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At the Crossroads—
Looking for Meaning in Jamaican
Dancehall Culture: A Reply
Carolyn Cooper
In the introduction to Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large I make my position
clear:
In the present study I document a series of forays I have made across the shifting borderline
between “academic” and “popular” territory. I do not claim for this project the definitive authority
of an encyclopedic study of Jamaican dancehall culture. I offer, instead, the specificity of my voice,
positioning (a ya) and identity—to cite Stuart Hall and Cocoa Tea—as I try to make sense of the
border clashes that characterize much of contemporary Jamaican society, and which are therefore
often chronicled within the popular performance genres such as “roots” theater, dub poetry and,
especially, popular music (16).
Despite this disclaimer, it seems that three of the present reviewers have all concluded that I
attempted (and failed) to write the last word on Jamaican dancehall culture.
Mike Alleyne got it. Perhaps it is because he is grounded in literary studies and knows
how to savor the pleasures of the word in all its specificity and ambiguity. The punning title
of his lucid essay confirms his understanding of my project. And even though he does draw
careful scholarly attention to the weaknesses he sees in my reading of some aspects of dancehall
culture, for example its relationship to hip-hop, Alleyne’s generosity is evident throughout. In
fact, he does concede in his helpful refining of my representation of hip-hop that:
In fairness, she explicitly claims no critical authority in the world of rap/hip-hop, noting in “Hip-
hopping across Cultures: Reggae to Rap and Back” (chapter Eight), her status as “moonlighting
in foreign territory” where the genre is concerned. In this statement, she at least acknowledges a
critical humility evidently lacking in opponents to the worlds of dancehall (158).
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Alleyne clearly has no axe to grind.
Conversely, the high-theory triumvirate seems to be grinding their collective teeth in
irritation at my failure to tell it like they see it. Unlike Allyene’s commonsense response to
Sound Clash, which is no less theoretical for its elegance, Bakare-Yusuf’s tendentious essay,
“based essentially on a materialist and phenomenological analysis which privileges the moment
prior to language in the production of culture, without disregarding the discursive effect on
cultural activities” (162), laboriously delineates the “forms of aporetic silence and occlusion”
(164) that Sound Clash seemingly represses.
Stanley Niaah, deploying a cartographic trope, initially appears to set out to map “the
conceptual territory Cooper’s Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture At Large occupies
in the context of academic writings on Caribbean popular culture, in particular dancehall
culture, and the politics of what is made visible, excessive or absent” (174). But this rather
grand enterprise is quite quickly aborted. Stanley Niaah’s review essay focuses fleetingly on
a single chapter, “Slackness Personified: Representations of Female Sexuality in the Lyrics of
Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks,” and then mutates into a polemic having very little to do with
my own concerns in the book.
Hippolyte wants me to be a thoroughgoing theorist who offers more than “smatter-
ings of post-modern lingo” (189). She dismisses as mere “theory-bashing” my attempt, first
articulated in Noises in the Blood and again in Sound Clash, to “retheorise marginality and
power” by “centring the ideological narrative on close readings of the texts themselves” (4).
My supposedly “un-theoretical” project—seeking to “discover what the texts themselves can
be made to tell us about the nature of cultural production in our centres of learning (4)”—is
not at all valorized.
The central burden of Bakare-Yusuf’s essay is to demonstrate the folly of my insistence in
the introductory chapter, “Word, Sound, and Power,” that Sound Clash is “stubbornly rooted
in a politics of place that claims a privileged space for the local and asserts the authority of
the native as speaking subject” (2). Bakare-Yusuf will have none of that. She bewilderingly
interprets my statement to mean that “ ‘outsiders’ are not permitted to appropriate and read
dancehall as they wish” (166). Of course, I, myself, make no such preposterous claim. Nowhere
in Sound Clash do I attempt to police the appropriation and reading of dancehall.
Over and over again, Bakere-Yusuf misrepresents my argument:
First I address the problems created by Cooper’s privileging of the local voice over the foreign in
the decoding of dancehall culture. I argue that while she appears to accept contradictory forms of
meaning within dancehall lyrics, at the same time she rejects the possibility of plural interpretations
occasioned by such semantic bifurcation (161).
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Of course I allow the possibility of plural interpretations. Even if I wanted to, I could not
suppress them. But I do know that some interpretations make much more sense than others.
