Search results for "Jamaica"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Reggae Outernational: Borders and Trans/National Identity in Jamaican Popular Music
2020
International audience; The history of post-1945 Jamaican popular music is one of constantly changing borders. Despite efforts on the part of the Jamaican state to turn reggae into Jamaica’s exclusively national music and a tourist attraction, reggae and its related subgenres remain to this day a minority culture of the underground, in Jamaica itself and in the many places around the world where it is produced and performed. Recent research on the history of Jamaican popular music suggests that it cannot easily be contained within strictly national borders. Reggae can rather be seen as a focal point around which an incipient alter/native, working-class Jamaican identity is built, both insid…
"Dis poem is still not written." A Study of Diamesic Variation in Jamaican Dub Poetry
2020
International audience; This paper looks at diamesic variation in the works of Jamaican and Anglo-Jamaican dub poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah and Mutabaruka. Dub poetry constitutes a turning point in the history of literature in Creole, since the genre achieved to establish Patwa as the legitimate medium for Caribbean writers, thereby effectively inverting (post)colonial linguistic hierarchies. Though closely associated with the reggae tradition, dub poets have always claimed to be doing “real” literature and published their work in written form as well as in audio or video recordings. The paper analyses various strategies to inscribe orality and orature in written t…
“Sometimes I Wanda/Who Will Translate/Dis/Fe de Inglish?” Strategies for Transcribing Jamaican Creole in the Dub Poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Be…
2019
International audience; The question of dialect has always been central to Caribbean literature, and more specifically to poetry. In a (post)colonial context of diglossia between standard English and Jamaican Creole, and of a strong hierarchy between oral and scribal forms of linguistic and literary expression, the mere possibility of writing ‘real’ literature in Patwa was severely contested until quite recently. Yet, an increasing number of poets have experimented with Creole over the course of the last century and have amply demonstrated that it is a legitimate medium for poetic and literary expression.This paper looks at various strategies employed by Anglo-Jamaican dub poets Linton Kwes…
“A Modern Slave Song:” Reggae Music and the Memory of Slavery
2019
International audience; From early ska tunes to modern-day dancehall sounds, Jamaican popular music has been a privileged site for the re/creation and transmission of a communal memory of slavery, within Jamaican society itself but also in the broader context of the African and Afro-Caribbean diasporas. The lyrics of reggae songs constitute a vast textual repertoire where a predominantly oral discourse on slavery is produced and circulated, mostly outside institutional circles. In such texts, slavery serves as a memorial matrix which fosters a sense of identity, community and resistance for Afro-Caribbean people around the world. This chapter examines a corpus of 250 song lyrics dedicated t…