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Passa Passa: Interrogating Cultural
Hybridities in Jamaican Dancehall
Donna P. Hope
Introduction
Contemporary dancehall culture is a cultural site for the creation and dissemination of symbols
and ideologies that reflect and legitimize the lived realities of its adherents. Many of its more
prominent creators and artistes originate in the poorest inner cities of Kingston, Jamaica. The
dancehall increasingly symbolizes the existential realities and efforts by individuals to make
meanings of their lives in these spaces. I argue elsewhere that dancehall is a cultural dis/place
of ongoing dialogue, confrontation, and contestation with the rigid sociopolitical, gendered,
and classed hierarchies of Jamaica.1 It is noteworthy that the popularized lyrics of the artistes
and the erotic dress and sartorial fashions of dancehall adherents have received significant and
critical attention from academic and journalistic endeavors. In the main, this attention has
been largely condemnatory or overtly celebratory where dancehall’s epiphenomena is labeled
as negative or positive from a vantage point on the dichotomous slackness versus culture
1. See Donna P. Hope, “Inna di Dancehall Dis/Place: Sociocultural Politics of Identity in Jamaica” (master’s
thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, 2001). On page 13 of this work, dis/place refers to the overlapping
sociocultural, political, and economic discourses that characterize the space of the dancehall and draws on a
multilayered etymology to construct a working definition: “this disrespectful place where we have been placed;
this place where we are consistently disrespected and mistreated; this place where we are consistently denied our
legitimate human rights”; “this place where we are denied access to resources”; “this place where our identities
are negated” and even more importantly, “this place from within which we are forced to re-create and claim our
resources, identities, personhood and self-esteem by any means.”
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debate.2 More recent sociological and anthropological discussions on dancehall have been
sparse; however this has been complemented by emerging research on fabricated identities,
violence, the politics of gender, and philosophies of space.3
The multiple, overlapping, and often contestatory discourses in dancehall are mimicked
in movies like Dancehall Queen (1997), Third World Cop (1999), and Shottas (2002), which
ostensibly use dancehall culture as a cultural backdrop against which its actors play out their
roles. In addition, the competing and often contradictory discourses that energize dancehall
culture are consistently played out and with on the stages of many popular dancehall events
like the weekly Wednesday night street dance, Passa Passa. This street dance epitomizes
the explosive creativity and paradoxical ambivalence of dancehall’s cultural creations which
simultaneously play with, against, and into the gendered, classed, and political structures of
Jamaica. This distinctively hybridizing ethos in dancehall culture has ensured its continuity
as “a field of active cultural production, a means by which black, lower-class youth articulate
and project a distinct identity in local, national, and global contexts.”4
This article contributes to discussions on cultural hybridity and extends the debates on
dancehall culture. It uses the “mix up and blender” of a dancehall street dance, Passa Passa, to
examine hybridity from the viewpoint of dancehall culture as it participates in the sociocul-
tural construction of personhood, meanings, and knowledge from within the restrictive and
marginalized spaces designated for its primary creators, members of the black, lower-class, and
inner cities of Jamaica. As Shalini Puri notes in her work on Caribbean cultural hybridities,
the integrative rhetoric of cultural hybridity and “its role in achieving hegemony, has also
offered oppositional constituencies the opportunity to seize upon slippages, contradictions,
and accommodations of ruling-class rhetoric . . . the lag between communities imagined as
equal and the realities of exploitation and inequality, the duplicity of populism.”5 Jamaica’s
2. See for example Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular
Culture (London, Macmillan, 2003), 136–173; Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall
Culture in Jamaica (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Ian Boyne, “Decadent Dancehall Mirrors
Society,” in Sunday Gleaner, 5 January 1997, 8A.; and “How Dancehall Holds us Back” in Sunday Gleaner, 29
December 2002, G1 & G5.
3. Anthropological discussions include Stolzoff, Wake the Town; Marvin Sterling, “In the Shadow of the Universal
Other: Performative Identifications with Jamaican Culture in Japan (PhD thesis, University of California, 2002);
Donna P. Hope, “British Link-Up Crew: Consumption Masquerading as Masculinity in Dancehall,” Interventions
6, no. 1 (April 2004): 101–117; Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, “Kingston’s Dancehall: A Story of Space and Celebration,”
Space and Culture 7, no. 2 (2004): 102–118; and Kingsley Stewart, “So Wha Mi Nuh Fi Live To: Interpreting
Violence in Jamaica through Dancehall Culture,” Ideaz 1, no. 1 (2002): 17–28.
4. Stolzoff, Wake the Town, 1.
5. Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity (New York and
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 50.
