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

Abstract

This study explores Jamaican popular music's changing engagement with globally networked media technologies. It combines 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. Newly networked technologies for circulating visual media in global networks affect how Jamaicans perform identity. These technologies also affect street dances' social function, evoking race- and gender-related pressures that reinforce existing and historic inequalities, reshaping and limiting street dances' traditional function as a site of autonomy and resistance to colonial inequality. A better understanding of local practices can offer an alternative conceptual framework to help practitioners, scholars, and policy and technology designers avoid reinforcing those inequalities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.