Consistency with the internal logic of the text is a primary criterion for evaluating the valid-
ity of any interpretation. Oftentimes, non-Jamaican listeners—or, more precisely, listeners
who do not fully understand the Jamaican language—do not even hear the lyrics accurately
let alone interpret them coherently. Many German listeners thought Bob Marley’s line “no
woman, no cry” meant that if you don’t have a woman then you won’t cry. The line did make
sense to them but their interpretation was certainly not what Marley intended. A comfortingly
nostalgic song, evoking domestic intimacy and the shared rituals of community—“I remember
when we used to sit inna govament yard in Trench Town”—becomes an almost misogynist,
homosocial rejection of the company of women.
Another anecdote will suffice. Soon after the publication of Noises in the Blood I got a
congratulatory letter from a well-intentioned North American academic. He found the book
illuminating but he did wonder if I hadn’t made an error in the transcription of the following
Marley line: “We forward in this generation triumphantly.” The correction he proposed was
what he had heard: “We flowered in this generation.” Surely, I must be entitled to tell him that
he’s wrong. That flowery transcription, eliding all of the culture-specific Rastafari resonances
of Marley’s “forward,” transposes the politically charged “Redemption Song” into another, less
threatening, key. Though the horticultural trope, like the militaristic “forward,” does denote
potency, the connotations are decidedly not the same. The meaning is in the metaphor.
In Noises in the Blood I do address this matter of interpretation but, of course, I cannot
assume that Bakare-Yusuf knows the argument I make there. Of Bob Marley’s lyrics I say:
Indeed, the lyrics become open to a wide range of interpretations. Asked about the possible mean-
ings of the Kaya album, Marley himself advises in good “reader response” criticism: “You have to
play it and get your own inspiration. For every song have a different meaning to a man. Sometimes I
sing a song and when people explain it to me I am astonished by their interpretation.” This permis-
sive astonishment seems to derive from the creative artist’s recognition that the power of the word
cannot be contained within the boundaries of the individual author’s “intention.” It also seems to
point to the dynamics of “interpretation” in oral, communal contexts of performance. The roots
of interpretation—to spread abroad among (O.E.D.)—seem to be grounded in oral discourse. The
audience, as much as the performer, engages in the making/spreading of the text and its meanings.
Inspired interpretation—both oral and scribal—thus becomes another “performance” of the text,
another opportunity to disclose its multiple meanings.1
1. Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood, Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London:
Macmillan, 1993) in which the Marley quote is cited from Basil Wilson and Herman Hall, “Marley in His Own
Words: A Memorable Interview,” Everybody’s Magazine 5, no. 4 (1981) : 24.
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It ought not to be necessary to repeat in Sound Clash arguments already elaborated in Noises
in the Blood.
In addition, I do not propose as Bakare-Yusuf alleges that “because language is the most
overtly contested aspect of the culture . . . it is the most important” (166). My argument is
much more subtle. In the introductory chapter of Sound Clash I actually quote from Noises
in the Blood, where I say that “the DJ’s verbal art originates in an inclusivist neo-African folk
aesthetic—a carnivalesque fusion of word, music and movement around the centre pole, and
on the common ground of the dance floor” (7). Yet Bakare-Yusuf persists in contradicting an
argument I do not make: “The language of the DJs is part of a totality, a multisensory complex
that refuses any hierarchization. Language alone cannot open up the complexities of the social
world of dancehall culture” (166). Sounds a lot like what I said. Bakare-Yusuf spends most of
her combative essay fighting strawpersons that she herself has constructed.
In my admittedly contentious introduction, what I do affirm is the right to vigorously
correct the mangling of my academic work by two North American critics, both of whom seem
to have no anxiety whatsoever about asserting the authoritativeness of their own readings of
dancehall culture in general, and my essays in particular. Not surprisingly, non-Jamaican art-
ists are much more respectful of the authority of Jamaican experts than are academics. Unlike
many foreign academics who, a priori, know everything about us, non-Jamaican artists who
have appropriated ska, reggae, and now dancehall routinely seek validation from hard core
Jamaican audiences whose critical judgment is acknowledged as authoritative. This, of course,
does not mean that foreign artists do not also exercise their right to adapt Jamaican musical
forms to suit their own cultural needs. That is how it should be.
