Dancehall In/Securities

Perspectives on Caribbean Expressive Life

Patricia Noxolo, 'H' Patten, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, Patricia Noxolo, 'H' Patten, Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000550337
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Thema: Danza

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.

1Corporeal in/securities in the dancehall space

Patricia Noxolo

DOI: 10.4324/9781003205500-2

This chapter offers a critical investigation of how bodies in Jamaican dancehall can be theorised as a locus of corporeal in/security. The concept of in/security draws on redefinitions of the lived experience of security and insecurity as an everyday negotiation between the two, played out in a range of aspects of everyday life. Pushing beyond a top-down state-led declaration of levels of security threat, in/security is an understanding of the line between security and insecurity as much more porous, and as constantly defined and redefined in everyday life (Noxolo and Huysmans, 2009). Such a negotiation can be overtly political: for example, it can operate through a range of more or less formal political moves by non-governmental organisations, media and para-state actors (lobbying government, contributing to public debate, declaring and counter-declaring that particular social groups or government actions are a threat) (Huysmans, 2014). However, in/security can also be social and cultural, operating through the everyday conversations and actions of individuals, artists and communities, who begin to conceive of in/security in multiple ways – for example, around criminality and violence, environmental change, livelihoods and basic needs – based on a range of different perceptions and assessments of the sources, meanings and extent of their own safety and unsafety, certainty and uncertainty, or stability and precarity (Noxolo and Featherstone, 2014).

The CARISCC and CARICUK projects¹ focus on in/security in the Caribbean region and on how in/security is negotiated in creative arenas. The seven network members are working towards an understanding of creativity and in/security as pervasive aspects of contemporary life in the region, with a range of actors, but particularly the region’s poorest, having to be creative in managing the resources available to them (for example in finding forms of income generation and making money stretch), and negotiating between the competing demands of different kinds of in/security (existential, financial, criminal, violent, environmental) (Rhiney and Cruse, 2012; Jaffe et al., 2012). Moreover historically, a range of differently mobile actors – seamen, tourists, migrants, as well as enslaved peoples – have catalysed new dialogues around in/security through a range of dialogic encounters and through the circulation of radical ideas (Anim-Addo, 2016, 2011; Featherstone, 2016, 2012). But the project also engages with the Caribbean’s formidable range of creative cultural practices – literature, visual arts, dance and music – and understands creativity as a forum within which security and insecurity are constantly re-negotiated (Mains, 2015; Noxolo, 2016). When seen as part of creative practice in the Caribbean, in/security becomes more than a discussion about the precarious tightrope between desired security and undesired insecurity, neither of which is ever total. Where there are conflicting perspectives, for example historically between Maroon and planter communities, creative artists, such as novelists, can redefine in/security through new perspectives on the different technologies of surveillance that the landscape of the islands has afforded to different groups (Cummings, 2016, 2010). Beyond this, in/security is also intrinsic to creativity: creativity can be redefined as a delicious precariousness between success and failure, between the stunning and the nondescript, but beyond this, as the proliferation of generative slippages and ambivalences that in themselves spark new meanings. In literature, for example, in/security can be in the slippage of meaning between words on the page or between the immateriality of narrative and ideas and the monumental materiality of screen, ink and paper (Noxolo and Preziuso, 2012): it can be at the heart of the craft of creative writing.

This generative quality of in/security is the starting point for this chapter. Coming from a nonpractitioner of dancehall, this chapter does theoretical workaround corporeal in/security – or how security and insecurity are negotiated in and through the body – and locates this in the context of Jamaican dancehall spaces. The chapter asks this core question: how does the body negotiate between different kinds of in/security in dancehall spaces? After some preliminary work around the concept of corporeal negotiation, and brief contextual analysis about the wider social and political in/securities, both local and global, in which dancehall in Kingston takes place, the chapter theorises the corporeal negotiations of these in/securities in dancehall spaces, through the material forces of sonic vibration on the flesh, the communal affects of lyrics and movement, and the visual effects of dance performance.

Corporeal negotiation

There has been a corporeal turn in the western academy in recent years, and an increasing recognition that something is lost when the body is seen as only a container for the mind: as Julian Henriques (2011, p. 243) succinctly puts it, in the context of dancehall culture: “Very often the privilege of the intelligible over the sensible requires the sacrifice of the qualities and values of our embodiment.” True as this is for western philosophy, Charles Mills (2010, pp. 179–180), however, has asserted that this ‘sacrifice’ has never actually been a choice open to Black people – due to the heavy racialisation of post-enslavement, and through globalised processes of continued exclusion, Black people have been defined by Black bodies. Black bodies demand recognition (Noxolo, 2009), so Mills (2010, p. 180) incites us to “contend with” the body: “recovering it, revalorizing it, relating to it differently”. Rex Nettleford taught us that we can contend most closely with the body through dance, becoming attentive to its power as a force that belongs to the Black body and is not determined from elsewhere:

Sound and movement are the life-making abstractions beyond the reach of external domination… . Coupled with music and performed in a context of religious ritual, the dance assume[s] elemental proportions … a means of revitalisation, of integrating inner and outer space in the sense that it is seen to serve as a route to self-confidence that underpins the creation of one’s own destiny in modern life.