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own Caribbean and national ruling class rhetoric of a hybridized “out of many, one people”
disseminated in its integrative nationalistic motto is selectively and routinely discounted in
dancehall culture’s insular and personal narrative constructions of identity which re-present
the archetypal black, ghetto youth as the dispossessed and marginalized masses in a classed and
gendered capitalist structure. Dancehall culture’s transgressions re-script nationalist notions
of a hybridized Afro-Jamaican identity through strategies that recreate this sameness into dif-
ference, what R. J. C. Young refers to as a cultural phenomenon that makes difference into
sameness and sameness into difference, but in a way which makes the same no longer the
same, the different no longer simply different.6
This hybridizing process is essentially a simultaneous breaking and joining, an ambivalent
movement within and without that results in the creation of new and often imagined spaces
for cultural and social engagement. Using Passa Passa as its point of entry, this article focuses
on three facets of dancehall culture that emblematize this hybridizing ethos. First it examines
the uneasy marriage between popular and political culture where popular dancehall culture
is used to simultaneously contain and expand the restrictive elements of Jamaica’s political
culture. It next interrogates the alternative gender readings coded in the rise of popularized
male dancers in dancehall culture which tamper with the hegemonic readings of heterosexual
masculinity. It then analyzes the empowering and liberating potential of selective manifesta-
tions of a “dancehallized” identity which is transmitted from within the disempowering and
socially darkened spaces of Kingston’s depressed communities. These ideo-spatial transgres-
sions and gendered representations—transcendental and often ambivalent images—reflect
dancehall culture’s propensity to traffic in ambivalent representations of self and personhood,
which often resist efforts to homogenize. The dancehall event Passa Passa, encapsulates these
phenomena in a riotous burst of spectacular and extreme formations on its multilayered,
shifting, and ambivalent stage.
Here, I consider it prudent to lodge the caveat that it is not my intention to misrepresent
Passa Passa or any related phenomenon within the ambit of dancehall culture as a relatively
self-contained sphere. The scope of this article delimits my discussion and interrogation of all
the historical, related, and overlapping themes and theories that may or do work in concert
with my own examination of this popular cultural sphere. Additionally, my own focus on
issues of power and gendered identity is a conceptual bias that inclines this discussion towards
the themes that present themselves more forcefully to my own viewpoint as an academic,
researcher, and longstanding dancehall fan.
6. R. J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 26.
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Passa Passa: Mix Up and Blenda
I’ve seen nuff dance before . . . but I’ve never seen nuh dance like dis.7
During the summer of 2003, dancehall culture created space for the dramatic reentry of a
not-so-new sibling, the street dance, which was playing an important role in repatriating
much-needed resources back into the hands of enterprising residents of the poverty-stricken
communities of West Kingston with the addition of Passa Passa’s Wednesday night frenzied
fantasy to the popular culture calendar. Passa Passa’s most popular antecedent is the famous
Rae Town Sunday night event which had its heyday in the 1980s. Like Rae Town Sundays,
Passa Passa temporally connects the “uptown” middle classes with their “downtown” inner-city
counterparts within spaces that are considered dangerous and volatile, particularly because
they are peopled by Kingston’s urban poor.
The event has its own contemporary competitors, similar dancehall events that are held
during the traditional workweek and variously tagged as Early Mondays, Hot Mondays, Blase
Blasé, Jiggy Fridays, Weddy Weddy, Blazing Wednesdays, and so on. Many of these events are
staged by residents in other inner-city communities. However, Passa Passa attracts unusual
attention because its weekly staging is in the volatile West Kingston, inner-city garrison com-
munity of Tivoli Gardens.8 Tivoli Gardens has gained notoriety for its die-hard allegiance
to and safeguarding of the political fortunes of Jamaica’s political opposition, the Jamaica
Labour Party (JLP). This community formed the hub of former opposition leader Edward
Seaga’s political constituency, now headed by Bruce Golding who took the helm of the JLP
and the constituency from Seaga in 2005. For nearly four decades, the JLP has dominated
at the polls in the West Kingston constituency. Intense political participation underwrote a
project to house the poor in the 1960s, securing the ascendancy of the Labour Party and the
cult-like following of its Tivoli constituents.9 Outsiders and non-JLP supporters are usually
viewed with intense animosity and as outright enemies by residents. Indeed, the community