Bakare-Yusuf appears to stand on much firmer ground when she proposes that “Cooper
neither understands the nature and dynamic of violence, nor the way in which metaphor infil-
trates reality and structures experience” (162). I certainly do not consider myself an authority
on these interrelated psychoanalytical matters. What I do know is that, in some instances,
dancehall DJs themselves acknowledge the fact that they use language metaphorically, though
their literal-minded detractors would argue otherwise. When Shabba Ranks, for example, says
“When mi talk bout gun it is a lyrical gun / A lyrical gun dat di people have fun” (When I talk
about a gun, it’s a lyrical gun / A lyrical gun so that people have fun), I am inclined to take
his word for it. If this makes me step, in Bakare-Yusuf’s words, “to the brink of becoming an
apologist for the very culture [I] should be interrogating in terms of the silences and violations
that occur in its midst (173)”, so be it.
Furthermore, any claims made by Bakare-Yusuf for the power of metaphor to “create
social realities which may have an impact on future action” must also be unequivocally applied
to other forms of discourse in Jamaica and elsewhere that are not routinely vilified in the way
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dancehall culture usually is. Everyday use of violent metaphors such “big guns,” “discharging”
one’s duty, “killing” one’s opponent, “shooting” goals, and the like must attract the same ire
that Bakare-Yusuf displays in response to my reading of Lady Saw’s “Stab Out Mi Meat.” For
Bakare-Yusuf, the song “does little to challenge standard models of female passivity, and every-
thing to contribute to violence against women by sustaining the ideal of violence as metaphor”
(170). Lady Saw is not at liberty to choose her own metaphor to express sexual pleasure; she
is reduced to the condition of victim of patriarchy, pure and simple.
Bakere-Yusuf seemingly consolidates her arguments about misunderstood metaphorical
violence and facile nativist interpretation in the following sentences:
In terms of symbolic violence and violation, I can do no better than invoke again the role of Esu-
Elegbara, the Yoruba trickster God, who scrambles and intermingles codes as much as he reveals
truth, reveling in an orgy of mutant symbolism. Here the categories of authentic/inauthentic
and pure/fake that motivate much of Cooper’s argument have no purchase when set against the
transductive material fury of dancehall culture itself (173).
Bakere-Yusuf’s invocation of Esu-Elegbara to give weight to her argument is a good example
of the insider knowledge she disdains. Given the logic of her refusal to claim the authority of
the native and local, I consider myself completely at liberty to contest the perspective on Esu
that she, a continental African, offers me, a diaspora African.
Bakere-Yusuf confidently asserts that “dancehall culture exists within a phenomenologi-
cal/hermeneutical universe where Esu and Hermes dance together, invalidating and ridiculing
authenticity before it comes to voice” (167). Though Bakere-Yusuf herself ridicules the way in
which I “conveniently appropriate mythic figures such as fertility goddesses Oshun and River
Mumma, Esu and its New World counterpart, Anansi for their trickster-function,” I intuitively
know that Anansi is laughing with me, not at me. Anansi stories encode a body of knowledge
that, however mutated in the process of transmission to, and transformation in, the African
diaspora, always signifies something in particular. Jack Mandora mi no choose none. (This enig-
matic Jamaican aphorism is both a ritual affirmation of the non-originality of the folk-tale and
a conventional disclaimer whereby the teller distances self from the moral improprieties of the
tale.) In “Me And Annancy,” Jamaican cultural critic Louise Bennett explains:
At the end of each story, we had to say, “Jack Mandora, me no chose (sic) none,” because Annancy
sometimes did very wicked things in his stories, and we had to let Jack Mandora, the doorman
at heaven’s door, know that we were not in favor of Annancy’s wicked ways. “Me no chose none”