(quoted in Mills, 2010, p. 180)

Dance is a primary location for thinking about the body.

The body is many things (material, representational, discursive), and can therefore be understood in multiple ways (as fleshy, muscular, boney substance; as a means of communication; and as a ‘text’ to be interpreted). As Stuart Hall recognised so clearly, this flexibility relates to the Black body as a locus both of its multiple inheritances and of its spatio-temporal contingencies, so that corporeal practices within Black cultures are ‘over-determined’ by “Selective appropriation, incorporation and rearticulation of European ideologies, cultures and institutions, alongside an African heritage” (Hall, 1996, p. 471), leading to an emphasis in Black popular culture on embodied ‘style’, and the body as ‘cultural capital’ (Hall, 1996, p. 472). L’Antoinette Stines’ (2014, p. 23) dance-focused neologism ‘synerbridging’ both interrogates the corporeal content of that over-determination and broadens out the range of traditional influences to Africa, Asia and Europe, in recognition of the diversity of the Caribbean body. Her example of the corporeal content of selection, appropriation, re-articulation and literal incorporation (as mentioned previously) speaks to the choreographic choices made by dancers as they knowingly negotiate these different traditions: “A dancer can execute a grand plie while simultaneously disrupting the rigid line of the back with the circular rotations of the hips as done in a daaance’all bubble” (Stines, 2014/15, p. 13). Stines’ dance philosophy recognises the “deliberate and planned” but also unforced and fluid capacity of the Caribbean body to move across and draw from these diverse traditions: “Synerbridge … encourages the dancing body to traverse cultures fluidly” (Stines, 2014, p. 23).

As matter, the dancing body’s bone, muscle and flesh can be disciplined and controlled by the individual dancer, working within a range of traditional techniques and within the contingencies of its spatio-historical contexts. However, at the sub-atomic level, as Wilson Harris, the Guyanese novelist and philosopher, highlights, the corporeal matter is constantly changing, remaking itself molten and chaotic (Noxolo and Preziuso, 2012). Wilson Harris’ ‘quantum’ vision, inspired by his understanding of the diversity of Caribbean culture – which notably incorporates Amerindian, as well as European, Asian and African traditions – links bodies together through quantum ‘gateways’ (Henry, 2000, p. 106). Sub-atomic particles of one body (human, animal, flora or fauna) pass through to another, each bringing a tiny aspect of shared consciousness, a ‘fossil’ in Harris’ terms, to which the human person might or might not be consciously alive. Where Stines (2014/2015), as a dancer/choreographer, works with and on the biomechanics of the body (see Henrique, 2014), deploying the ‘synerbridge’ as a recognition of the body’s capacity for disciplined fluidity in crossing cultures, Harris (1999, p. 242) works through his understanding of deep matter to “help us to arrive upon unsuspected bridges, bridges of innermost content that have a deeper, stranger luminosity and incandescence than the purely formal appropriation by one culture of another’s artifacts”. Although Harris is concerned with the language of fiction here, his recognition of material bridging allows us to imagine the body as deeply communal.

The concept of corporeal negotiation that I want to develop in the dancehall context draws from these combined senses of a dancing body that (as a material, representational and discursive entity that is over-determined by a range of traditions and contemporary contingencies) has the capacity both to negotiate in/security through a conscious, disciplined agency, and also to slip the bonds of conscious control, operating at sub-atomic, uncannily communal scales that we can only intuit. This duality is crucial; it is part of the racialisation of the Black body for it to be understood as purely uncontrolled, animal, irrational. Dance introduces technique and recognises embodied agency in corporeal negotiation, but this is by no means incommensurate with an appreciative contention with the body’s deeper capacities, its material relationships. The next section places dancehall in the context of in/security before the following sections focus on corporeal negotiations of in/security in dancehall spaces.

Dancehall contexts

The other chapters in this volume (see also Patten, 2016) give a more comprehensive analysis of in/security in Jamaican dancehall, in relation to the corporeal dancing body. It will suffice here to draw on the commentaries of key academics (Sonjah N. Stanley Niaah, Carolyn Cooper, Donna Hope) to sketch out a number of contexts for theorising the corporeal negotiation of in/security in dancehall.

Stanley Niaah’s (2010) focus on the spatio-temporalities of dancehall highlights the in/security that comes from the construction of dancehall spaces in the middle of the urban outdoor spaces of downtown Kingston. Rather than walls or boundaries, it is the styles and activities of dancehall that transmogrify the ordinary into the event: “Ordinary spaces are transformed into dancehall performance spaces once the selector’s turntable and speakers, the drinks bar and the patrons are put in place” (Stanley Niaah, 2010, p. 53). Situated in heavily policed areas of Kingston, dancehall performers and crowds have often been subject to “raids, beatings, lockdowns and arrests” (Stanley Niaah, 2010, p. 64), exacerbated by strongly enforced legislation necessitating permits and prohibiting noise (Stanley Niaah, 2010, p. 55). Nonetheless, the ‘celebratory culture’ (Stanley Niaah, 2010) of dancehall is burgeoning, with, by some accounts,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword – ‘pull up!’: confronting dancehall in/security
• Preface
• Notes on style
• 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 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
• Index