of the simple word as a political statement to place the affect and the human within theories. Although English remains an imperial barrier of knowledge production for many thinkers, for whom it is the second or third language - and I include myself in this category, there is also a need for us to express the affect on our “humanness” in our projects. In bringing my own poetry into this work, I use the aesthetics of writing to inevitably and “unapologetically” strike out any kind of neutral and unmarked sense of objectivity.
Yet, the different notions of blackness, body politics, silenced narratives, resistance and ethnography I have introduced in this toolkit are addressed alongside the four territorialities that might be different, but also share certain undeniable features. In the next chapter, the first territoriality of a Dancehall street party demonstrates how the different concepts of the toolkit are embraced in the production of space.
3. DANCEHALL STREET PARTIES AS BLACK QUEER SPATIALITIES
Black matters are spatial matters.
—Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds In April 2018, I went to the Black Geography conference organized by the American Association of Geographers in New Orleans. It was a very intense experience for me as I personally felt the sense of living in a black space through the tropes of academia, and the many strolls through the high connoted African American space of New Orleans. It was the first time I was surrounded by so many black people in the academic realm. I appreciated it deep into the cells of my body, like a healing process, a meditation of my body, spirit and unarticulated thoughts that finally could find the right place to be exteriorized and shared with what Sylvia Wynter names other “referent-we”30. I experienced for the first time what it is not to be anxious in my entire environment. Inside academia as well as outside in the streets. I literally experienced the sense of being fully privileged even when I crossed spaces. This surrounding environment around the Black Geography Conference, the discussion around how we can think Black Studies and Geography together as decolonial praxis of knowledge construction and circulating in the temple of African American culture such as New Orleans, felt like a mise en abyme of my entireness. My entire body and soul were invested in articulating a sense of a black space to establish myself. I share these thoughts on my New Orleans’ auto-ethnographic and healing procession as they help reflect how a black space is not just a desire but an accomplishment for black people of the African Diaspora. I share these thoughts because I think it provides an understanding of how marginalized black people like Dancehall street dancers in Jamaica feel and reimagine street parties as a self-making space of accomplishment.
3.1. Street parties as cosmos of energies
In this section, I play with my auto-ethnographic “inside” position and the “outside”-perspective of the ethnographer to reconstitute the narratives of the particular universe of Street Parties in Kingston31. Kingston’s night life is one of the main nexuses of the street dancer’s life. Parties are a central element of the Dancehall culture. Street parties are embodied by the dancers and become a way of promoting dancehall and a “terrain”32 of expression. The first time I arrived in Kingston, I was surprised by the large number of parties that take place every night. Each day is marked by a famous street party. I did not expect to see the same people moving from one party to another and to see them every night going to parties in Kingston. I was wondering how the experience of poverty in the inner city of Kingston could match with this daily rhythm of partying. Parties are the rhythmic leitmotiv of a dancer’s life. Parties are like a protocol with no written rules. Rules are embodied by space, time, dancers’ attitudes. Every day or to be more precise, every night, dancers attend two or three parties in different venues. Mojito Mondays and Uptown Mondays33 are the most famous ones and take place in parking lots in the uptown district of Halfway Tree34. Dancers show up with their craziest and shiniest outfits, the ones that can catch the sight of the photographers35. Crews come together as one body. They find their spot on the circle formed by the crowd. Dancers have their own emplacement at parties. They possess the public space of the street at this particular time. Once they are on their spot, they don’t start dancing. They wait, pose, look seriously. This performance of seriousness characterizes the social status inscribed on the body, on the mimic of the face that has to be held serious. Space is policed and bodies too. The moment before the dancers start dancing is very interesting to analyze as it is the freezing moment right before the beginning. It highlights how the dynamics of energy and bodies play together and how the politics of uniqueness are temporarily frozen before emerging progressively to surround an entire