7. Elephant Man, “Pon di River, Pon di Bank,” Good 2 Go. CD, track 1 (Atlantic, 2003).
8. Mark Figueroa describes a garrison community as a political stronghold, a veritable fortress controlled by a political
party; see the Report of the National Committee on Political Tribalism, (Jamaica, 1997), 7. Any significant social,
political, economic, or cultural development within the garrison can only take place with the tacit approval of
the leadership (whether local or national) of the dominant party. Twelve communities are labeled as garrisons in
Kingston, St. Andrew, and St. Catherine. For an in-depth discussion on these communities see Christopher Charles,
“Garrison Communities as Counter Societies: The Case of the 1998 Zeeks’ Riot in Jamaica,” Ideaz 1, no. 1 (2002):
29–43; and Mark Figueroa and A. Sives, “Homogenous voting, electoral manipulation and the ‘garrison’ process in
post-independence Jamaica,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 81–108.
9. See Obika Gray’s discussion of this phenomenon in his work on the urban poor in Jamaica in Demeaned but
Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago: University of
the West Indies Press, 2004), 72–79.
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is generally perceived as permanently at war with outsiders and, therefore is seen as off-limits
for non-residents and non-Labourites, including the state’s law enforcement officials.
A Solution of Popular and Political Culture
Passa Passa’s appropriation of space on the Spanish Town Road thoroughfare in downtown
Kingston creates a temporal and temporary, public and private stage for performances which
symbolize the tense dichotomies that emblematize the identities represented in dancehall.10
In the dead of the night, beginning from approximately 10 p.m. and ending as late as 6 a.m.,
patrons effectively launch a temporary occupation on the public thoroughfare of Spanish Town
Road and its environs; the actual streets become the event’s private, dancehall venue.
Based on the history of violence and antagonism, many persons in Jamaica refuse to enter
these areas, and those who do generally enter or pass through Tivoli Gardens with a strong
sense of foreboding. The rigid boundaries that govern Tivoli Gardens and its environs and
the extreme violence that permeates the area mean that many Jamaicans would never set foot
at Passa Passa. Nonetheless, when visitors and outsiders enter the dancehallized space of Passa
Passa, overpowering fears about personal safety and property (for example, motor vehicles) are
encouraged into temporary remission. Residents and other regular patrons remind outsiders
that their safety is assured as a part of the “way the ghetto run.” During a visit in April 2004,
one resident told the author that the community is run under “One Order,” a term used to
describe the system, often based on fear, under which the community is unified through the
Machiavellian guidance and control of the ruling Don and his “soldiers” on the ground. This
control extends to the staging of Passa Passa. The assurance of peace and safety at the event
in 2004 was solidified because the event was hosted under the auspices of the ruling Don,
Duddus (a.k.a. The President), of Tivoli Gardens whose sanction underwrites the consensus of
peace at Passa Passa.11 The wealth of Dons like Duddus is increasingly said to accrue from drug
10. Sonjah Stanley-Niaah discusses this in her work on dancehall’s boundarylessness in a context where boundedness
simultaneously operates is relevant to this work. In her own words, she contributes to the “excavation of
philosophies, of space, ethnographies of embodiment and dance” that is an important part of the debates on
dancehall culture. See Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, “Making Space: Kingston’s Dancehall Culture and its philosophy of
‘boundarylessness,” African Identities 2, no. 2 (2004): 117–132.
11. “Don” is a title of distinction afforded to men who are considered to be of high social, political, and economic
status in Jamaica. It is particularly used to denote status among men from the lower socioeconomic levels and in the
inner city context and is commonly used in inner city and dancehall slang. The Jamaican definition of Don draws
significantly from the distinctive label given to Mafia overlords of the kind immortalized in the movie Godfather;
however it is oriented around indigenous symbols of the “ghetto gunman” who may sometimes have political
and/or narcopolitical linkages. Political Dons are affiliated to one of the two major political parties in Jamaica (the
ruling People’s National Party or the opposition Jamaica Labor Party) and generally oversee the running of garrison
communities in Jamaica. Many practicing Dons have been accused of illegal or extralegal activities in Jamaica.
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trafficking and extortion since the drying up of the patron-clientelist resources that fostered the
development of their relationship with the formal political structures in the late 1960s.12
The pact of peace at Passa Passa, brokered on the foundation of the political structure of
the garrison, creates a temporal and temporary hiatus within which any instances of deviant
behavior are not tolerated. This includes harassment of affluent patrons or outsiders, attacks
against patrons from rival inner-city communities, attacks against known supporters of the
rival political party, robbery of patrons, and the theft of motor vehicles. Any such practices
within the temporary-temporal space of Passa Passa would be perceived as a direct affront to
the authority of the Don, Duddus, and a personal “Dis” to his position as The President.13
Therefore, there could be serious repercussions, including bodily harm, for those involved
in breaking the positive vibes of Passa Passa. Incidences of harassment, robbery, or otherwise
would also signal the retreat of patrons, a reduction of the event’s attraction to “outer city”
residents, and negative publicity from the mainstream and community media. The overall
result would be economic loss, deaffirmation of the social and cultural power of the poor, and
a regression to their demeaned status and, in effect, the death of Passa Passa.
