small axe 21
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ISSN 0799-0537
Clashing Interpretations in
Jamaican Dancehall Culture
Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
In recent decades, dancehall music appears to have surpassed its predecessor, reggae, as
Jamaica’s major cultural export. In her recent collection of essays written over the last decade
entitled Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, Carolyn Cooper continues the
project she began in what is arguably the first seminal essay on dancehall culture.1 In this latter
collection, Cooper offers the model of clash as a way of thinking through an array of issues
surrounding the culture. The text presents the notion of clash in a variety of ways: clashes
between conservative Jamaican insiders who fail to understand the worldview of lower class
Jamaicans, clashes drawn along sexual and gender lines, clashes of words between competing
DJs and sound systems, inter- and intra-religious clashes within Jamaican, as well as clashes
between “foreign” and “native” decoders of the culture.
As with any export, appropriation and expropriation of local meaning are inevitable, lead-
ing to mistranslations, different understandings, and hybridization as aspects of the culture are
re-embedded elsewhere. In this article, I explore some of the problems Cooper’s approach to
the analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture raises by focusing on two key areas. 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. Secondly, I question Cooper’s assertion that the
violence in dancehall music is better understood as a metaphorical and lyrical game that
1. See Carolyn Cooper, “Slackness Hiding from Culture,” Jamaica Journal 22, no. 4 (1989): 12–31; 23, no. 1 (1990):
44–52.
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sublimates real violence, by arguing that Cooper neither understands the nature and dynamic
of violence, nor the way in which metaphor infiltrates reality and structure experience. My
critique of Sound Clash is based essentially on a materialist and phenomenological analysis
that privileges the moment prior to language in the production of culture, without disregard-
ing the discursive effect on cultural activities. Such an approach allows us to move away from
forms of critique and analysis that requires intimacy with the linguistic register of dancehall
in order to truly understand the richness, irony, and parody within dancehall.
The Problems of Insiderism
One of the clashes running throughout Sound Clash is that between the native and the foreign
interpreter and the concomitant consumer-audience dichotomy within dancehall culture.
From the outset, Cooper asserts that her project “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). Part of the need to assert the authority of the “native speaking subject” has not
only to do with the “devaluation of misunderstood local traditions” (173) by both elite Jamai-
cans and the parasitic cultural “outsiders who do not understand the multi-track discourse of
the dancehall” (39),2 but as a strategy to recuperate “the power of the indigenous voice and
the nativist worldview of the marginalized wordsmiths, especially the DJs” (7). For Cooper,
as dancehall culture “enters cultural spaces that cannot accommodate them” (25), indigenous
meaning is stripped of its layers (208), and what is lost or mistranslated is the metaphorical,
lyrical, contradictory meaning, parodic performance, and resistance to local hegemonic struc-
tures and cultural symbolisms that dancehall culture playfully evokes and resists. Therefore,
the tradition of “role-play in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture makes it difficult for
outsiders to accurately decode local cultural signs”(153).
It appears from Sound Clash that the native occupies a privileged space as the arbiter
or mediator of a “truthful” interpretation of dancehall culture. This emphasis is motivated
at least in part by Cooper’s antagonistic relationship with external accounts as noted in her
statements below:
I foreground Stolzoff’s and, to a lesser degree, Henry’s dismissal of my work in order to draw atten-
tion to a recurring “sound clash” in the academy between “local” and “foreign” scholars of Jamaican
popular culture (9). . . .
2. Reference to the outsider here does not refer solely to the geographical foreigner, but also references to those within
Jamaica whom for Cooper are outsider to the hermeneutic community of dancehall culture.
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I certainly welcome all those non-Caribbean academics who do engage seriously with our culture,
adding to the ample body of scholarship that we are consolidating locally and in the Caribbean
diaspora. . . .What I must contest is the hubris of some foreign experts who seem to deliberately
set out to undermine local scholarship in order to aggrandize their own reputations. They thus
provoke border clashes (12).
