Sounds of the Citizens: Dancehall and Community in Jamaica

Notes

The Long View 175 ally poor. As seen in Guy Town, members of poor urban populations are already helping themselves as entrepreneurs, flexible subjects, and private investors, but personal initiative cannot conquer the problem of limited national economic capacity and unemployment. The current moment of global economic convulsion and reconfiguration might provide a productive milieu, freed of neoliberalism’s ideological baggage as a universal panacea , in which to begin the project of rethinking how its precepts have been reinterpreted and applied in Kingston garrison communities in order to begin the development of fundamentally new approaches to the ongoing problem of poverty and violence in Jamaica. 177 Notes Introduction 1. All the names of people and places have been changed, unless they are public figures whose public statements are being referenced. This attempt to anonymize people and places reflects my commitment to maintain the confidentiality of both the research setting and of the research participants. Guy Town is a space that is frequently embroiled in violent power struggles, be they politically rooted or based upon private motivations. Within these struggles, access to private knowledge can be used as a form of power. For this reason it was important to me as a researcher and to my collaborators in Guy Town that their identities be protected as effectively as possible. 2. To “have” in local parlance means that a person has access to regular sources of income and is wealthy relative to the low standard of living within poor urban communities. 3. “Baby father” is a term used to describe the father of a woman’s children who is not her husband. 4. Martin’s perspective expresses a familiar frustration among community residents who grew up with few resources and who often view themselves as having made better choices than others from their age group. However, it is important to recognize that there is economic and social stratification within ghetto communities themselves that might also provide advantages for some that others did not possess. Martin indubitably did work hard to achieve stable economic status, but he also had family support and other resources that some other community residents lacked. The perspective does, in a sense, reproduce ideological narratives that contrast the traits of the deserving and undeserving poor. 5. The role of the state in “dominated” countries might, in fact, be particularly important, even though their generally weak position may make the state appear to be less evident. 6. However, it is important to understand that in Jamaica what is being here characterized as “minority” culture is actually created by a marginalized majority. 178 Notes to Pages 18–29 7. Interestingly, it was often hard for people to racially-ethnically classify me, in part because my dark curly hair led some to believe that I was a “brown” Jamaican at the light end of the phenotypic spectrum. At other times I was variously called “whitey,” “chiney,” “Indian,” “cooley-gyal,” “England,” “Canada,” and even on rare occasions, “America.” The rarity of this final designation is a reflection of the infrequency of American tourism in Kingston, which has been labeled too dangerous by the majority of American travelers, unlike the slightly more adventurous Canadian and European visitors. 8. “Garrison” is a term applied to areas with uniform voting patterns and a militarized power structure linked to a political party. 9. Wicked Times is a pseudonym for the dancehall production company in which I conducted my research. 10. The fathering of children with multiple women as a status signifier for some young men does not indicate the social endorsement of parental irresponsibility. In fact, men who do not contribute to the well-being of their children are in many ways socially stigmatized. It is important that the fathering of children with multiple women not be conflated with a lack of parental involvement on the part of the fathers. Chapter1 1. Thanks are owed to Don Robotham for pointing out that values around giving and generosity are prevalent throughout Jamaican society, even among the upper and middle classes. Through my research, I noticed that the form that these values take in daily practice is distinct in the context of ghettos, which are heavily populated, intensely public, and highly social settings. 2. Barry Chevannes identified sharing as one of the major values that is taught within homes in Jamaican ghetto communities (Chevannes 2001). 3. It is important to note that the shorthand of “uptown” and...