At the Crossroads—Looking for Meaning in Jamaican Dancehall Culture: A Reply

In the introduction to Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large I make my position clear:

In the present study I document a series of forays I have made across the shifting borderline between “academic” and “popular” territory. I do not claim for this project the definitive authority of an encyclopedic study of Jamaican dancehall culture. I offer, instead, the specificity of my voice, positioning (a ya) and identity—to cite Stuart Hall and Cocoa Tea—as I try to make sense of the border clashes that characterize much of contemporary Jamaican society, and which are therefore often chronicled within the popular performance genres such as “roots” theater, dub poetry and, especially, popular music (16).

Despite this disclaimer, it seems that three of the present reviewers have all concluded that I attempted (and failed) to write the last word on Jamaican dancehall culture.

Mike Alleyne got it. Perhaps it is because he is grounded in literary studies and knows how to savor the pleasures of the word in all its specificity and ambiguity. The punning title of his lucid essay confirms his understanding of my project. And even though he does draw careful scholarly attention to the weaknesses he sees in my reading of some aspects of dancehall culture, for example its relationship to hip-hop, Alleyne’s generosity is evident throughout. In fact, he does concede in his helpful refining of my representation of hip-hop that:

In fairness, she explicitly claims no critical authority in the world of rap/hip-hop, noting in “Hip-hopping across Cultures: Reggae to Rap and Back” (chapter Eight), her status as “moonlighting in foreign territory” where the genre is concerned. In this statement, she at least acknowledges a critical humility evidently lacking in opponents to the worlds of dancehall (158).

Alleyne clearly has no axe to grind.

Conversely, the high-theory triumvirate seems to be grinding their collective teeth in irritation at my failure to tell it like they see it. Unlike Allyene’s commonsense response to Sound Clash, which is no less theoretical for its elegance, Bakare-Yusuf’s tendentious essay, “based essentially on a materialist and phenomenological analysis which privileges the moment prior to language in the production of culture, without disregarding the discursive effect on cultural activities” (162), laboriously delineates the “forms of aporetic silence and occlusion” (164) that Sound Clash seemingly represses.

Stanley Niaah, deploying a cartographic trope, initially appears to set out to map “the conceptual territory Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large occupies in the context of academic writings on Caribbean popular culture, in particular dancehall culture, and the politics of what is made visible, excessive or absent” (174). But this rather grand enterprise is quite quickly aborted. Stanley Niaah’s review essay focuses fleetingly on a single chapter, “Slackness Personified: Representations of Female Sexuality in the Lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks,” and then mutates into a polemic having very little to do with my own concerns in the book.

Hippolyte wants me to be a thoroughgoing theorist who offers more than “smatterings of post-modern lingo” (189). She dismisses as mere “theory-bashing” my attempt, first articulated in Noises in the Blood and again in Sound Clash, to “retheorise marginality and power” by “centring the ideological narrative on close readings of the texts themselves” (4). My supposedly “un-theoretical” project—seeking to “discover what the texts themselves can be made to tell us about the nature of cultural production in our centres of learning (4)”—is not at all valorized.

The central burden of Bakare-Yusuf’s essay is to demonstrate the folly of my insistence in the introductory chapter, “Word, Sound, and Power,” that Sound Clash is “stubbornly rooted in a politics of place that claims a privileged space for the local and asserts the authority of the native as speaking subject” (2). Bakare-Yusuf will have none of that. She bewilderingly interprets my statement to mean that “ ‘outsiders’ are not permitted to appropriate and read dancehall as they wish” (166). Of course, I, myself, make no such preposterous claim. Nowhere...