This temporal and temporary assurance of peace and safety at Passa Passa signifies a depar-
ture from the generally accepted practices and behaviors that normally govern the activities of
communities like Tivoli Gardens and its environs. Passa Passa’s intervention into this closely
guarded public space is radically important in making an assessment of the role of this uneasy
marriage between popular dancehall culture and restrictive political culture in Jamaican life.
The porous social, political, and cultural barriers that distinguish this dancehall event and
its marked departure from the normative practices and values that govern inner-city and
garrison communities in downtown Kingston, underscore the important role that popular
dancehall culture plays in creating temporal spaces that temporarily extend the normative
boundaries that de-limit modes of being in Jamaica. In one instance, known supporters of the
ruling Peoples National Party (PNP) were seen in numbers, while at the same time the two
male patrons from the inner-city (Spanish Town and Kingston) who joined our group were
happily demonstrating and encouraging us to form the “new JLP hand symbol.” Although
Passa Passa was deemed a dancehall event where people of all classes, races, social statuses, and
12. For a discussion on the patron-clientelist structure that underpinned the Jamaican political culture and practice in
the 1970s and beyond see Carl Stone, Democracy and Clientelism in Jamaica (New York: New Brunswick, 1980). See
also Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, in particular 34–35 and 173–180.
13. “Dis” is an abbreviation of the term disrespect and its derivatives. In the flux of values and contestations for identity
and status that exists in the inner cities and dancehall it is translated as a perceived act of disrespect committed
against the person, the status or the identity of an individual. This “dis,” perceived or real, usually results in
retaliatory violence.
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political persuasions were allowed entry, the overwhelming and insular political identities of
many patrons remained close to the surface, held only in check by the temporary-temporal
restraints of the dancehall event.
Nonetheless, Passa Passa articulates a useful contract between popular culture and political
culture where dancehall culture effectively subsumes and contains the more negative aspects
of Jamaican political culture for a moment in time. Passa Passa is effectively promoted as a
dancehall event and not as an inner-city dance held in a deeply partisan, volatile community.
The strategic highlighting of its popular cultural role over and above its political role, that
is, its staging in a deeply partisan and political community, is one important element in the
explosive success of Passa Passa. Additionally, the lure of the notorious Tivoli Gardens to out-
siders cannot be discounted. Curious outsiders get a real chance to sample the hardcore feel
of a dance held in a real ghetto community; and to taste the forbidden fruit of fraternizing in
this rigidly guarded space.
Passa Passa acts as a model dancehall event that political agents, activists, Dons, and
enterprising community members use to access resources for their poverty-stricken com-
munities. The intense material deprivation, high levels of unemployment, and squalid living
conditions that characterize life in these inner-city communities force many residents to rely
on the patronage of community Dons for their economic survival and protection. Passa Passa
and similar events provide a legitimate arena where residents of these communities can “hustle
for a food” by vending a variety of goods ranging from food items to alcoholic beverages,
cigarettes, and marijuana.
The enveloping of conflicting social and political identities within the space of Passa Passa
signifies dancehall culture’s capacity to temporally contain conflagrations that develop from
the collisions between perceived legal and illegal practices and between negative and positive
social values that usually characterize the hegemonic debates emanating from the privileged
spaces provided for “uptown” citizens. These debates include the suppressed and overt partisan
political behavior of many patrons, the open fraternizing of “decent” citizens with known or
self-declared criminals, the open selling of illegal substances like marijuana, and the playing
of what many identify as negative music (for example, gun tunes). Dancehall’s violations also
include the discourse of alternative masculinities that are projected on the Passa Passa body.
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E-merging Masculinities in Dancehall
Real badman nuh wear people pants
We tek dancing to a higher ranks
(Really bad men do not wear pants that belong to other people.