The Problem of the relative authority of insider/outsider perspectives is not limited to the domain
of the popular or academia. Foreign experts of all kinds routinely tell us how best to understand
and “develop” our society. The insider’s perspective is constantly invalidated as the outsider positions
himself or herself as the “real” authority in these matters. My critique of the presumptuousness
of some of these foreign experts should not itself be misinterpreted as evidence of a mere fit of
pique, an attempt to jealously protect territorial borders from recolonizing invaders, armed this
time round with laptops (11–12).
In other words, Cooper aligns “foreign” analysis of dancehall culture with a patronizing
development agenda. The very fact that she alludes to “recolonising invaders” surely betrays
the sense that at a certain level (and against her denial), she takes specific forms of outsider
perspective on dancehall to involve the presumptive authority of the colonial power. Her
privileging of the local therefore functions as a defense mechanism against the “constant invali-
dation” of the outsider. Her retaliative response is therefore in part driven by the apparently
straightforward proposition that contrary to what others may think, the insider knows best.
Beyond being “a mere fit of pique” towards foreign voices, Cooper is making an important
methodological defense of the importance of the native perspective, based on the daily lived
experience of those on the ground. In so doing she is suggesting that in order to elaborate
a “thick” description of dancehall culture, it is important to recognize that local knowledge
and experience reveal a perceptual framework or “way of seeing and knowing” that is able to
capture and respond to the richness of the discourses and cultural significations that frame the
dancehall phenomenon and give it its meaning. Such thickness of experience might not be
readily available to outsiders. It is at the level of language and the authority of the local voice
that Cooper thereby resolutely rejects the validity of the external interpretation.
This study of Jamaican dancehall culture 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. However,
the local is decidedly not conceived as a narrowly insular, uniformly flat landscape, cut off from
currents of thought beyond its shores (2).
Again, Cooper is careful here to avoid privileging the local as a homogenous and entirely
separate phenomenon. However, the hermeneutic supremacy she ascribes to local under-
standing remains problematic. Whether it is reflexive anthropology or feminist standpoint
theory concerning situated knowledge, theoretical and methodological currents in the last
few decades would share Cooper’s view that knowledge is always situated within the local
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context of production. But this respect for indigenous knowledge does not necessitate that
this local understanding should be given priority over external analysis, still less avoid critical
scrutiny. Rather, the cultural critic should strive to create a balance between autochtonous
interpretation and forms of analysis derived from a more general methodological approach.
One of the key aspects of any structured approach to sociocultural analysis would be weighing
the insights to be gleaned from insiderist description against the blindspots that are already
inscribed within that description. While a perspective saturated in the perceptual subtleties
of insider knowledge and discursive understanding has the potential to offer up rich swathes
of description for the cultural researcher to analyze, we must also recognize that an insider
perspective can itself generate its own forms of aporetic silence and occlusion.
Moreover, any attempt to privilege the insiderist account must assume a certain level
of homogeneity and univocality to the local voice. Although Cooper tries to guard against
this by denying a “uniform flatness” to indigenous description, the logic of her argument
means that she is forced to repress internal differences and contestation. A local voice can
only be such if it has a strong element of uniformity; otherwise, one would have to ascribe
some degree of pluralism to the local interpretation, and talk in terms of local voices. At that
point, there may be local interpretations closer to outsider perspectives than they are to other
conflicting local accounts. As systems theorists like to point out, internal systemic differences
are often greater than external differences. To put the same point in a Foucauldian way, any
sociocultural tradition has its counter-tradition. Dancehall culture itself already generates
its own alternative perspectives—forms of contestation from different voices speaking from
within the culture. Cooper herself draws attention to these voices in the work of dancehall
DJs such as Lady Saw and Buju Banton, whose repertoires include both slackness and cul-
ture, resistance to and affirmation of normativity. Yet, plural and alternative interpretation
is rejected. Any cultural interpretation is always contested and set against an unpredictable
range of alternative perspectives. Any account that privileges the local over the external voice
would therefore have to repress the internal difference that is always already at work, in order
to give the argument its effect.
