Carolyn Cooper

Lady Saw Cuts Loose

The flamboyantly exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomizes the sexual liberation of many African Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judaeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behavior. In a decisive act of feminist emancipation, Lady Saw cuts loose from the burdens of moral guardianship. She embodies the erotic. But one viewer’s erotica is another’s pornography. So Lady Saw is usually censured for being far too loose—or “slack,” in the Jamaican vernacular. Or worse, is dismissed as a mere victim of patriarchy, robbed of all agency. Marian Hall’s spectacular performance of the role of “Lady Saw” is not often acknowledged as a calculated decision by the actress to make the best of the opportunity to earn a good living in the theater of the dancehall.

Hip-hopping across Cultures

The African diasporic poet Kamau Brathwaite employs the resonant metaphor “bridges of sound” to evoke the substrate cultural ties that reconnect Africans on the continent to those who have survived the dismembering Middle Passage. The paradoxical construct, “bridges of sound,” conjoins the ephemerality of aural sensation with the technological solidity of the built environment. This arresting metaphor affirms the creative potential of Africans in the diaspora to conjure knowledge systems out of nothing, as it were. Africans, taken away without tools, were able to rebuild material culture from the blueprint of knowledge carried in our collective heads. In long historical perspective, the Middle Passage thus functions like a musical bridge; it is a transitional passage connecting major sections of a musical composition. And that magnum opus is the survival song of generations of Africans who have endured the crossing.2

Islands Beyond Envy: Finding Our Tongue in the Creole-Anglophone Caribbean

The sixth Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture was delivered by Professor Carolyn Cooper on 29 November 2012 at the University of the West Indies, Mona. It is reproduced below.

“Mama, Is That You?”

In Dancehall Queen and Babymother, the film medium becomes a site of transformation in which the spectacularly dressed bodies of women in the dancehall assume extraordinary proportions once projected onto the screen. In both films, one set in Jamaica, the other in the United Kingdom, the styling of the body—the hair, makeup, clothes, and body language that are assumed—enhances the illusion of a fairy-tale metamorphosis of the mundane self into eroticized sex object. The fantastic un/dress code of the dancehall, in the original Greek sense of the word “fantastic,” meaning “to make visible,” “to show,” is the visualization of a distinctive cultural style that allows women the liberty to demonstrate the seductive appeal of the imaginary—and their own bodies. In an elaborate public striptease, transparent bedroom garments become theatrical street wear, somewhat like the emperor’s new clothes. And who dares say that the body is naked? Only the naive.

Mix Up the Indian with all the Patwa: Rajamuffin Sounds in ‘Cool’ Britannia

Apache Indians spectacular performance of the identity of ‘Jamaican’ dancehall DJ exemplifies the problematic politics of acculturation in ‘postcolonial’ Britain. Born in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, a major centre of Caribbean and South Asian migration, this multilingual, border-crossing, urban youth appropriates the ‘patwa’ language of Jamaicans and mixes this with his own Punjabi. What results is a polyvocal, rajamuffin sound that illustrates the ways in which the creolisation process, more familiarly studied in the context of the colonies of Britain, assumes new dynamics in the very belly of the beast of Empire. Apache Indian declares: ‘Me a push reggae music to a different body/A next nation and a next country.’ The DJs ‘nation’ encompasses an expansive body of South Asian/West Indian diasporic communities and others far beyond his country of birth. Having discovered at home in Handsworth models of performative excellence within a distinctly Caribbean idiom, Apache Indian, like Nahki in Japan, Snow in Canada, Bigga Haitian in New York, Admiral T in Guadeloupe and Gentleman in Germany, crisscrosses cultural borders, demonstrating the infinite capacity for adaptation of transnational Jamaican popular culture as it accommodates local needs in its global spread.

Caribbean Fashion Week: Remodeling Beauty in “Out of Many One” Jamaica

Abstract The elitist Jamaican motto, “Out of Many, One People,” privileges racial hybridity as the quintessential marker of national identity. Conversely, populist constructions of Jamaican identity acknowledge the primacy of the African majority. The “mixed-race” ideal inscribed in the national motto becomes the aesthetic standard for judging “beauty” and “ugliness.” Beauty contests, for example, become sites of contestation in which competing representations of the face of the nation jostle for recognition. Identifying with marginalized African-Jamaican aspirants who often fail to win these competitions, discontented patrons routinely claim the right to assert alternative models of beauty that challenge the authority of the “out of many one” aesthetic. The emergence of a modeling industry in Jamaica that valorizes idiosyncratic style has opened up a space in which black images of beauty take center stage. Caribbean Fashion Week is the major platform for displaying internationally acclaimed Jamaican models. Showcasing a high percentage of decidedly black male and female models wearing spectacular designer clothes, Caribbean Fashion Week enables multiple readings of the body as cultural text. The permissive modeling aesthetic engenders capricious images of beauty that contest the very conception of the “model” as a mold into which a singular figure of beauty is impressed.

The Dancehall Transnation

The norm that is accepted in the international community is that a state should ideally be made up of a single national/ethnic group speaking a single language. Such notions have their origins in the Europe of the late Middle Ages, following the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire. This ideal of what a state should be has spread across the world in the wake of European expansion and domination and has been universally accepted in spite of the fact that the states that appeared in Europe hardly ever fit the model. For a state to survive, those over whom control is exercised generally have to accept the legitimacy of that state. Its citizens, therefore, have to be presented with a body of ideological justifications for the existence of the state and its authority. One such justification is that the state is the highest expression of a shared national identitiy.

Mix Up the Indian with All the Patwa

The international dispersal of Jamaican dancehall culture, as the music first accompanies migrant Jamaicans to Britain and North America and then becomes more broadly incorporated into the global economy of the multinational entertainment industry, raises complex ideological issues of “authenticity,” “identity,” and “diaspora politics.” As reggae/ragga goes “mainstream,” much remains of the (con)tributary Jamaican cultural values. But these are constantly swirling in the cross-currents that bear the music along. A classic example of these processes of interculturation is the emergence of DJ Apache Indian (Steve Kapur), in Birmingham, England. His career illustrates, as well, the necessary adaptation of this potent Jamaican dancehall culture to accommodate local needs in its global spread.