We take dancing to a higher level.)14
With the rise of troupes of popularized male dancers, dancehall events like Passa Passa mani-
fest the loosening of the once rigidly policed boundaries of male behavior that have governed
dancehall culture, inner-city culture, and the wider cultural and social terrain of gendered
practices and norms in Jamaica.15 Jamaica’s hegemonic masculinity has been designated by
the close approximation to a Eurocentric and middle-class standard that incorporates key ele-
ments of masculine status including middle-class background: tertiary education, white-collar
career, economic wealth, ability to provide for and control immediate family, (polygamous)
heterosexuality, access to leisure, access to or ownership of expensive cars, and domination of
women. It is important to note that the spaces that historically existed in Jamaican culture
for men to dance were always cast as middle- or upper-class (National Dance Theatre Com-
pany) or deeply religious (Jamaican Revival Church and the spiritual healing profession); or
feminized and homosexual, that is, unmanly. The effect of these factors was that dancing as
a staged spectacle was negated and ideologically exiled as a route for masculine expression
and ascendancy by hardcore dancehall men in dancehall culture’s lower class, secularized, and
deeply patriarchal space.
In particular, dancing by dancehall men has been negated by dancehall’s heavy focus
on sex and sexuality in its discussions on identity and personhood with its propensity to use
the female body as a source of male empowerment. This masculinist predisposition has been
reflected in the strident anti-male homosexual dancehall discourse that has been challenged
by gay lobbyists like GLADD and OutRage in 1993 and 2004, respectively. Many Jamaican
men are hesitant to hug each other publicly for fear of being labeled as gay, and men who
are overtly effeminate in their behaviors are often stereotyped and harassed. In the extreme
microcosm of the dancehall, gay men are lyrically denounced as the arbiters of all forms of
corruption and evil who must be eradicated from the face of the earth by various means. These
anti-gay discourses are immortalized in dancehall songs and have generated intense discussion
with the international furor over dancehall artiste Buju Banton’s “Boom Bye Bye” and the
14. Elephant Man, “Pon di River.”
15. For a discussion on the rigid gendering of male and female identities in Jamaica see Barry Chevannes, Learning To be
a Man: Culture, Socialization and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities (Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and
Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), in particular 35–66 and 149–204.
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more recent debates around Beenie Man’s “Bad Man Chi Chi Man” as important examples.
Extreme anti-homosexual discourse and performance are important patriarchal sites from
which marginalized Jamaican men, who are over-represented in dancehall culture, seek to
garner the social power and status that they are otherwise denied.16 Dance, as performance
and spectacle in dancehall, has consequently been coded as feminine. Women gained ascen-
dancy as dancehall queens and dancers while men did as deejays and posers. Nevertheless,
since late 2002 the phenomenon of male dancers has become a norm in the dancehall and is
now being reflected in the burgeoning male activity in the wider sphere of professional, staged
dance.17 Male dancers and dancing crews are an essential part of the ritualistic, imaginative,
and competitive sphere of Passa Passa.
At Passa Passa, dancers seem to prefer dancing in all-male or all-female groups except
when there is intense competition for the space circumscribed by the light of the video cam-
eras. This is a radical departure from accepted dance practices in the dancehall culture in the
preceding eras of the 1980s and 1990s where, since the 1980s, women took the stage and
publicly performed their dances in the space selected as the center of the dance, while men
remained on the fringes individually or in groups to “profile” or “hang out.” Male dancing in
the center of the dancehall has been generally tolerated when the man in question is dancing
erotically with a female or when the man is particularly skillful and is allowed a brief moment
to signify his prowess, preferably with a dance coded as hardcore or masculine like the Cool
and Deadly. These gendered boundaries effectively stifled the rise of male dancers with the
late Gerald “Bogle” Levy being the only popular male dancer in the dancehall for nearly two
decades. Consequently, the contemporary phenomenon of young men claiming this sacred
and very hyped public space in the center of the dance and dancing in groups, touching each
other and holding hands, without the intervention of a female or in direct competition with a
female dancer signifies an alternative rendering of masculine roles in the dancehall.
It is arguable that the tolerance for these male dancers and their close, physical contact
with each other reflects a transformation in the traditional readings of male heterosexuality in
the dancehall. In the dancehall women were (and continue to be) positioned and read as sexual
objects. The fact that men have appropriated the feminine aesthetic rituals of dress and dance
and have begun to recast the tropes of masculine notions of personhood speaks to a revolu-
16. See Donna P. Hope, “Of ‘Chi-Chi’ Men: The Threat of Male Homosexuality to Afro-Caribbean Masculine Identity”
(paper presented at the 26
th
Annual Caribbean Studies Association Conference, Maho Bay, St. Maarten, 2001);
and “ ‘Love Punaany Bad’: Negotiating Misogynistic Masculinity in Dancehall Culture (paper presented at the 2
nd
Conference on Caribbean Culture, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, January 2002).
