Born a Sufferah

Attuned to the reverberations of Jamaican popular music in diverse cultural contexts, Quito Swan skillfully theorizes the politics and aesthetics of dancehall performance. Like a top-ranking sound system selector, he deftly practices the art and science of academic juggling. Born a Sufferah is a dubplate special, signifying Swan’s prowess in the sound clash of dancehall scholarship. * Carolyn Cooper, Professor Emerita, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica * Quito Swan (re)mixes culture and politics to produce a lyrical account of Black revolt at the millennium’s end. Dancehall is no mere soundtrack but a sound, a sounding, where dub poetry meets history, and we discover the three R’s: Riddim, Remembering, Resistance. Moving intervallically and diasporically through key episodes of Black insurgency, Born a Sufferah re-members separate, discrete arenas of struggle – the street, the home, the school, the dance floor – as one Babylon where popular defiance is expressed as one Love. Read until you overstand. * Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination * A much overdue examination of dancehall as a perceptive and articulate international cultural ambassador, rather than merely the influential musical phenomena we love it for. Although that isn’t forgotten in this fascinating and insightful study. * Lloyd Bradley, author of Bass Culture, a history of reggae *