The question to put to Cooper’s account would therefore be whether she can be accused
of repressing internal differences in placing privilege on indigenous discursive understanding,
or whether she allows for a plurality of interpretations both within and outside the community
of dancehall consumers and interpreters. Let us first consider a 2003 letter published in the
Jamaican newspaper Gleaner written by one Iris Myrie, quoted in Sound Clash along with
Cooper’s response.
The cathartic effect of the music spoken by Dr Cooper is like vomiting to relieve the stomach of
over surfeit, but doing so on the street in view of everyone else, depositing it on people, spoiling
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everyone’s appetite so as to ease your own discomfort. It is sickening! The fact that you are hurting
gives you no right to sicken others.3
Cooper replies:
This upstanding spokeswoman for the Business and Professional Women’s Club, a foreigner in the
world of the dancehall, does not appear even to entertain the possibility that the generic “every-
one,” on whose behalf she glibly dares to speak, might not share her presumption about what is
appropriate public behaviour—whether literal or metaphorical (11).
On the basis of the above exchange, it is clear that Cooper does in fact try to minimize
the value of any interpretation of dancehall at variance with her own. Rather than embracing
the conflict of interpretations and genuinely exploring alternative perspectives on dancehall,
Cooper privileges her own perspective. No matter how involved we are in a debate about
the sociocultural relevance and impact of a popular cultural form, it is vital that we allow
for multiple positions within our own perspective. Popular cultural forms are after all always
produced from within and outside the culture of production, which precludes any unitary
interpretation. Openness and contestation to potentially different views and interpretations
must necessarily be weaved into the fabric of our own interpretation. In such an arena of
interpretations clashing against one another, dancehall is revealed to be a contested space
where rival interpretations exist in conflict with one another. The notion of the singularly
coherent, interpretive local voice falls apart. The alleged authority of indigenous discourse is
transformed into a babel of alternative hermeneutic options.
The proliferating complexity attached to any cultural analysis attuned to the potential
clash of interpretations would therefore count against any move that tries to construct the local
as on the righteous side of an authentic-inauthentic binary schema. This irreducible plurality
resonates with both the ancient Greek myth of Hermes, the god of interpretation who medi-
ates between the firmament and demotic reality (and often scrambles the interpretation in the
process), and his West African counterpart, Esu Elegbara. In Yoruba philosophy, Esu Elegbara,
like Hermes, mediates between the spirit world and the human world, purveying messages
from the gods and mixing codes all at once.4 Esu is therefore the conduit for interpretation
as well as the source for the proliferation of interpretations. Rather than being an authentic
figure, Esu undercuts the possibility of a binary split between authenticity and inauthenticity
itself. Cooper conveniently appropriates mythic figures such as fertility goddesses Oshun and
3. Iris Myrie, “Distasteful Side of Dancehall Music,” Gleaner (14 February 2003), A5; cited in Sound Clash, 11.
4. See Bibi Bakare-Yusuf and Jeremy Weate, “Ojuelegba: The Scared Profanities of a West African Crossroad,” in
Urbanization and African Cultures, eds.Toyin Falola and Steven J. Salm (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2005);
Ulli Beier, “Esu-Elegbara: Ambivalence in Yoruba Philosophy,” in Ulli Beier The Hunter Thinks The Monkey Is Not
Wise, ed. Wole Ogundele (Bayreuth African Studies 59, Eckhard Bretinger, Bayreuth, 2001).
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River Mumma, Esu and its New World counterpart Anansi, for their trickster functions, yet
“outsiders” are not permitted to appropriate and read dancehall as they wish. Esu and Anansi
would certainly greet Cooper’s appropriative stance with welcoming laughter.