environment. First, the deejay plays the r’n’b from the 80’s, re-memorizing the eternal hits of Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston. It is the moment when dancers reload their bodies with the energy of other people surrounding themselves. Energy is what flies in, out and across the dancehall party, but what is not perceptible. It is not visible, but it is ubiquitous. The small mobile tables are full of different energy beverages like magnum and Boom. Party attendants nourish themselves on those sweet and sparkling energy drinks. Like a magic potion, it has to simmer inside the bodies to get ready and flies in the air. Energy is also the name of a dancer. He is one of the key components of dancehall parties in Kingston. Always present every night at parties, it is common to hear “when you don’t know where the next party is, just ask Energy, he always knows”. Energy was also awarded most active male of the Kingston dancehall scene in 201736, a symbol for the strong support to its dance community through his everyday presence. Always there at the right time and right location, Energy proudly promotes his new hit move “swing di energy”, where the impulse of the move suggests taking the energy from outside to the inside of the body. It seems that the energy rhymes with omnipresence. This omnipresence of energy as sparkly fluid or as personification is also reflected in the in moves that become hit moves, danced by a whole crowd. Where does this energy come from? What makes this energy magically nourish the dancehall environment? Those questions might be difficult to relate to the formal analysis of social practices of dancehall dancers. But questioning this surrounding energy of street parties makes me think of the notion of specificity embedded in the component of energy. Energies occur in a particular environment. If we talk about “catching” the energy, it is because it is not always there, everywhere, fixed and accessible. Catching the energy means to capture the specific moment when a shooting star enlightens the dark horizon. A shooting star is specific, unique and particular. Energies too. It becomes then interesting to question, how this uniqueness of energy becomes omnipresent in the dancehall environment? What kind of understanding and use of social structures enable uniqueness and omnipresence to become conflated in a same environment?
Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten v. Brown, Leando (Mai 2017): Dancer Paul Thompson a.k.a. Energy at Uptown Mondays, Kingston, Jamaica. Breezy Media. Courtesy of the photographer.
It is 00.30 am. I arrive at Mojito Mondays with my dance crew and place myself behind some dancers that are already dancing. I “catch” the energy of the party that is already flying in the air. Dance crews are dancing in circles with their own crews, sometimes they join other crews and execute the same dance move. Then, they come back to their original spot and keep on dancing their own dance creation. It is almost 2 am. Mojito Mondays is over. The crowd moves like one entity to the street corner, where the next party takes place. Uptown Mondays. My dance crew and I are following the dance crew Get there Squad. Energy is one of the crew members. The dancer Boysie is humming “we going to party tonight”, the new Vybz Kartel’s song played everywhere on the streets, as an echo from the opened kitchen windows of Kingston and mobile standpipes37. We first stood in the parking lot, waiting for Energy to bargain the entrance prices for us, the European dancers. Uptown Mondays is one of those parties where an attendant must pay 500 JMD. Jamaican dancers don’t pay. They perform and contribute to make the party famous. After a couple of minutes waiting in the parking lot, we enter the plaza and follow the Get there Squad. We place ourselves behind them and order some drinks, magnum, rum, ting and boom, that we share with them38. It is our way to be thankful for the discounted entrance tickets. The deejay plays reggae and more dancers arrive progressively from the other party. They greet the dancers already there and go to their own spot. This is a very important time as dancers show their loyalty to others and have peaceful relationships. In this way, dancers acknowledge dancehall as a peaceful environment to challenge its violent image in the media. The deejay is now playing 90’s dancehall songs of Buju Banton. The dancers are getting ready in crew formation but, keep talking quietly to each other, as if they were to enter into a ritualistic session39. They become more sensitive to the music and celebrate the “pull up” actions of the deejay by putting their hands up in the sky with gun fingers. New skool dancehall songs from the last five years are now playing. Popcaan, Vybz Kartel and Mavado make the Soundsystem vibrate. The magic tension of the increasing energy is still contained within the bodies. At this moment, bodies act like corporeal glasses, reacting similarly to a bottle of Champagne with air bubbles popping up