means “I don’t choose to behave in any of these ways.”2
2. Louise Bennett, “Me and Annancy,” in Jamaican Song and Story, ed. Walter Jekyll (New York: Dover, 1966), ix.
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Like Bakare-Yusuf, Stanley Niaah seems to construct strawpersons for the sheer plea-
sure of knocking them down. She announces quite early in her self-indulgent essay that her
“intention is not to review the book but to engage the chapter ‘Slackness Personified’ which
fails to contextualise slackness historically and within contemporary performance.” It doesn’t
matter that I don’t set out to do any such thing here, as the subtitle of the chapter confirms:
“Representations of Female Sexuality in the Lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks.” Nor
does it matter that I have already historicized slackness in Noises in the Blood. There I argue
that Yellowman’s “Waan Mi Virgin,” for example, “echoes an earlier Mento song . . . thus
suggesting that sexual innuendo is not at all peculiar to the much maligned lyrics of the DJs,
but is firmly established in Jamaican popular culture.”3
According to Stanley Niaah, not only do I fail to historicize slackness, I also neglect to
“point to where it has been done inside and outside the DJs lyrics” (179). But in the intro-
duction to Sound Clash, if not in the chapter Stanley Niaah critiques, I do give an account
of the etymology of the words “slack” and “slackness”—a kind of historicizing—even if not
quite what she seems to have in mind. In addition, I also give a summary of my own reading
of the contested term slackness that is elaborated in “Slackness Hiding From Culture: Erotic
Play in the Dancehall,” the penultimate chapter of Noises in the Blood. I point to the source of
the slackness/culture dialectic I invoke in that foundational essay: “Encoding subversion, the
title of that essay, taken from a composition by DJ Josey Wales, celebrates the cunning wiles
of slackness; the subtitle, foregrounding the erotic, underscores the ambiguities of disgust and
desire in the dancehall imaginary: feminized seductive slackness simultaneously resisting and
enticing respectable culture” (2).
Less than halfway through her essay, Stanley Niaah abandons the fiction of responding
even to the single chapter of Sound Clash and proceeds to write her own history of the trope
of slackness in Jamaican popular music. She defines her revisionist ambition thus: “I want to
do something for historicizing slackness from a multidisciplinary perspective for the students
who would not be aware of the sources outside ‘mainstream’ readings of dancehall” (179).
But what she presents as her distinctive scholarly contribution to the historicizing of slack-
ness is common knowledge: “A look at songs since the 1950’s illustrates that slackness—or
more accurately—songs about women’s body parts and sexuality—existed in mento, ska, and
specifically in the Censored album of Lloydie and the Lowbites, and music from artists such
as Prince Buster, among others” (181).
3. Cooper, Noises in the Blood, 137.
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Furthermore, in Stanley Niaah’s scholarly opinion, Sound Clash is “somewhat of an anach-
ronism,” a polite euphemism, I suppose, for “out of date.” Indeed, my allegedly ahistorical,
single-discipline, literary perspective on dancehall culture has become “mainstream,” in the
most disparaging sense of the word, the disdain signified by the skeptical quotation marks that
inscribe alternative tributaries—oceans even—of knowledge. Stanley Niaah’s gratuitous citing
of Kwame Dawes’s shoddy review of Sound Clash illustrates the trials and tribulations of the
“forerunner:” “Cooper is never exhaustive . . . the metaphor of the forerunner who clears the
ground for more lasting cultivation suits Cooper’s work here very well. She manages in each
chapter to propose just enough of a case to warrant further study” (175).
The O.E.D. definition of “forerunner” is multilayered. The primary meaning encodes a
sense of vicarious honor that the forerunner enjoys: “One who runs before, esp. one sent to
prepare the way and herald a great man’s approach, a harbinger.” A great woman’s, too, of
course. The secondary meanings of “forerunner” include “guide” and “ancestor,” with reso-
nances of that preeminent value in all “traditional” cultures—paying respect to elders. All of
this is lost in the derogatory Dawesian sense of the word. The problem with being perceived
as a forerunner in academia these days is that, in an ironic inversion, the herald now comes to
be seen as an authority in the field and is likely to be trampled by those rushing from behind
to overtake her or him.
Stanley Niaah deploys the quote from Dawes to legitimate her corrective reading of
my work. She argues that the “broad scope of Cooper’s engagement—dancehall culture at
large—and her attempt to depart from a portrayal of dancehall culture totally centered on
DJ lyrics for a fuller contextualization in Jamaican politicized and sexualized society and the
culture’s transnational significance, is only partially achieved “ (175). Stanley Niaah seems to
misunderstand “at large” which signifies not so much the “broad scope” of my project—which
remains rooted in literary discourse—as the transgressive nature of dancehall culture itself, at
large and on the run from the containments of scholarship. She seems to assume that, unlike
her, I do not comprehend the ways in which, as she puts it, “expressive cultural products and
practices such as dancehall are shifting with the shifting spaces and bodies that occupy them
and that they occupy” (176).
Stanley Niaah then uses the chapter on the black British DJ Apache Indian to illustrate
my failure to make the point that:
Bhangra has a diaspora of its own with Canadian and African iterations that ultimately expands
the definition, scope, and influence of dancehall. Links can therefore be made into a transnational
soundscape to other genres directly influenced by dancehall such as kwaito, reggaeton, makossa,
samba reggae, and Afro beat among others. The risk is that readers could slip into a kind of
Dawesian reading (175).