Again, one can critique Cooper’s insistence on the authority of the local voice from the
perspective of the hybrid nature of the dancehall complex itself. Beyond, or rather, prior to
competing interpretations, one may point to the anterior plurality of the phenomenon itself.
In other words, rather than suggest that dancehall is open to multiple interpretations, one
can point to the irreducible plurality of the dancehall complex itself, prior to any moment of
interpretation. What is at stake here is how we account for multiplicity within the dancehall
complex—at the level of discourse or at the material level of the phenomenon itself. Rather
than ascribe the source of the plurality to the moment of interpretative response (and therefore
ultimately within language), one can rather suggest that multiplicity is inherent within the
material and phenomenological complex of dancehall itself. In other words, before anyone
speaks of the meaning of dancehall, there is an irreducible complexity and ambiguity built
in—a complexity that enables different linguistic groups to tap into it, enjoy and critique
different aspects of the culture. Therefore the origin of the conflict of interpretations lies not
within language but within an anteceding material and experiential moment. Of course, no
one can deny “the language of the DJ’s is the most contested component of their total perfor-
mance repertoire” (6) and therefore the significance of the need to critically analyze the lyrics
of the DJ. However, the fact that language is the most overtly contested aspect of the culture
does not mean that it is the most important. The language of the DJs is part of a totality, a
multisensory complex that refuses any hierarchical ordering. Language alone cannot open
up the complexities of the social world of dancehall culture. While it may be a good entry
point to begin cultural analysis, it is certainly not the only place for such analysis. To reduce
dancehall to language and discourse is to create an authenticist self-fulfilling prophesy: that
it is only insiders who can truly understand the irony and parody within dancehall lyrics.
However, if one takes a materialist stance that does indeed begin prior to discourse (and of
course responds to discourse) then we can see that a linguistic clash itself must be positioned
and framed within a wider material and hybridized context. To think that dancehall is always
already within discourse is akin to the idea that fashion itself must always already operate
within an economy of signs. Both are forms of semiotic reductionism that repress an excessive
materiality. But what would dancehall culture be without material excess?5
5. See Julien Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System,” in Auditory Culture, eds. Michael Bull and
Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican
Dancehall Culture,” Fashion Theory 10, no. 4 (2006); and Sonjah Stanley, “Kinston’s Dancehall: A Story of Space
and Celebration,” Space and Culture 7, no.1 (February 2004), as examples of different entry points of engagement
with dancehall culture.
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I suggest therefore that dancehall culture is an inherently hybrid form, constantly mutat-
ing as it negotiates various elements of internal and external difference and reception. Rather
than privilege any possible local interpretation at the level of discourse and language, dancehall
is revealed as an intrinsically complex material assemblage that does not and cannot valorize
the category of the authentic. Rather than an analysis centered mostly on language and lyri-
cal content, dancehall is in this way opened up as a political, economic, sonic, visual, haptic,
and indeed olfactory phenomenon; a synaesthetic array of elements making up a dynamic
and volatile lived experience. Any distinctions between the authentic and the inauthentic,
the pure and the impure, the insider and the outsider, fall away in the face of a constantly
morphing assemblage of sound, words, movement, adornment, desire, and social economy
of signs. Dancehall is grounded not only in the “politics of place” but in an avaricious inter-
play between alterity and difference. Dancehall absorbs external influences as much as it is
absorbed by them. Rather than privileging a pure moment of interiority based on a singular
local interpretation, a cacophony of interpretations is released within the material modes of the
phenomenon. Dancehall culture exists within a phenomenological and hermeneutical universe
where Esu and Hermes dance together, invalidating and ridiculing authenticity before it comes
into voice. Surely the hybridity of the dancehall complex entails that everyone is a stranger,
just as much as everyone is a native; the distinction between insider and outsider collapses in
the face of a bacchic intensity of display and desire. Those who participate in dancehall (at
home or abroad) are never involved in pure translation or mere interpretation; rather they
are transductive engineers, forever converting one form of energy into another as different
layers of materiality come into excessive play.6 If dancehall practices were merely concerned
with a clash of linguistic meanings, I doubt it would have become as globally popular as it
has. It is only by acknowledging the material excess in dancehall and its relation to desire (of
others beyond the local dancehall context of Jamaica) that we begin to account for its ability
to transverse cultural borders.