inside, where pressure created by the conflation of energy and air slightly rises until the lid unexpectedly goes off. The song “winning right now” by Agent Sasco is now playing40. Dancers start moving their bodies with the movement of the knee and a finger snap, like gospel singers in a church. It is time for our corporeal glasses to open themselves, energy is being released to fly in the air of the dance. Dancers are in formation, dancing their own moves in a circle. Each crew executes moves at the same time, mapping the circular space of the dance and enjoying the energy that they exchange with each other. My crew and I respond to moves executed by other dancers. It feels like dialoguing with our own bodies. They start dancing one move and we complete it. The music is very loud and envelopes the dancing space. Sometimes, we take a short break as a photographer interrupts us to capture our energies, or when the cigarette seller comes to say hi. Then, we start dancing again. It is 3.30am, Badman tunes41 are played and male dancers are going more and more to the center of the circle, executing their gun moves. It is almost impossible to walk through the crowd as everybody is dancing hard. Suddenly, Shelly Belly, one of the pioneers in dancehall, jumps with a very serious face high into the air in the middle of the circle, pointing at the sky with his gun fingers. The dancers let him jump and the deejay screams Shelly Belly’s name in the microphone. It is also when dancers dismantle the tension created by the lyrics of the music and the narrower circle, where they are dancing. After Shelly Belly’s intervention, dancers start making the circle larger as if they would calm down the tension. Moving on to the next social dance and hit tune, “sculla skwella”, the same dancer Shelly Belly starts dancing simple moves very smoothly42. This time, he has almost a childish face and smiles at the crowd. Entertaining the crowd with his theatrically face, Shelly Belly plays with different energies emanated from the dancing environment. He canalizes and redistributes through the politics of body language contradictory feelings rooted in a heavy tension and a light happiness43.
[...]
1 See Clifford 1994: 303 in the Clifford’s article Diasporas. In: Cultural Anthropology Vol. 9, No. 3, Further Inflections: Toward Ethnographies of the Future (Aug. 1994), pp. 302-338
2 See the notion of diaspora stressed by Stuart Hall (1990) in the article Culture Identity and Diaspora where he attempts to open a dialogue on the subject of cultural identity and representation. See also the specific accounts on the Presence Européenne and Presence Américaine pp. 233-234.
3 I develop the concept of resistance in Chapter 1.
4 See Benitez-Rojo 1992, Wynter 2015, Sheller 2012
5 See Stuart Hall Cultural identity and Diaspora: p. 222, p.227 and Benitez Rojo (1992): The repeated island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Duke University Press
6 See Thomas 2004, Lorde 1982, hooks 1992, Fanon 2008 1952.
7 See the works of Mohammed 2000, Miller 2001, Charles 2003 and 2007, Hope 2011.
8 See Vybz Kartel. “Cake Soap”. Adidjaheim Records, October 2010.
9 See the video of Spice (2018): “Black hypocrisy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXdl3mpCbz4
10 See Audre Lorde’s poem A litany for Survival (1978) from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997), W. W. Norton & Company.
11 Mc Kittrick & Woods 2007: 4.
12 See Gloria Wekker’s The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (2006).
13 During a keynote at the Black Geographies Symposium hold in Berkeley on October 8th, 2017, Katherine McKittrick acknowledged the symbolic meaning of theories, quotes and authors in her works. She recalled the importance of theorizing as a form of sharing.
14 See Hall 1997:17 in “The work on Representation”
15 See Thomson 2009:348
16 See Thomson quoting the afrocentric Jamaican British intellectual Richard Small (Thomson 2009: 22)
17 Thomson 2009: 66p.
18 See Thomson 2009:117.
19 “In Jamaica, the creole multiracial nationalist project that was consolidated between the 1940’s and the 1960’s is reflected through the country’s national motto, ‘Out of Many, One People.’ This project encompassed efforts to legitimize selected elements of previously disparaged Afro-Jamaican cultural practices in order to foster a sense of national belonging among Jamaican’s (majority black) population (…) While the government’s legitimation of aspects of Jamaica’s African cultural heritage broadened the public space in which notions of national identity could be debated, the actual process of privileging particular elements of Jamaica’s African cultural heritage also marginalized alternative visions. (Thomas 2004: 4-5)
20 “The island was run by a small ‘brown’ elite made up of ‘Syrian” (Lebanese), Asian, Chinese, white and near-white (‘local white’) British Jamaicans. Only black Jamaicans were desperately poor. White Jamaicans were not.” (Thomson 2009: 192)
21 see the social reforms of the PNP in Thomson 2009: 193.