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It is only the careless reader of Sound Clash who runs this risk. Even Dawes himself, in more
careful moments, would concede that his facile review of the book is not a fine example of
his scholarship.4
Stanley Niaah’s unfounded assertions to the contrary, I do map a “transnational sound-
scape” in Sound Clash, even if I do not focus in expansive detail on the Bhangra diaspora.
That is not my preoccupation; it is hers. In the introduction to Sound Clash I quite explicitly
acknowledge:
the contribution of all those non-Jamaican DJs who have successfully reproduced the language and
riddims of the dancehall: Nahki in Japan, Snow in Canada, Bigga Haitian in New York, Admiral T
in Guadeloupe, Gentleman in Germany, to name just a few of the non-Jamaican artists who have
DJed across cultural borders and mastered the sound clash on home territory and internationally.
Their accomplishment is a compelling confirmation of the seductive power of Jamaican dancehall
culture and its infinite capacity for adaptation (33).
Furthermore, in my reading of Apache Indian’s song “Badd Indian,” I observe that the DJ’s
“reference to his tour of Canada foregrounds the circulation of dancehall culture in the Carib-
bean diaspora in North America” (67). In Apache Indian’s case, “dancehall culture” explicitly
signifies “bhangra” hybridity, as I make clear in the chapter “ ‘Mix Up the Indian with All the
Patwa’: Rajamuffin Sounds in ‘Cool’ Britannia.”
Stanley Niaah further asserts that “Cooper falls into the trap of using categories deployed
by journalists and cultural critics who are often alien to the expressive cultures they write
on” (179). Unlike Bakare-Yusuf, Stanley Niaah here seems to valorize the perspective of the
insider. But for her, my claim to be an insider is discredited. She dismisses the chapter on the
representation of female sexuality in the lyrics of Bob Marley and Shabba Ranks in this way:
“the comparison feeds into critics’ own lack of understanding of dancehall as one of the New
World Black expressive cultures which is a music, style, language, a social movement, a profes-
sion, a space, indeed an institution which does not begin with Marley and end with Ranks.”
I take that final clause to be a rhetorical gesture not worthy of response.
Like Bakare-Yusuf, Stanley Niaah seems to assume that my focus on lyrics arises from a
failure to comprehend dancehall culture in all its complexity. But as I argue in Noises in the Blood
(4–5) and again in the introduction to Sound Clash (7), I choose to privilege verbal meaning:
The lyrics of the reggae musician and the DJ, related in performance terms to the poetry of Bennett,
Breeze and Smith constitute the fourth group of texts to be examined. The least scribal of the texts
under consideration, they become the most de-contextualised in the kind of close verbal/textual
4. My response to Dawes’s review is published in a letter to the editor, Caribbean Review of Books, November 2005, 36.
A longer version , “Sound, Fury and Significance,” is posted on the CRB website: http://www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.
com.
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reading to which they are subjected here. The cautionary Brathwaite epigraph from History of
the Voice draws deliberate attention to the sound and not simply the sight of the text. The basic
limitation of this sighted focus on lyrics is that relatively little attention is given to the analysis
of the non-verbal elements of production and performance: melody, rhythm, the body in dance
and the dancefloor itself as a space of spectacle and display. Relatively little attention is paid to
the institutions of music production or to assessing the degree to which modes of production and
performance reinforce or undermine the power relations at play in the lyrics. But the value of the
analysis of disembodied lyrics is that the ‘noise’ of the reggae musician and DJ is heard as intelligible
and worthy of serious critical attention.
The business of the intelligibility of lyrics is crucial. A good example of the problem of
misinterpretation or “multiple interpretations,” as Bakare-Yusuf would prefer, is evidenced in
the challenge to my reading of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” that Stanley Niaah offers. In
my analysis of this song I propose the following:
The song confirms the ambivalent representation of woman—and male desire—in Bob Marley’s
lyrics and, more broadly, in Rastafari. Here are echoes of the “hit and run” doublespeak of “Kinky
Reggae.” The dilatory woman, with a long line of lovers in attendance, seems, in the man’s view, to
be functioning somewhat like a whore. The all too willing Rastaman is forced to patiently wait to
negotiate a space for himself, however much he may not want to wait in vain (83).
