Insurgent Soundscapes of Dancehall Music: Black Politics and the Global 1990

(Hardback)

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This book evaluates modern Caribbean politics through the soundscapes of Reggae and Dancehall. Born to Reggae in the 1970s, Dancehall is often framed by its lyrics of hyper masculinity. This has distorted its engagement with Reggaes innate politics, largely Rastafaris critique of the West as being of a Biblical Babylon. Both strains grappled with questions of a decolonizing and migrating Caribbean: hard times, concrete ecologies, and promised lands. But if Reggaes radical soundings of Black liberation repatriated East beyond Babylons rivers, then to what extent did Dancehall imagine freedom amidst the contradictions of the gully sided West Both receiver and amplifier of Caribbean epistemologies, sound system culture held space for both genres. Arguably the most expansive but least explored audio archive of modern Black internationalism, sound system culture is essential to understanding the global Caribbean.

Author Bio

Quito Swan is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, USA. He is the author of Black Power in Bermuda (2010), Pauulus Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (2020) and Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-colonialism, and the African World (2022).