Given the multisensory assemblage of hybrid forms, juxtaposing local and global to the
extent that one cannot tell where one begins and the other ends, one wonders why Cooper
is drawn to privilege the local over the foreign interpretation, apart from activating a local-
ist defense mechanism form. Put briefly, the core motivation for this authenticism seems to
be derived from an approach to cultural theory that privileges the linguistic over any other
form of analytical engagement. Sound Clash is essentially about the clash of interpretations,
6. For one exploration of notions of transduction in relation to cultural analysis and human experience see Adrian
Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London: Continuum, 2002). For specific applications of
transduction to dancehall, see Julien Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System,” in Auditory
Culture, eds. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
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a clash that is always within and about language and therefore to be engaged with in terms
of its lyrical content. As she points out, “a major aspect of dancehall music and culture is the
meaning of lyrics” (29), and “language, in the most literal sense of the word, is the primary
medium through which the DJs articulate their preoccupations and communicate directly
with their receptive audiences” (6). For Cooper, what the outsider denies in his or her “prob-
lematic mistranslation” (172) of lyrics is “the full range of contradictory meanings” (208)
they offer. The question to put to Cooper is this: If there are contradictory meanings at work
in dancehall, surely there must be contradictory interpretations available? Instead of embrac-
ing the material force of hermeneutic multiplicity that her text broaches, Cooper ultimately
disavows the clash of interpretations and responses offered by the cultural outsider who reads
dancehall culture from a phenomenological perspective in favor of the lingustic authority of
the native academic voice.
Violence as Metaphor
Beginning an analysis of dancehall not from a literary or linguistic point of view but from a
phenomenological approach (in terms of the lived situated experience of the dancehall com-
plex) has an important consequence: it challenges the way in which Cooper accounts for the
role of verbal violence in dancehall lyrics. Against critics who read violence into the lyrics of
dancehall culture, Cooper repeatedly invites us to accept lyrical violence as a metaphor and
role-play which is a “crucial aspect of Jamaican popular culture” (170). She argues that much of
the DJs’ “badman gun talk” “is pure badinage, a grand rhetorical performance”(40) operating
at the level of “poetic introspection, not willful extermination . . . of subversion and subter-
fuge” (154). This fact is apparently “lost on narrow-minded critics of the genre”(38). More-
over, lyrical violence in dancehall culture can have a healing effect on the audience. Cooper
writes, “Violent, daring talk such as that of DJ and the rapper can function as a therapeutic
substitute for even more dangerous violent action” (159).
Even if we follow Cooper’s linguistic route, the above statement can be approached from
two diametrically opposed ways. First, from Cooper’s perspective, lyrical violence is read as a
form of sublimation, a therapeutic taming of everyday and historical violence by transferring it
metaphorically to the level of language, in order to control it in a socially acceptable way (159).
