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DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto
BY SONJAH N. STANLEY NIAAH
African and Diasporic Cultural Studies Series, University of Ottawa Press
Cloth | $65.00 . 978-0-7766-3041-0
Paper | $29.95 . 978-0-7766-0736-8
6 × 9 . 244 pages . 20 black and white photographs
About DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto......
DanceHallcombines cultural geography, performance studies and cultural studies
to examine performance culture across the Black Atlantic. Taking Jamaican
dancehall music as its prime example, DanceHall reveals a complex web of
cultural practices, politics, rituals, philosophies, and survival strategies
that link Caribbean, African and African diasporic performance.
Combining the rhythms of reggae, digital sounds and rapid-fire DJ lyrics,
dancehall music was popularized in Jamaica during the later part of the last
century by artists such as Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, Beenie Man and Buju Banton.
Even as its popularity grows around the world, a detailed understanding of
dancehall performance space, lifestyle and meanings is missing. Author Sonjah
Stanley Niaah relates how dancehall emerged from the marginalized youth culture
of Kingston’s ghettos and how it remains inextricably linked to the ghetto,
giving its performance culture and spaces a distinct identity. She reveals how
dancehall’s migratory networks, embodied practice, institutional frameworks, and
ritual practices link it to other musical styles, such as American blues, South
African kwaito, and Latin American reggaetòn. She shows that dancehall is part
of a legacy that reaches from the dance shrubs of West Indian plantations and
the early negro churches, to the taxi-dance halls of Chicago and the ballrooms
of Manhattan. Indeed, DanceHall stretches across the whole of the Black
Atlantic’s geography and history to produce its detailed portrait of dancehall
in its local, regional, and transnational performance spaces.
Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University
of the West Indies at Mona.
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