17. In her Sunday Gleaner article of 3 July 2005, Tanya Batson-Savage discusses the increase in male dancers in
professional dance ensembles like the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), which seemingly indicates an
erasure of the homosexual and feminized stigma that haunted this activity.
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tionary change of attitudes that may signify an incremental decrease in the overpowering levels
of the anti-male homosexual discourses that are created and communicated in the dancehall.
Correspondingly, this apparent transition in masculine behavior in the dancehall may signify
the response of marginalized men from Kingston’s inner cities to the varied and popularized
renditions of masculinity they encounter in the international media. They now see, for example,
the strategic placement of gay men in powerful positions in sitcoms, as well as the elevation of
hardcore male dancers in American hip-hop on popular cable television stations.
Dancehall’s cosmopolitan flavor and its inward and outward reach favor the strategic re-
fashioning of the self to approximate “foreign” images of superstar status that are broadcast on
popular cable TV channels like BET and MTV. Selective re-imaginings of male heterosexu-
ality embody this mediated cross-fertilization in which images of male hip-hop dancers are
transferred to dancehall’s rigidly policed male heterosexual space. The gendered sociopolitical
suggestions encoded in these images resulted in alternative readings and renditions of male
heterosexuality and encouraged dancehall men to follow the lead of the original and popular
male dancer, Bogle, to claim center stage as dancers in an arena once deemed feminine. The
perception of dancing as masculine and hype is increasingly coupled with the growing preoc-
cupation with re-fashioning the body by “hardcore” Jamaican men who appropriate feminine
aesthetic rituals governing appearance and self-presentation to refine their images.18 The idea
of “privileged” males selectively borrowing and re-casting aspects of female privilege as mas-
culine,19 exemplified here by the feminine prerogative to engage in public display and dance
spectacles, gains legitimacy in this new representation of male heterosexuality. Dancing is now
perceived as a viable economic activity and an accepted career for hardcore men. Following
the late Bogle, dancers like John Hype accompany artistes on their tours abroad and even go
on their own tours to perform at clubs and other popular cultural sites. Creative displays of
dance prowess and acrobatic style by men is increasingly viewed as another useful way to access
resources and as a viable exit out of the poverty of inner-city life. In the contemporary dance-
hall arena, “Dancing is not about fun, it is a job.”20 This masculine appropriation of dance
in the dancehall is displayed at Passa Passa by the growing numbers of hardcore male dancers
who compete fiercely with the diminishing numbers of female dancers for center stage.
18. See for example my article on the British Link Up Crew where I examine the politics of appearance and conspicuous
consumption as one example of the discourse of masculinities in the dancehall; Donna P. Hope, “The British Link
Up Crew: Consumption Masquerading as Masculinity in the Dancehall,” Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (April 2004): 101–117.
19. For a discussion on male privileging and its repercussions on the Jamaican male see Mark Figueroa, “Male
Privileging and Male ‘Academic Underperformance’ in Jamaica,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical
and Empirical Analyses, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago: University of West Indies
Press, 2004), 137–166.
20. Ding Dong, popular male dancer in the dancehall, in conversation with author, Kingston, Jamaica (May 2005).
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One example of the competition between male and female dancers for center stage was
witnessed by author in April 2004 when popular female dancer Keiva, dressed in a pink
terry gym shorts suit, complete with hood and matching sneakers, was pursued by a group
of energetic young male dancers (including Sadekie and the crew) in a choreographed flash
down the centre of Spanish Town Road. Keiva was the only woman in a group of fourteen
dancers. Her lithe, slim outline fought to surpass the predatory surge of masculine energy as
she guided, led, and turned the group. But the male dancers dominated with their acrobatic
feats, their choreographed dance moves, and their overwhelming numbers as they moved in a
single ripple, touching, waving, leaping, bowing, and rising to claim Passa Passa’s center stage
as an organic unit. Dancers like John Hype, Sadekie and the Crew, Ding Dong, Rizzla, and
Labba Labba have gained popularity and preeminence in dancehall culture. These men and
other hardcore male dancers use the Passa Passa stage to parade their popular dance moves.
Like many other dancehall adherents, these dancers transcend their rigidly bound sociopoliti-
cal spaces by playing to the quasi-amorous advances of the ubiquitous high-technology video
and camera equipment.
