PhD thesis synopsis

Volume!, 2017

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.

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.

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.

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2006

Volume !

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

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.