"A Ghetto Education Is Basic": (Jamaican) Dancehall Masculinities as Counter-Culture

Abstract

Black male bodies are constructed in a largely alienating master narrative of white racism in Jamaican society. By analyzing representations of the same in Dancehall lyrics and performances (musical videos, stage performances, street dances, fashion, etc.), I reference some of the constructions of (Dancehall) nationalism which are achieved through the multiple performances of masculinity in Jamaican Dancehall popular culture, predicated on a history of plantation slavery and colonial racism in Jamaica. Thus, Dancehall embodies and characterizes discourses in Jamaican popular culture, and is read as the anti-thesis of traditional Jamaican nationalism. Hence, my conceptual/theoretical overview, methodology, and tentative conclusion utilizes Carolyn Cooper’s (1995) gender theory which forms the major framework for analysis here, specifically her interrogation of ‘femaleness ’ in Dancehall as a correlation is made between this and her later critique of (symbols of) Jamaican nationalism, including its motto “Out of Many, One People ” (Cooper, 2004). Therefore the (male) Dancehall artiste locates race and class struggles in Jamaican society through the female body – itself a shifting social construct, through which he re-inscribes an alternate/indigenous vision of the society as sexuality and gender are interlinked in discourse to form Dancehall’s revolutionary impulses. And finally, Judith Butler’s postmodern theory of gender performance processes proves very useful here and is compared to Cooper’s reading of gender performance in Dancehall popular culture, using (Jamaican) nationalism as the socio-political context of the analysis.

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