Eyelight, Highlight, and Videolight
Up inna di video yuh haffi bling and clean.21
The nucleus of activity at Passa Passa that is controlled by the dancers is circumscribed by the
reach of videographers as the dancers pander to the amorous advances of the cameras. The
dancers perform their most stylish and energetic dances within the range of the video lens like
fireflies clustering around a beacon, refusing to free themselves from its bright lights. In effect,
the lights of the video cameras act represent an electronic boundary within which the dancers
strive to remain at all times. Young men aggressively compete with women in an effort to claim
the center of the dance, as they present their choreographed and energetic dance styles to the
Passa Passa audience, the photographers, the video cameras, and the world at large.
This powerful need to be seen and videotaped has been an important part of dancehall
culture since the introduction of video cameras as a regular part of dancehall activities in the
dance hall in the late 1980s to early 1990s.22 The rise of Jamaica’s local cable television indus-
try at around this time also contributed to this phenomenon, as local cable providers filmed
sections of dancehall events and broadcast them on local channels. What I refer to as the
“Video Light Syndrome” refers to the insatiable desire of many dancehall patrons to have their
21. Elephant Man, “Pon di River.”
22. Jack Sowah, noted dancehall videographer, interview with author, Kingston, Jamaica (February 1999).
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presence duly documented at the dances, stage shows, and other dancehall events that they
attend. Many of these individuals will go to great lengths to ensure that their images are cap-
tured on camera. This includes the wearing of elaborate and expensive jewelry and costumes;
conspicuous purchase and consumption of expensive, brand name beverages like Moet &
Chandon and Alize; the wearing of erotic, revealing clothes; and performance of erotic, x-rated
dances by women. With the rise of male dancers, female dancers are now forced to share the
dancing stage with their male counterparts. This means that where the earlier participation of
men in this sphere was more muted and understated, both men and women are now aggres-
sively subscribing to the Video Light Syndrome. The particular spatial placement of Passa
Passa in the inner city, coupled with its simultaneous positioning on the weekly entertainment
and popular dancehall calendar, means that it is an important space for the presentation of
re-fashioned selves in the dancehall and in the inner city. The pervasiveness of video and still
cameras in this temporal space promise considerable rewards in terms of visibility, recognition,
status, and sometimes real resources to those whose images are captured in action on the Passa
Passa stage. The local and mainstream media aid in this quest for status by providing avenues
for national and international publicity beyond the traditional propensity of Jamaican media
to document and record the images of inner-city residents at their worst and ignore them at
their best. In fact, the music video for the hit “Anything Goes” (Wayne Wonder, CNN and
Lexus), which makes the rounds of popular North American television stations like BET and
MTV, was shot on location at one staging of Passa Passa.
In his work on cultural hybridity, Nestor Garcia Canclini assesses the influence of new
media on the construction of culture and the writing of history and discusses the significance
of photocopiers, VCRs, videos, and video games. In upgrading this list, we could add recent
high-tech equipment like DVD players, CD burners, hand-held video recorders, and digital
cameras of the sort that now predominate at many dancehall events. Canclini reflects on the
uses of such technological tools, noting that:
Their simple formal innovation implies cultural changes, but the final sign depends on the uses
different actors assign to them . . . they crack the orders that used to classify and distinguish cultural
traditions; they weaken historical meaning and the macrostructural conceptions to the benefit of
intense and sporadic relations with isolated objects, with their signs and images.23
The expansive imaginings and fantastic images captured on the Passa Passa stage transcend
the narrow and dreary representations of self that have been handed down to inner-city resi-
dents and the lower working class by the hegemonic classes in Jamaica. The telescopic seizure
23. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L.
Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 226–27.
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of Passa Passa’s imaginings and images translate into an explosive release of said imaginings
and images onto a grandiose and mediated stage, far beyond the limiting confines of Passa
Passa, dancehall culture, and Kingston’s inner cities. Passa Passa arguably represents a local and
glocal identity stage on which the marginalized children of the poverty-stricken inner cities
of Kingston, St. Andrew, and St. Catherine can bruk way (break away and engage in loose
behavior) and indulge in frenetic, spiritual rituals of affirmation and renewal.
In a critical moment of self-affirmation that bestows social and cultural empowerment,
the dancers, profilers, and modelers proclaim their existence and declare that “wi a smaddy
to” (we too are individuals of merit). The preponderance of high-tech imaging devices on the
Passa Passa platform reflects its multiple layers where African retentions, creolized dance, and
inner-city style merge with high technology “pon di river pon di bank” (on the river and on
the riverbank). Images implode within the confined inner-city, garrison space and explode
without through dancehall culture and into the eyelights, highlights, and floodlights of the
cameras. The children of the dancehall and inner city fight frenetically for their tiny bits of
space on the Passa Passa stage, harnessing their rides on the backs of digital video beams. They
are sensitized to the empowering potential of the cameras which effectively free their digitized
images from the disempowering social and political entrapment they face in Kingston’s inner
cities. Their encoded representations will reach outwards from the confined space and stage
of Passa Passa to flaunt their composite selves on multiple and extensive stages. Even momen-
tarily, their spirits will be freed from the here and now to be seen and heard in the there and
elsewhere. In this moment, they defy the strictures of history and dismiss the empty promises
of nationalism, creating ahistorical global selves that ripple with empowerment. They will be
known as dancehall’s kings, queens, and superstars.