Although Cooper is aware that violence has become a feature of daily life with the increasing
proliferation of guns in the culture, she nonetheless wants to hold onto the positive value of
lyrical violence and therefore draw a distinction between verbal and actual violence. An alter-
native perspective would suggest that violent lyrics cannot be kept apart from incitement. It
is precisely by enunciating violence that the potential and continued possibility of violence
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is maintained. In other words, if violence were not present at the level of speech, if there
was silence about the reality of violence, the potential for its continued reproduction within
society would be reduced. Violence can replicate itself at the level of language, just as violent
language can have physical implications. As Lakeoff and Johnson have argued, metaphors can
create social realities that may have an impact on future actions; actions that correspond to
and reinforce the power of the metaphor.7 In this sense, lyrical violence has a cyclical effect,
calling for and responding to the violence that takes place in the wider society. There is a
strong parallel here with the feminist argument that pornography as a form of representation
has a self-replicating, viral structure. Violence at the level of language has precisely the same
self-perpetuating structure as pornography. In other words, violent language maintains and
supports the potentiality of violence and acts as a form of tacit legitimation. In this case,
violence at the level of speech or lyrical content is not merely cathartic, but in fact a form of
anaesthetic. Rather than reading violence in dancehall lyrics as pure metaphor or incitement, it
might be more useful to see it as an example of DJs engaging “in accurate social analysis and
. . . contributing creatively to the garrison community’s theorising of its immediate condition
and to the normalising of . . . extreme states of emergency.”8
More seriously still, by claiming that violent lyrics are mere metaphors or harmless lyri-
cism, Cooper gravely underplays the reality behind the metaphor, by maintaining an unten-
able distinction between the literal and the metaphorical. In Cooper’s account metaphor
seems to be expunged from its grounding in social action. Outside of social usage, metaphor
has no meaning. Metaphors are real, structuring real experience that results in real behavior
(linguistic and physical). For example, if I suggest the apple as a metaphor, the community
of interpretation determines how this metaphor acquires meaning. In the Christian West, the
apple connotes innocence, the Garden of Eden, the seduction of Eve, and the realization of
gravity as a physical force. Outside of these cultural reference points (or any other horizon of
interpretation), the apple as metaphor is a meaningless signifier, spinning round in a symbolic
world without reference. Similarly, it is only within a gun culture that “metaphorical” reference
to the gun or the intimation of a gun sound has deep traction and meaning to its audience.
In this case, if reference to the gun is merely a metaphor, we must ask: a metaphor for what?
Surely, the reference to the gun and the idea of “killing” another sound system relies on and
invites us to draw on our cultural understanding of the literal use of gun to kill—to destroy
and dispose of another. The metaphor therefore only has meaning in the social and histori-
cal context of enunciation. Metaphorical and literal meanings are inextricably linked within
7. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
8. Idara Hippolyte, “Jamaican Dancehall and Postmodernism,” (master’s thesis, University of Oxford, 2001), 53.
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a sociocultural life world. It is precisely in this way that metaphors can have such force and
impact negatively or positively on bodies. The apparently metaphorical can be experienced as
wounding or diminishing, as soothing or reconciliatory. Our words have power, which in cer-
tain circumstance can maim or kill. Metaphors reflect and perpetuate systems of domination,
as much as they may also jam or destabilize these systems.
Cooper suggests that in using popular Caribbean culinary metaphors in her song “Stab
Out Mi Meat” Lady Saw highlights “the intense pleasure of vigorous, not violent sex” and
the “penis functions as a metaphorical dagger stabbing pleasure into and out of the woman”
(101). For Cooper then, Lady Saw’s song, her phrasing and parodic delivery, all contribute
to an assertion of female sexual agency. Whether it is the metaphor of “stabbing pleasure” or
parodic phrasing, Lady’s Saw’s song still replicates a preexisting hetero-patriarchal power struc-
ture that frames sex as a man penetrating a woman who receives the pleasure of the stabbing.
The song is a case of Nietzchean amor fati—loving one’s fate and therefore cannot really be
claimed as an assertion of transformative female agency; female agency yes, but not a transfor-
mative one. “Stab Out Mi Meat” does little to challenge standard models of female passivity
and everything to contribute to violence against women by sustaining the ideal of violence as
metaphor. Surely a far more destabilizing metaphor in this context might be one that speaks
of the envelopment or engulfment of the penis by the vagina. Such a metaphor would surely
challenge us to reconsider how heterosexual intercourse is hermeneutically framed.9 The fact
that the very metaphors we use to describe our world actually act to shape, incite, and produce
action and metamorphosis remain unexplored in Sound Clash. It is important that we do not
just argue that something is merely metaphorical without explaining the relationship between
metaphor, thought, and action, especially for such a sensitive topic as violence. It is only when
we explain these connections can we understand and attempt to reduce the reproduction of
lyrical violence, hate-speech, and the like.
