DanceHall: From Slaveship to Ghetto (review)

An examination of “reggae’s progeny,” Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s interdisciplinary study addresses dancehall as a musical genre, performance space, aesthetic style and philosophical ethos, examining the phenomenon through its myriad socio-cultural implications. Stanley Niaah delves into dancehall’s contemporary performance practices in Kingston and across the globe, conceptualizing its inception in the physical spaces of Jamaica’s dance halls during the latter half of the twentieth century when recorded music played on sound systems began to dominate formal and informal social events. Unlike recent cultural studies scholarship that examines the ways elements of popular music may reflect, challenge, contest and/or otherwise interact with socio-cultural and national categories (see Rivera, Marshall, and Pacini Hernández 2009), Dancehall’s theoretical framework does quite the opposite. Rather than interpreting aspects of Jamaican culture or identity through dancehall, Stanley Niaah reads dancehall as contemporary Jamaican culture and identity. Through her theoretical “performance geography” framework, the author maps dancehall’s complex systems of practice and spaces of production and consumption to emphasize its everyday place in the lives of inner-city Kingston youth and the ways it reflects contemporary Jamaican social reality. The study underscores how localized dancehall practices and experiences also reflect the continued impoverishment and marginalization of Afro-Caribbean communities across the region, the centrality of resistance in Black Atlantic cultural expressions and the global impact of Jamaican culture, and complicates research focused solely on musical elements or critiques of dancehall’s “slackness.”

Each chapter examines an aspect of dancehall performance, material and spatial conditions and social practices. “Performing Geography in Kingston’s Dancehall Spaces” maps and classifies the locations and uses of dancehall venues to historicize their contemporary use within a tradition of working-class appropriation of public space for celebration and discusses the state policing of commercialized, official and unofficial dancehall events. In “Ritual Space, Celebratory Space,” Stanley Niaah uses a broad theoretical interpretation of ritual that touches on Victor Turner’s communitas to argue that dancehall practices bridge the popular, performative and celebratory in what the author terms “sacred geographies.” Outlining the names, times, themes, types and purposes of one-time and recurring dancehall events such as Passa Passa, Bembe Thursdays and British link-ups, this chapter intimates a complex matrix of rules and codes where the sacred and secular coalesce through “transcendence of social structure that brings the participant under the authority of the community” (p. 90). “Geographies of Embodiment – Dance, Status, Style” examines the role of the dancer (including interviews with Gerald “Bogle” Levy and Stacey, Dancehall Queen 1999), the economic and social rewards of dancing, the popularization and chronology of specific dance moves and the role of gender and women in the dancehall space and defines dance as a “sixth sense” of embodied elocution. The chapter “Performing Boundarylessness” argues that dancehall practices transcend class, temporal and spatial boundaries both within and outside of Jamaica. It explores Buju Banton’s international tours, the sound system Stone Love and selector Tony Matterhorn, international appearances of dancehall queens, the popularity of dancehall in Japan and the video recording of dancehall events. The final chapter, “A Common Transnational Space,” examines the common geneaologies of Jamaican dancehall, South African kwaito and Puerto Rican reggaetón as black performance genres that are largely “shaped in the margins” (p. 188) of the ghetto, criticized for vulgarity, use informal and/or public spaces to perform, rely on dance and movement for popularity, and are produced in small recording studios. Stanley Niaah insists on the common liminality or “in-between” spaces of these phenomena—created in the margins but mainstreamed, popularly supported but rigorously policed by state authorities.

DanceHall is thus a detailed survey of contemporary dancehall practices. What the book’s title proposes is ironically what the work does not do, however, and Stanley Niaah’s tracing of continuities from “slave ship” to “ghetto” are largely unsubstantiated. For example, Stanley Niaah claims current Kingston dancehall events that warm up between 1:00 and 5:00 am are “reminiscent of secret slave...