22 The diasporic ties between Jamaica and the United States are significant in various ways. The Jamaican intellectual Marcus Garvey founded his political project Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in New York in 1919 with the idea to bring black people from African descent back to Africa. Also, many Jamaicans settled to the USA, especially in Brooklyn after the independence of Jamaica in 1962, This idea of seeking for a “better life” and pursue the “American dream” reinforced the strong migration ties between the USA and Jamaica. Also, in terms of cultural production, the Harlem renaissance affected significantly how Jamaican thinkers and poets such as Jamaica Kincaid, Miss Lou or Linton Kwesi Johnson established themselves between the two cultures. Musically, the New Orleans Jazz and Blues as well as the Soul and R’n’b were expression of African American black voices that influenced the emergence of Jamaican ska, dub and reggae as deejays start playing and mixing their vinyl in the Dance Halls of Kingston. This Soundsystem culture in Jamaica influenced the emergence of the hip-hop culture in New York in the 80’s.
23 Deborah Thomas has explored the practice of respectability: “Respectability, here, is a value complex emphasizing the cultivation of education, thrift, industry, self-sufficiency via land ownership, moderate Christian living, community uplift, the constitution of family through legal marriage and related gendered expectations, and leadership by the educated middle classes. (Thomas 2004: 6)
24 “Modern blackness is a subaltern aesthetic and politics from which to make claims upon the earlier forms of nationalism that gained state power in Jamaica. Indeed, what I am calling modern blackness and creole multiracialism are always side by side, jockening for position” (Thomas 2004: 13). Ian Thomson’s reluctance to dancehall in his book The Dead Yard (2009: 32-48), is good example to illustrate the idea that performances of modern blackness are often criticized by people occupying white male positioning.
25 See Striffler 2002: pp.207-211.
26 Paget Henry and Carl Stone’s edited collection The Newer Caribbean (1983) includes several essays that explore the process of decolonization not leading to more economic, political, or cultural control. More specifically, Trevor Farrell argues in his essay “Decolonization in the English-Speaking Caribbean: Myth or Reality?” that the English-speaking Caribbean “remains essentially colonized” and what has changed is the form, mechanisms, and agents of colonization. He asserts that dynamic changes are and will continue occurring in the region, but decolonization remains a myth that is bound up in international relations—American global power, capitalisms, and political and economic developments. Farrell explains that the Caribbean has little control over its own resources, movement, and development. He asserts that the economy of the Caribbean is deeply and extensively controlled by transnational corporations. Farrell is also concerned with the cultural and psychological colonization that he argues still marks the post-independence Caribbean.
27 Sheller 2003, Nixon 2015, Kampadoo 2004, Stout 2014, Allen 2011, Wekker 2006
28 See Hastrup 2005: 119
29 See Lorde 1979, Anzaldua 1987, Haraway 1988, Harding 1991, Collins 1998, hooks 1984.
30 In her critical analysis of epistemologies or decolonial praxis of humanness that questions what it means to be human, S. Wynter evokes how the vision of the western man has been homogenized and universalized in the monolithic category of human. For Wynter, “Man1” depicts a notion of human that centers the category “man” in its epistemological and philosophical question in the early European humanism. “Man2” refers to an overrepresentation of the white western “man” in the production of knowledge since the 19th century, an overrepresentation that became so ideological in the epistemologies that the “white man” became the category “man” itself. This formation of the human category around “Man1” and “Man2” that also includes similar groups of “referent-we”, systematically extracts black people from the category “human” – referent-we as they are in this logic “ human-Other(s)-by-nature” (McKittrick 2015:46). See Sylvia Wynter’s reflection on “Man1”, “Man2” and “referent-we” in: Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick (2015) “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations” and in Wynter’s essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”
31 Gina Ulysse’s book “Downtown Ladies” is a significant example of auto-ethnographic analysis as a way to critically understand her fieldwork as “temporarily going in everyday’s lives of people” (Ulysse 2008:181)
32 In her book Democracy’s infrastructure about citizens’ actions of resistance in the post-apartheid era in South Africa, Antina von Schnitzer understands the terrain as “a pedagogical ground to make and unmake political subjectivities in the aftermath of apartheid and a site of disagreement at which questions of needs, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and sometimes contested.” (Schnitzler:7p.). She uses the term “terrain” to refer to the blurred relationships of space and time. The “terrain” materializes the connection of bodies and subjects to their actions. In so doing, terrain emphasizes not just the physical space but also the action of human beings on it.