Furthermore, from Cooper’s suggestion that Buju Banton is not invoking a “literal death-
sentence” against homosexuals in his song “Boom By-By,” which appropriates the popular
Jamaican declaration “all betty-man fid dead,” and her reference to Lady Saw’s “stabbing the
meat” as an assertion of female sexual pleasure, it is hard not to view the appeal to a superior
cultural insiderism via the notion of metaphor-as-therapeutic as a fragile defense of the inde-
fensible. This appeal to metaphor is even more surprising given her statement that “music is
not mere entertainment but ideological weaponry” (75). Cooper’s argument would seem to be
that when violence is taken up at the level of speech or lyric, an automatic sublimation process
takes place such that the violence disappears or is relocated elsewhere. Failure to make the
9. Robert Baker, “’Pricks’ and ‘Chicks’: A Plea For Persons,” in Philosophy and Sex, eds. Robert Baker and Frederick
Elliston (New York: Prometheus Books, 1984), 249–67.
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connection between the language of violence and actual violence via a defense based on meta-
phor means that Cooper is complicit in the perpetuation of violence and oppression against
gays, women, and animals by denying the extent to which these oppressions are culturally
connected.10 In Cooper’s defense, one might argue that she is right in simply articulating the
feelings of the vast majority of Jamaicans about homosexuality and gender relations. However,
the job of a cultural critic is surely not merely to reflect normative attitudes; it is imperative
that those norms and values are interrogated.
Although Cooper wants to condemn homophobia, she suggests, however, that “in neo-
African societies like Jamaica [homophobia] is often conceived as an articulation of an African
worldview”(163). She thus goes in search of “an African genesis of the cultural attitudes to
homosexuality in Jamaica” (163). In her search, she discovers a paper by Hilary Standing read-
ily confirming that “homosexuality in Sub-Saharan African is not socially constructed as nor-
mative and, indeed flourishes primarily in areas influenced by the culture of tourism” (165).
The question we might ask is this: is there a society today or in the past where homosexuality
is “socially constructed as normative”? The least we can say is that homosexuality as a practice
is a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon; the key difference between African and con-
temporary Euro-American cultures being that the latter has a discourse and identity formed
around homosexuality beginning from the late nineteen century, which is less pronounced in
the former. Cooper is perhaps unaware that there is an increasing body of research focusing on
same-sex practices in Africa. Much of this research is culled from anthropological and travel
writings that dates back to 1732, as well as contemporary research.11 These works show that
there is remarkable diversity in same-sex practices, many of which exist in conjunction with
heterosexual practices or as a preferred sexual choice throughout a person’s lifetime.
The search for an African genesis of cultural attitudes towards homosexuality in Jamaica
raises the question of the utility of such a search. Does providing an African genesis mean that
homophobia is no less dehumanizing and injurious? Is such excavation aimed at producing
new knowledge that would contribute to social change? The search for an African genesis is
futile if we cannot use it to engage in struggles and dialogues to produce new and opposing
accounts of homosexuality that might serve as a guide for our practices and modes of relat-
ing that do not negate the live world of others. We need to be bold and provide an outright
condemnation of hate speech instead of trying to explain it by recourse to some retentive
African worldview.
10. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990).
11. See Stephen. O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Boy-Wives and Female Husband: Studies in African Homosexualities (New
York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); Dunbar.T. Moodie (2001), “Black Migrant Labourers and the Vicissitudes of Male
Desire” in Changing Men in Southern Africa, ed. Robert Morrell (London: Zed Books, 2001).