I also argue that “the tension between the wanting and the waiting defines the pathos of this
song” (83).
Conversely, Stanley Niaah observes: “My reading of Marley’s ‘Waiting in Vain’ did not
suggest the themes of ‘whore’ and pathos, no sadness or tragedy” (177). She is certainly entitled
to her “own inspiration,” as Marley himself puts it. But Stanley Niaah proceeds to convert
inspiration into factual evidence: “In fact, the protagonist is even relishing the anticipation
and waiting: he affirms that ‘the waiting feeling is fine’. His concern seems to be an aversion
to ‘puppetry’ where he is played at will with strings or treated like a fool” (177). This read-
ing of Marley’s song as unequivocally joyous erases the nuances of the text and is obviously
inconsistent with other lines. I suppose when the singer cries his heart out, “Tears in my eyes,
girl, tears in my eyes, girl / While I’m waiting, while I’m waiting for my turn,” these must be
interpreted as tears of joy. In her haste to prove me wrong, Stanley Niaah seems to abandon
common sense.
I find most intriguing of all Hippolyte’s response to Sound Clash. On first reading, her
strawpersons appear far more substantial than either Bakare-Yusuf’s or Stanley Niaah’s. But
on closer inspection they collapse. Hippolyte’s sardonic critique of my “Un-Theory” focuses,
somewhat like Stanley Niaah’s, on the travails of the forerunner: “Of course some of this
confusion over how to react against an academic tradition of which one is the self-proclaimed
progenitor could arise merely from the ritualistic positioning that is required by the academy’s
agonistic conventions” (186).
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Hippolyte’s gesture of respect notwithstanding, I must demur. I have never proclaimed
myself the progenitor of an academic tradition. I do on occasion, as she wickedly puts it,
“rightly and proudly claim the initiation of academic study of dancehall”—narrowly defined,
let me hasten to add. But that is another matter altogether. I honor as my mentors Mervyn
Morris, Maureen Warner-Lewis, Gordon Rohlehr, and Kamau Brathwaite who all shifted
Creole-anglophone literary criticism (and theory) into the domain of the popular and the oral
and thus established a new academic tradition. I continue to value the work of Edward Baugh
whose seminal/ovular essay, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History,” remains
an illuminating theoretical account that sheds light on some of the contentious discourses in
which I now find myself imbricated.5
Indeed, there is a body of “indigenous” Caribbean theory on which I draw; and it appears
not only in conventionally conceived scholarly works. I celebrate, for example, the perfor-
mance poetry and dramatic monologues of Louise Bennett as classic examples of embodied
theory. But since theory itself and its historicization are not my primary preoccupations, I
am disinclined to dissipate my energy and intellectual capital providing the rigorous clarity
Hippolyte espouses: “The other studies against which Cooper positions ‘Slackness Hiding
from Culture’ in her introduction to Sound Clash remain rather fuzzy, although they appear
in moments of suggestive caricature as foils to what she presents as her (localized) textual
method” (186). Hippolyte does not provide any evidence of these moments of caricature. So
let me make my position entirely clear, caricature or not: if, in the middle of the day when
I’m wide awake, I read three times (the magical number) any theoretical text, especially one
replete with those “Germanic” sentences of more than one hundred words, and its meaning
escapes me, something is wrong with it, not with me.
Somewhat like Bakere-Yusuf and Stanley Niaah, Hippolyte argues that “Cooper’s corpus
. . . defines the Jamaican dancehall field and its allowable methods” (187). Mi know seh mi
corpus big an broad. But not to dat. (I know that my body [of work] is extensive; but it’s not all
that.) I have never proposed that my lyrics-centered, culture-specific readings of dancehall cul-
ture are the only appropriate methods of inquiry. That would be sheer lunacy. Donna Hope’s
recently published book exemplifies dancehall scholarship arising out of the social sciences.6
I take as a dubious compliment Hippolyte’s characterization of my work in this grandiose
way: “Cooper’s influence on any serious scholar in the field and her justly earned access to
5. Edward Baugh, “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel With History,” Tapia, 20 February 1977, 6–7; 27
February 1977, 6–7; 11.
6. Donna Hope, Inna Di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica ( Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad
and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2006).
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the popular and academic ear are such that the positioning of her work in relation to other
possibilities is potentially constitutive of the dancehall field of study” (187). It is precisely this
kind of dangerous “influence” that makes the “forerunner” vulnerable to stampedes.