Conclusion
Elephant Man’s popular 2003 hit “Pon di River Pon di Bank” ostensibly describes the new
role of dance in the life of the dancehall and at events like Passa Passa. In this song, Elephant
Man documents the fact that warring communities like “Cockburn Pen (now) team up with
Drewsland.” Corresponding former rival dancers Stacey and Keiva are now able to shake hands
in a gesture of respect. Elephant Man further admonishes:
All dancer fi unite and live as one
John and Bogle! ah oonu mi ah talk
Lock di river bed now di sea part
Bogle ah wave ah tear di dance apart
John do di new dance a buss it inna half
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(All dancers must unite and live as one
John and Bogle! I am speaking to you.
Lock the river bed and now the sea parts
Bogle is waving and tearing the dance apart
John does the new dance and bursts it [the dance] in two)24
In this excitable and popular hit, Elephant Man’s lyrics not only drive the proliferation
of new dances that have erupted in the dancehall since 2003, but also outline the horizons
that are created when politically divided communities and rival male and female dancers
come together to conquer the proverbial river. Their actions re-create the miracle of Moses by
parting the sea so that the God’s chosen children can reach a promised land that is rich with
potential. The children of Kingston’s stagnating inner cities rip the dance apart by transcending
its boundaries and can, therefore, progress and be empowered within the dancehall.
Similarly, camouflaged in the guise of fun and entertainment in the dancehall, Passa
Passa presents the hard core of the economic realities and the political, gendered, and popular
cultural Jamaican self to a local, national, and global audience. It sets the pace for social and
political renewal by creating difference from sameness and changing sameness into difference;
by ripping apart sociocultural dichotomies and the street dance, Passa Passa is transformed
into a literal and temporal embodiment of political, gendered, and social issues. I hesitate to
fall into what Puri describes as the “common tendency of cultural theorists of the Caribbean
to focus on cultural resistance to the neglect of other forms of political resistance.”25 Yet my
own work in dancehall confirms that dancehall culture and Passa Passa draws on the lived
practices of its adherents and creators and projects an imagined dancehall community that
creatively works out and performs the convergent themes of social and political inequalities
that persist in Jamaica, even with the uproar about globalization and its attendant “benefits.”
In fact, Passa Passa is a projection of people’s ideals, a culturally mediated insurrection against
the traditional value system and exploitative capitalist economy that define sociopolitical and
gendered engagement in Jamaica. Its ahistorical reflections mirror the capacity of dancehall
culture and marginalized individuals to reinvent selves and adapt to ensure survival. It repli-
cates the irrepressible African ethos in plantation slavery which defiantly transgressed physical
confinement by releasing the spirit, the essence of self, into freedom.
Passa Passa is a cacophonous incarnation of a temporal miracle. It is a volcanic eruption
and a temporary hiatus from particular sociopolitical norms in Jamaica. It is a microcosmic,
animated tattoo—an extreme and painful artistic representation of the multiple and competing
24. Elephant Man, “Pon di River.”
25. Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial, 63.
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imaginations of a local and global self, and the realities of Kingston inner-city “livity” (life-
style and worldview) that are simultaneously created within, by, and on the riotous dancehall
body. In the final analysis, my interrogation of the hybridities represented at Passa Passa raises
many questions, but one important query is this: Do the event’s spatial, temporal, political,
and gendered transgressions ultimately constitute a meaningful break with social and political
constraints and signal new possibilities, or do the Passa Passa transgressions merely reinforce
old barriers? The passage of time will dictate if Passa Passa is historicized as another popu-
lar culture spectacle in the dancehall genre’s two-plus decades of existence, or if its signals,
signifiers, images, and imaginings will be harnessed to effect meaningful change in Jamaica.
Acknowledgments
I remain indebted to several persons with whom I have had numerous discussions on this issue. I want to
acknowledge in particular the valuable contributions made to this article by Marlon Marquis, Hume Johnson,
Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, and Carliss Nattoo-Young. The contributions of my two reviewers whose comments
and suggestions have been used to inform the final draft of this article are also deeply appreciated.