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Again, for a theorist who conveniently evokes images of Western African cultures as a
nodal point of Jamaican cultural identity, it seems to me that Cooper is curiously inattentive
to the very cultures she so actively raids to cushion and support her argument. For example,
for Yoruba, words help to bring about a world and have the power to transform and make
things happen to either positive or negative effect. Language within a Yoruba conception is
a living, communicative practice which has its own power and agency and therefore its own
forceful pathway into the world. Language, especially metaphorical language, incites and
provokes as much as it merely represents. This conception of language is strikingly similar to
the poststructuralist theory of language of thinkers such as Derrida and Lacan, where in broad
terms language has an originary capacity to enact symbolic violence. In contrast to Cooper’s
position, the Yoruba and poststructuralist account would hold that violence in language is a
more primordial form of violence than physical wounding and therefore we must take it very
seriously. Physical violence is a contingent event; it occurs in a specific time and place and is
gone. In contrast, violence at the symbolic level installs violence within a generalized economy
of the sign; in which case, symbolic violence occupies a wider domain through which its
effects as physical violence are preserved and maintained. In this conception, physical violence
becomes a symptom, of which symbolic violence is the underlying cause.
Conclusion
This paper has sought to identify the limitations of Cooper’s approach to dancehall culture
in terms of the role of the insider’s interpretation and the role of violence in dancehall lyrics.
While we must applaud Cooper for her valuable work in opening up dancehall for serious
academic engagement, especially her uncovering of the agency of female sexual pleasure that
dancehall culture potentially opens up, it is time to move away from theories grounded in
authenticism and the idea that the local academic voice has priority over conflicting interpre-
tations both from within and without. In contrast, I have suggested that dancehall must be
analyzed as a multisensory material and phenomenological entity. This holistic conception
does not wholly reject a linguistic-textual approach to dancehall; rather dancehall is embraced
as a multiplicitous assemblage, constantly in mutation. In contrast to engaging with dance-
hall via the perspective of literary theory and a textualist approach that emphasizes the role
of lyrical content and its alleged therapeutic value, I suggest we look at dancehall as a plural
desiring machine that appropriates global cultural flows just as much as it is appropriated by
them. Rather than denying the reality, I suggest that we accept dancehall as an intrinsically
violent, contestive, and performative event, both at the physical and visceral level as well
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as at the symbolic level of speech. 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 symbol-
ism. Here, the categories of authentic or inauthentic and pure or fake that motivate much
of Cooper’s argument have no purchase when set against the transductive material fury of
dancehall culture itself.
Finally, if this paper appears to focus excessively on the problems of Cooper’s approach,
it is because I think they provide important lessons to us all about the difficulty and danger
of privileging an indigenous perspective to cultural analysis, as if that insider perspective itself
is not in itself a site of contestation and differentiation. Cooper’s book is significant precisely
because she centers popular culture within Caribbean academic discourse and invites criti-
cal engagement with this endlessly metamorphosing local and global culture. However, in
her engagement with dancehall, she steps to the brink of becoming an apologist for the very
culture she should be interrogating in terms of the silences and violations that occur in its
midst. While one can fully understand the desire to defend dancehall against the clash of
interpretations (internal uptown snobbery and sometimes patronizing external accounts), her
approach must ultimately be seen as an all too fragile defense that insulates itself against the
full and dangerous reality of the culture. Rather than being metaphorical or a lyrical play, the
violent lyrics of dancehall must be accepted as yet another layer of violence that has structured
African experience in the New World. Cooper’s attempt to explain away the homophobia of
Buju type lyrics must be seen as a failure, especially given the reality that those singing the
lyrics have often explicitly acknowledged their own homophobia. Dancehall culture reflects
wider social mores and attitudes towards homosexuality in a largely conservative and puritani-
cal society. Dancehall culture also represents the desires, aspirations, and anxieties of a local
expressive culture that cannot be contained within the terms of the local—whether in terms
of interpretive community or flights of influence.