Given the strawperson argument that I am essentially a theory-basher, Hippolyte pro-
poses that my objections to some misreadings of my work arise precisely in response to the
theoretical positions of those I challenge: “Cooper’s resistance to some kinds of theorizing
demonstrates a particular antagonism towards the ‘bumptious’ generalizations of the cultur-
ally privileged, whatever their theoretical complexion” (187). But it is neither the cultural
privilege nor the physical complexion even of the bumptious that antagonizes me. And
certainly not their theorizing to which, after all, they are entitled. It is simply their willful
misrepresentation of what I actually say. It is a moral, rather than a theoretical, issue.
In elaborating her argument that I simply diss the theorists, Hippolyte alleges that I
dismiss “even theory of the most naive and politically efficacious type” (187). And she asserts
that my interrogation of a North American feminist’s critique of Lady Saw “underplays the
loud chorus of identical criticisms that arise from within the Jamaican context itself—from
both men and women and of all classes” (188). But this is simply not true. In Sound Clash I do
document local voices like those of Ian Boyne, Iris Myrie, and Barbara Gloudon, for example,
who challenge the ameliorative reading of dancehall culture I offer, even if not the specific case
of Lady Saw. Furthermore, Hippolyte does not acknowledge the fact that Lady Saw herself,
far from passively accepting the role of victim of patriarchal discourses, asserts the right to
distinguish between her stage persona and her identity. So Hippolyte chastisingly observes
that from my “privileged class position,” I “freely [and improperly] recontextualize as female
fertility (188)” what she sees as the “potential oppression” of women like Lady Saw.
Hippolyte objects to what she derides as my strategy of “wheeling in the Deus ex machina
of a ‘localised’ theory” to counter dismissive Western feminist readings of dancehall (191). In
this instance, I am indebted to Prezident Brown and Don Yute, corporeal gods of slackness,
for my culture-specific theorizing of Lady Saw’s body politics:
If yu see a gyal a wine pon all her head top
No bother put on no label like di gyal slack
A vibes she a vibes to di sound weh she hear
Is a African ting an she bring it down here
It’s a African ting so African people sing
An if you love what yu hear
Mek mi hear yu chanting
All di dance dem weh a cause all a explosion
All a dem a come from inna di motherland
Bogle dancing, butterfly dancing
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At the Crossroads—Looking for Meaning in Jamaican Dancehall Culture: A Reply
An di tati dancing
All world-a-dance is a African ting7
(If you see a woman gyrating, even with her head on the floor
Don’t bother to put on a label as if the woman is loose
She’s actually responding to the sounds she’s hearing
It’s an African thing and she brought it here
It’s an African thing so African people sing
And if you love what you hear
Let me hear you chanting
All of the dances that are causing an explosion
All of them are coming from the motherland
Bogle dancing, butterfly dancing
And the tati dancing
Even world-a-dance is an African thing)
Though Bakere-Yusuf might contest the “essentialist” Africanness of Jamaican dancehall
culture and seems likely to suggest that Anansi, Esu-Elegbara, and Hermes to boot are all
laughing at Prezident, Don Yute, and me for forwarding such a claim, what enables my aca-
demic work as a culture-specific, primary text reader and theorist, if you please, of Jamaican
popular culture is the certainty that my position at the crossroads enables me to see in several
directions all at once and allows me to make meaning of what I apprehend. At the risk of
being accused of the vanity of the forerunner, I see myself as a kind of trickster, Esu-Elegbara
no less, deploying theory when it suits me and it disdaining it when it does not.
The best review I’ve had of Sound Clash comes from a young man who is employed as a
courier in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at the University of the West Indies at Mona. His
job is to deliver letters, not discourse on letters. But his job is not his identity, as it is for so
many academics. He stopped at my gate one morning to ask me to autograph the book. He
had just dropped off his mother who works around the corner from me. He gleefully told me
that he had gotten the book as a Christmas present and was really enjoying it. He admitted
that he didn’t understand everything. But he carried the book around with him and, as he put
it, all when mi stop a stop-light, mi gwaan read piece of it (even when I stop at a traffic light, I
catch a quick read). That’s what keeps me going. And I know Mike Alleyne understands.
7. Prezident Brown and Don Yute, “African Ting,” Track 10, Prezident Selections, CD, RUNNetherlands, RNN0043, n.d.