33 After many years of attending parties in Kingston, I am not surprised anymore to see that the most important party for the dancers remains Uptown Monday. It is when I organized a dancehall trip in 2018 with dance students from Europe that I heard many was confronted to many surprised reactions of dance tourists that an important party could occur on a weekday like Monday.
34 Donna P. Hope and Sonjah Stanley Niaah have examined the particular space of Halfway tree as a crossroad between uptown and downtown people (Hope 2006: 128; Niaah 2010: 80-83,)
35 See Thompson 2015: 24.
36 Energy was awarded most active male by the dance community for the year to year dance event in 2017. His move “swing di energy” was also awarded best new dance move by the organizers of the party Day rave Thursday April 2018.
37 See Vybz Kartel – Watch over us : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXQBNBc-EiE
38 Magnum, Rhum, Ting and Boom are the typical party drinks in the dancehall scene of Kingston. As Ting and Boom are sweet sodas, they are traditionally mixed with rum. Magnum is an energic tonic wine, also sweet and very popular among dancers.
39 “The dance, then, is not just an event, it is a system of rules and codes, an institution. Patrons are aware of the latest dance moves, the latest songs, debates and artistes. There are salutations, tributes and paying of respect. Validation is signaled in specific ways by using cigarette lighter flashes or gun salutes, or saying ‘Pram pram’, ‘bouyaka’, or ‘bung bang’. The audience participates in the fundamental themes or moral codes that have been part of the dancehall scene, many of them from its inception.” (Niaah 2010: 95)
40 See “ Winning right now” - Agent Sasco in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrNe0eqoEPg
41 Badman tunes are focusing on masculine dancehall identities’ lives surrounded by criminality, reflecting the high rates of violence and circulation of weapons in the ghettos of Kingston. The lyrics depict also particular harsh experiences of living such as friend’s betrayal, the hard path to achieve success and its inextricably competitive world of the dancehall industry, as well as the rough conditions of survival in poor living conditions, money business and the accusation of unfaithfulness and girls’ bad behaviors. The most popular dancehall artists performing Badman tunes are Vybz Kartel, Mavado, Popcaan, Masicka, Alkaline, Govana, Dexta Daps. When Badman tunes are played on dancehall parties in Jamaica, dance crew usually perform gun moves with gun fingers and very energic steps. The use of gunfingers in the dancing is rather interpreted as a way to mirror the high presence of criminality in the daily life of the Jamaican youth than to glorify violent acts. The following quote is the introduction of the Badman tune “The Right place” released by Masicka in 2017: “Shot a lef' the gun and every man a collect some Anybody run a get it, anybody run Gyal a bawl out say fi 'member say a smaddy son Badness dem a copy so we paste you dung inna the grung Yeah man, a we that 'pon dem ends a put gunshot in head Dem think dem bad, dem acting dumb, dem gi' dem crack fi bun No juvenile cyaan know which part me lock mi gun Matter a fact me devn lock mei gun, me got me gun Me full a bomboclaat money how shot fi done Pull up on dem ends and man a drop the rum Me nah gi' dem no belly shot fi that damage the lung (Weh me point it?)” See also the video of Masicka – the right place : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzpPXeeEL4E
42 See Sanjay and Shelly Belly – Sculla Skwella : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkQ0kYtGOfM
43 When talking about body language with the dancer Kool Ravers, he told me that everybody could move and execute steps but “ not everybody can dance a step like a move and makes it has a good look”. Also, Boysie Roses always says in his dance class “everybody can dance but not everybody is a dancer”. This difference between executing a dance step and communicate with body language is perfectly emphasized by the two dancers. They account for the value of dance as inhabiting bodies and creating a body language. Dance becomes for the dancer an important tool of communication as spoken or written language. And parties are spaces to communicate with body language.
- Citar trabajo
- Cyrielle Tamby (Autor), 2019, Resist(d)ance, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/539232
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