Sounds of the Citizens: Dancehall and Community in Jamaica

6. The Long View

The Contradictions of Neoliberal Nation Building 165 population. While participants are instructed in national membership in an attempt to fashion them into neoliberal citizens through the prioritization of participation, self-control, and personal contribution, they are also necessarily participants in illicit networks and systems of community governance that are all but compulsory for citizenship in Guy Town and the wider area. Issues of class and culture are critical to understanding the intricacies of development through dancehall. Dads’s participation in bourgeois business and political networks does make new resources available to Wicked Times and to Guy Town, as a community, through the new points of contact that are forged. However, even though Dads, at times, attempts to strategically deploy an air of bourgeois respectability, particularly within the context of his political campaign, it does not seem that he wants to transform himself culturally or socially into a fully bourgeois subject (see Freeman 2000).13 Even given the resources that he and the performers he works with are able to command, it is not an upper-class brown identity that they choose to cultivate. The markers of success that they adopt are instead those of African American hip-hop moguls, who largely retain a distinctly and purposefully black working-class sensibility. Beyond the consumptive preferences, trappings of success such as fashion , jewelry, and expensive cars chosen under this sensibility, he and his cohort also retain a deeper set of socialized cultural values based on concepts of giving, loyalty, and respect that are intimately linked to an urban working-class sense of community and the democratic socialist values of a prior political moment. Residents of Guy Town, while desirous of resources that make life enjoyable , or in this case, merely possible, are reluctant to give up their own language and social practices in order to acquire them on the terms of the dominant culture. The diversity of the newly forming middle class may provide a space for upward mobility, which will allow distinct class cultures to be bridged, bolstering the construction of a culturally, politically, and economically “black”-dominated national vision on the part of the People’s National Party. However, as part of that enterprise, the incorporation of the Guy Town youth into the Jamaican nation ends up being a superficial or even performed process. Residents have learned how to obtain resources through image cultivation while simultaneously participating in practices and networks that undermine the state’s authority at the local level. Additionally , the state’s tenuous grasp on the governance of garrison communities has led to reliance on local power hierarchies, including informal 166 SOUNDS OF THE CITIZENS systems of justice, as an extension of state power because the local systems are more well informed and efficacious in their response. The superficiality of Guy Town’s incorporation into the Jamaican nation is further reinforced by the privatization of the development discourse among Guy Town residents. Even initiatives that were sponsored by government agencies and NGOs were most often attributed to Dads and Wicked Times as the conduit for funding and other types of resources. Since norms of giving relate to the cultivation of loyalty among ghetto residents, this attribution reinforces residents’ commitment to local power structures rather than to the Jamaican state. The result is a corroboration of the disenchantment with electoral politics and cynicism regarding state-sponsored benefits and elected officials, regardless of the deep, but abstract, party loyalty that became clear during election time. This tension creates a space for play where community residents are able to manipulate both structures for immediate benefit under conditions in which their life choices are also molded by them. However, the long-term benefits of these arrangements are questionable. The young men who graduate from the remedial education programs undoubtedly benefit from enhanced literacy and new critical thinking tools, but the lack of growth in the Jamaican economy means that there is not employment available to accommodate them. 167 CHAPTER 6 The LongView Looking back at the declining heyday of the Guy Town development projects ten years later confirmed many of the concerns I initially identified in the development programming back in 2002. Though Dads was unsuccessful in his election bid for member of Parliament, he has continued to rise through the ranks of the PNP, and the change in focus has caused him to withdraw from development activities in Guy Town. Dads’s withdrawal soured his relationship with the...