This book focuses on how in/security works in and through Jamaican dancehall, and on the insights that Jamaican dancehall offers for the global study of in/security.
This collection draws together a multi-disciplinary range of key scholars in in/security and dancehall. Scholars from the University of the West Indies' Institute of Caribbean Studies and Reggae Studies Unit, as well as independent dancehall and dance practitioners from Kingston, and writers from the UK, US and continental Europe offer their differently situated perspectives on dancehall, its histories, spatial patterning, professional status and aesthetics.
The study brings together critical security studies with dancehall studies and will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners in theatre, dance and performance studies, sociology, cultural geography, anthropology, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, musicology and gender studies.
Introduction 1. Corporeal in/securities in the dancehall space 2. Practice, vision, security 3. Me badi a fe me BMW (my body is my BMW): engaging the badi (body) to interrogate the shifting in/securities within the co-culture of daaance’all 4. Interrogating in/securities in the recording studios of Kingston 5. The mask for survival: a discourse in dancehall regalia 6. Dancehall dancing bodies: the performance of embodied in/security 7. An in/secure life in dance; thoughts on dancehall’s in/secure lives 8. The warrior wine – the rotation of Caribbean masculinity 9. ‘Sounding’ out the system: noise, in/security and the politics of citizenship
Patricia Noxolo is a senior lecturer in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. ‘H’ Patten is an experienced choreographer, filmmaker, visual artist, storyteller and performer and has developed an international reputation in African and Caribbean arts for over 30 years. Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah is a Jamaican cultural theorist, scholar-activist, author and an international speaker based at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Mona, where she is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the Institute of Caribbean Studies.
